What is a Party for, anyway?

So the Republicans elected a Black chairman today. Weird.

A nice surprise, especially after the hoopla about the candidate for the position who forwarded the horrible email song about President Obama. (He dropped out of the race eventually.) The guy who was runner-up had the sense to resign from his all-white country club before the election.

Even more surprising, they didn't elect the more conservative black guy, of the two who were running.

But what is even weirder to me is the way the new chairman talks about re-invigorating the party. He's going to go out and bring people in; "we want you to be with us."

Except that, according to what I know about the Republican party, there are a lot of people to whom that simply doesn't apply.

Seems to me that such an approach illustrates desperation. Wouldn't the thing to do be to figure out who you are as a party, or what makes sense as your unifying belief system, or what you stand for, or something like that? And then go see who's interested?

He appears to be approaching the marketing of the party the way too many people approach marketing the church. Let's just go cajole people to come in! It doesn't matter what's here when they get here, or that it's in shambles because we've exhausted our ideological resources. Just bring them in! (Hint: this doesn't work very well in churches.)

I don't really see this being too convincing, but who knows? I wouldn't have thought they'd elect a black guy either.