We at RedState have ten items on which we would like your responses. We will print your responses to all ten items on the front page of RedState in the order in which they are received.

The ten items are:

1. Please state your qualifications for the job and why those qualifications make you the best choice.

2. Please explain how you see the role of RNC Chairman.

3. Please outline how you see the role of RNC Chairman in terms of structuring the Republican message and platform.

4. Please outline your goals for internal reform and/or restructuring of the RNC.

5. Please explain your vision for expanding the GOP’s use of technology in the future and, in light of that, explain your preferred structure for the online apparatus of the RNC.

6. Please explain what steps and resources you would use to rebuild, reform, or otherwise repair state Republican parties that need restoration and/or strengthening.

7. Please explain what criteria you would use to vet and recruit winnable candidates.

8. Please explain how you would recruit effective candidates for the 2010 United States Senate races and how you would help those candidates.

9. Please explain why the Republican Party should remain a pro-life party.

10. Please explain what benchmarks you think would be fair to measure an RNC Chairman to determine if that Chairman has succeeded or failed in his task.

This morning at 10 o’clock we’ll have a live chat with Senator Saxby Chambliss on the front page. Feel free to stop by and submit your questions to Senator Chambliss.

Likewise, we would encourage each of the candidates considering the RNC Chairman’s race to think about posting here at RedState why they are interested in being RNC Chairman. We’d be glad to put those posts on the front page.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae

Today there are three U.S. Senate races currently unresolved: Norm Coleman faces a recount in his victory over Al Franken, Ted Stevens has a narrow lead in his re-election bid, and Saxby Chambliss faces a runoff on December 2 against his Democratic challenger. Chambliss deserves any support you can offer — financial or otherwise — and we urge all conservatives to do what they can to make sure he wins his runoff and returns to the Senate to fight for strong national defense, free markets, and a smaller government.

National Democrats have made the defeat of Saxby Chambliss one of their top priorities this cycle. They never forgave him for defeating Max Cleland in 2002, and they have resented his conservative stance on issue after issue. They recognize that Chambliss is a vote against Barack Obama’s agenda of tax increases, profligate spending, radical education policies, and surrender in the war on terror. They know that Chambliss can be counted on to sustain filibusters against card check and giveaways to liberal constituencies

Beyond that, the liberal leadership in Washington D.C. recognizes that Chambliss’ vote is critical. They have already secured 57 votes in the Senate, and if they manage to win the three remaining races, they’ll attain their longstanding goal of a filibuster-proof majority. We can’t count on our lawyers being shrewder than their lawyers in Alaska and Minnesota as the only way to preserve 41 votes in the U.S. Senate. We need a clean victory in Georgia that creative vote counting can’t take away.

As Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid begin to plan their agenda for the years ahead, conservatives must not let up until the 2008 elections are concluded. And that means doing everything we can to re-elect Saxby Chambliss today. After all, regardless what happens in other races, we can’t gamble that all Senate Republicans will stick together on every radical proposal from the Obama administration. Some may vote in favor of some Democratic initiatives; some may be replaced by Democrats in the next few years. In other words, 41 Senate Republicans may not be enough to prevent the enactment of terrible policies. We need to re-elect principled conservatives like Saxby Chambliss at every opportunity.

Please consider making a donation to Saxby Chambliss today. Or consider backing the effort of an independent group such as Freedom’s Watch, which is up and running in Georgia today with an ad that explains Jim Martin’s terrible record of tax increases:

And if you can’t donate to support this effort, there are other ways that you can help out. Please consider signing up as a volunteer. Anything you do today will help promote good government for the next 6 years — or more.

We now move to the leadership struggle for the House and Senate Republicans.

We have no preferences in these races yet. But we have a question that Messrs. McConnell, Boehner, and Blunt must answer:

How are you qualified to lead after two consecutive elections of significant losses?

There are others who are just as qualified to lead, some might argue more qualified to lead.

in the Senate, there are Senators Kyl and Cornyn. In the House, there are Congressmen Ryan of Wisconsin and Cantor of Virginia.

They are able men.

If Messrs. McConnell, Boehner, and Blunt cannot adequately explain why they deserve to keep the reins of power given two consecutive elections of losses, we must ask that they step aside.

The voters have spoken. They have rejected the status quo again. The present leadership is part of the same Republican status quo voters rejected two years ago — now rejected a second time.

The present leadership better have an excellent answer to the question posed.

Only a few years ago, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing to uphold affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan, speculated that the time would be ripe to reconsider racial preference policies in thirty years, after the nation has had more time to progress.

Thirty years came quickly.

The nation has moved beyond what was. We congratulate President-elect Obama on a well fought battle won well.

We also thank Senator McCain and urge Governor Palin to stay involved and engaged. (Pssst . . . Governor Palin, we’ve got room for one more contributor here if you’re interested.)

We now look forward to the fight ahead and we do intend to continue the fight for America.

We have been treated in recent weeks to an unfortunate procession of people on the Right lending their assistance to Barack Obama against the Republican presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. These people should never be listened to or employed in any responsible or prominent position by anyone in the Republican Party or the conservative movement again.

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Note - A previous version of this post was entitled “RedState Endorses Mark Begich, Democrat For Senate, and Ethan Berkowitz, Democrat for House At Large in Alaska.” We have changed the title and amended the post to retract the formal endorsement out of respect for RedState Contributors who did not feel they could be associated in good conscience with an endorsement of two pro-abortion Democrats (though we note that Ted Stevens is also not pro-life). However, our point remains: the GOP, the conservative cause and even specifically the pro-life cause will be better off if Stevens and Young are defeated and the tarnish they carry with them are excised from the GOP.

We stand at a perilous moment in American politics, with thereal possibility that the Democrats could get to 60 votes in the Senate. This is no time for litmus tests of party loyalty, for abandoning our own. But we must make one exception: good conscience compels us to advise Alaskans not to vote for Ted Stevens for Senate or Don Young for the at-large House seat in Alaska. We leave it to the individual voter whether to abstain or take the step of voting affirmatively for Mark Begich, the Democrat mayor of Anchorage, and candidate for the U.S. Senate, or for Ethan Berkowitz for the at-large House seat in Alaska.

We have no illusions that Begich will be a good Senator (although perhaps he can bring to DC some bipartisan oomph to theneed to exploit Alaska’s energy resources for the good of the nation), or Berkowitz a good Congressman. But Ted Stevens and Don Young have been a pox on the Republican house for too long - too addicted to the pork barrel, too fast and loose with ethics. Stevens’ conviction in federal court today is the exclamation pointon an era in Republican politics in general and Alaska politics in particular that needs to end (and which Gov. Sarah Palin has been battling to clean up). Republicans need to clean our own house. Washington cannot too soon see the end of Stevens and Young.

Barack Obama is the most left-wing major-party presidential candidate in modern history. The evidence of this is all over his record and his campaign. Yet for a variety of reasons, ranging from terminal frustration with the Bush Administration to swooning over Obama’s pop culture cache to buying Obama’s and the media’s spin that he’s really a mainstream figure to the right, not the left, of John Kerry, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and Howard Dean, we keep encountering moderates, independents, liberal Republicans and even self-identified conservatives who are willing to give Obama a chance in the White House. Even though America remains a center-right country, Obama leads in the major polls, and the odds currently favor his chances of winning the election, and of the unpopular Democratic Congress expanding its majorities to approach a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate, something the nation has not seen since the Great Society.

Our friends who take seriously the future of America as a non-left-wing country with a viable party of the Right should reconsider lending any support to this venture. Under the normal rules of politics, we would accept the idea that Obama, after winning, would inevitably overreach to the Left, leading to a backlash from which Republicans could rebuild a new and better GOP in 2010 and 2012, as we did in 1980 and 1994 after the last two Democratic presidents overreached and underperformed. But this assumes that Obama’s agenda will be mostly about policy, and will seek by traditional means to persuade a center-right voting public to support a European-style left-wing social-democrat government.

In fact, it is highly likely that Obama and the Congressional Democrats will instead concentrate major efforts on a number of longstanding policy priorities are aimed at stacking the deck to change the electorate and the political process themselves, and thus entrenching themselves in long-term power without ever needing again to persuade a center-right electorate to support their policies. Let’s look at a number of examples of things the Democrats are likely to do with their new majority to bring this about:

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There are troubling whispers in Washington that John McCain might soon endorse the Gang of 16 Energy Proposal. It would be a terrible mistake for John McCain to sign on to this plan. The plan is both bad politics and bad policy.

For the past several months, John McCain has ridden the energy issue, moreso than any other single issue, to the top of the polls. Governor Palin, one of the nation’s leading proponents of domestic energy production, further solidifies John McCain as the candidate who takes the energy issue seriously.

To endorse the Gang of 16 plan would undermine Senator McCain’s credibility on the issue. In addition to the terrible politics of the plan for Republicans, the plan itself is terrible, terrible policy.

*Right now, if we do nothing, the entire Outer Continental Shelf (”OCS”) will open up for exploration on October 1, 2008. * Under the Gang of 16 plan, most of the OCS, roughly 80%, will remain locked up. John McCain has favored opening up the OCS. His support of this plan would directly contradict his call for expanded exploration.

The plan would only allow drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Even then, it would not open up those areas, but allow those states to opt in to a burdensome, confiscatory federal leasing program. And still, drilling could not take place less than fifty miles from the coast, taking coastal reserves off the table.

The plan would also, for the first time, permanently ban drilling in all other OCS locations. Currently, the ban must be renewed annually.

10 billion barrels of oil and 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would be permanently untouchable off the Pacific Coast.

10 billion barrels of oil and 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would be permanently untouchable in ANWR.

2 billion barrels of oil and 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would be permanently untouchable in the Atlantic.

That is 29 years worth of imports from the Persian Gulf still untouchable and inaccessible because of the Gang of 16’s plan.

John McCain says he wants to decrease our dependence on foreign dictators. To endorse this plan to would give the lie to that claim.

Even worse, the Gang of 16 would add an additional $30 billion in tax increases to the energy industry. That is a tax increase they would pass on to consumers in the form of higher fuel prices. This is a punitive tax. Any Economics 101 student can tell you a punitive tax will hamper efforts, not expand efforts in the taxed industry. The Institute for Energy Research estimates 637,000 jobs would be lost because of the plan.

Likewise, the Gang of 16 would increase charges to oil companies for extraction of oil from the Gulf of Mexico. They would make it more expensive to drill for oil — a cost that would either keep the energy industry from drilling or drive up costs for consumers.

Lastly, the plan would do nothing to curtail environmentalist organizations from suing to stop expanded energy production ? a tactic that has successfully delayed and, in some cases, completely stopped exploration of domestic energy reserves.

John McCain and Sarah Palin say they are the real reformers. Driving up the costs of doing business and half hearted compromises are “politics as usual” solutions from Washington. Today, the opponents of buying American energy are on the ropes; this is no time to let them off the hook. A McCain-Palin Administration, if elected, will have an unambiguous mandate to expand all sources of domestic energy production, and will be able to command bipartisan support for a truly comprehensive energy solution.

John McCain should oppose the plan, and unleash Sarah Palin to demonstrate her experience and expertise on energy issues. And if today’s Congress can’t or won’t choose a real plan for domestic energy production, Sen. McCain, Gov. Palin and Capitol Hill Republicans should trust the American people to make that choice for them on Election Day.

This was not an uplifting, unifying, post-partisan speech.  It was a typical Democrat speech, an act of attack to disguise a record thinner than that of any president.  It was an act of religious prayer for the believers, not evangelism to the nonbelievers.  When he declared he would engage in specifics, he continued to offer even more promises without explanation of how or why - just that here was the thing wrong, and in electing him president, that alone would correct the wrong. 

And that is Obama’s greatest failing - for all his fancy promises of hope and change, at his core, he is just like every leftist messiah we have seen before: a man wandering the world convinced of his rightness and purity, with no answers to offer but the collapsed policies of the past. There was nothing new there other than a new face.

Barack Obama claims to offer change. He said several times tonight that John McCain had been in the Senate for so long that . . . well, we don’t really remember. The point was not memorable. What is memorable is that Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s pick for Vice President has been in the Senate longer than John McCain. In fact, Barack Obama attacked John McCain’s support of bankruptcy legislation that Joe Biden sponsored.

Throughout the night we were treated to Barack Obama yelling into the microphone telling us he was an agent of change. Reading his words, we are struck that Barack Obama really is an agent of change. He will change the policies of the last thirty years in favor of the populist, leftist policies advocated by Jimmy Carter.

The shallowness of Barack Obama came out in his speech. It really is all about him, despite what he claimed.

And Barack Obama is an agent of change we cannot afford.

In 1862, when some of Abraham Lincoln’s political allies, furious over the losses at Shiloh, demanded the removal of Ulysses S. Grant from the leadership of the Army of the Tennessee, the first Republican President responded with unequivocal fervor.

“I can’t spare this man,” Lincoln said. “He fights.”

What John McCain requires in a Vice Presidential choice today is an individual who exhibits the best qualities of an intelligent political fighter. He needs a hard worker – a loyal, principled leader – an individual whose reputation is above reproach. And we are convinced that in this case, the right choice is clear.

Pitted in a deadlocked campaign against an eloquent yet inexperienced young evangelist of Hope and Change, McCain requires an individual who with every argument will prove that the Obama-Biden ticket is uninterested in real change or reform. He or she must be equipped to make the case that the ideas they espouse today are the same tried and failed liberal solutions that Biden has supported in his 36 year Senate career – the vestiges of the Great Society made shiny and new for a generation of voters who has no memory of their destructive effects on the nation. He or she must possess a bright policy mind and a telegenic demeanor for explaining these policies in the course of the ongoing debate. And in an election this divisive, McCain’s choice must be prepared to fight for new areas of the voting populace, expanding the center-right footprint while simultaneously inspiring the portion of the grassroots base still unenthused with the top of the ticket, and not threaten to break the delicate coalition of the willing who have swallowed their pride to support a former political foe.

One of these tasks alone would not be easy – together, they seem nigh impossible. Yet it is our great fortune today to be blessed with an individual who has all of these qualities and abilities. He is a hard worker, bright, capable and principled. He is a family man, strong in his values, his faith, and his character. And he is truly a man of the right.

He is the Congressman from Virginia, Eric Cantor.

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We’ll get right to it. The Politico reports Senator John McCain is feeling out state parties on the issue of a pro-choice Vice Presidential pick and what effect such a choice would have on the base.

Make no mistake about it, it would so dishearten the base we can spend the next few months practicing saying “President Obama.”

In short, there is no room for negotiation on the issue. There is no choice but life on this issue.

Senator McCain should be mindful of his status - he was not the consensus first choice of a voting majority of Republicans in the presidential primary, and instead won by amassing enough plurality wins in key contests to achieve victory. And of his potential choices for Vice President, those who would sell out the pro-life movement would also offend numerous current McCain supporters on other significant issues as well.

Should Senator John McCain choose a pro-choice running mate, we are comfortably enough in touch with the Republican base to say without hesitation that the majority of the base would sit this race out. And we could not blame them for it.

Dear Mr. President,

Pursuant to Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution of the United States of America, you can compel the House of Representatives and Senate to convene in special session.

You, Mr. President, can force the Democrats to either vote on energy legislation or not.

Mr. President, members of your party are on the floor of the House of Representatives in the dark as we write this because the Speaker of the House turned off the lights on them and skipped town. The Republicans are fighting to reduce the price of gasoline at the pump. They are fighting for American families. Democrats have turned their backs on the American people.

Normally Mr. President, the American people are better served when Congress is not in session. At this time, however, you should call the Democrats’ bluff. Recall the Congress to Washington to vote on expanding domestic oil production.

Sincerely,

RedState.com

PS - You can call the White House and ask the President to call a Special Session. The number to call is 202-456-1111.

Let’s cut to the chase:  last week should have been a good week on Iraq for John McCain and it wasn’t.  In an ideal world, of course, every week should be a good week on Iraq for McCain.  It is his signature issue and he should be scoring points on it given the dramatic success that is manifesting itself in that country.  But last week he took two hits when he should have been landing punches.

We are not saying this is fair.  We are not saying we approve.  We are saying it is happening and if McCain doesn’t do something—soon—to correct the situation Iraq could become a big problem for his campaign and that is something he cannot afford.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though.  We have a suggestion that might change the tenor of the debate over Iraq and give McCain a big issue around which he can build other aspects of his campaign message.  Something positive, optimistic, forward looking—and, as icing on the cake, something Barack Obama cannot do.

Senator McCain should declare victory in Iraq.  And he should be generous in sharing the credit with our Iraqi allies.

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There are always a number of problems with the launch of a site like RedState onto a new platform. There are the load issues that you can only really experience when you experience them. There are the caching issues. There are the compatibility issues. Then there are the user interface issues where some people cough Gamecock cough get used to the site functioning one way and then have to get used to something new. We conservatives have more people like that than the other side because we aren’t too big on change.

But we’re here. Behind the scenes there are some issues we’re going to have to work on. Overall, however, the site is working. The feedback on the new interface has been tremendously positive. The general sense is that this platform is much easier to use. That’s what we hoped for.

Getting us to this point has not been easy. First, thanks to those of you who contributed to the effort.

Second, we want to thank our own Neil Stevens and Eagle Publishing’s Robert Melton and Henry Rivera. There are few indispensable people on this planet. But for us, these three gentlemen are indispensable and integral to us getting to this point.

Starting tomorrow, we’re going to kick things into high gear. We’ll have some posts from notable conservatives, a special 3.0 launch podcast with a great friend of RedState, and through out the week a lot of front page guest posters. Along the way, a select few of you will also discover you have access to RedHot.

Now, let us repeat one thing on here. We know there are some who just cannot get excited about the 2008 Presidential election. We intend to fight and win this election for the GOP. But if you find yourself having a hard time with that race, focus on your community, your state, your congressman, or a congressman of your choice. Use the Get Local option. Turn to the politics of your community and state. Aim, fight, and win. Politics ain’t beanbag, but it’s not all presidential politics all the time either.

At RedState, we continue to fight on and hope you’ll stick with us for the fight ahead.

Welcome to RedState 3.0. It’s been a long time coming. As we get under way on this first Monday after launch, we’re going to have a number of guest posters throughout the week, helping us celebrate both the start of our fifth year and our new site. We wanted this to be our first post on the first Monday, a reminder of what we believe we should strive for.

The Republican Party has always embraced a wide range of ideological beliefs – and this diversity of thought has sometimes inspired conflict, as it has also led to great achievement. Yet through all debates, despite all regional or political concerns, the foundation of Republicanism has been the same since its inception: the freedom of the individual, and the value of every human life.

These principles have guided the party from its origin as a political force to destroy slavery, to the long fight against communism, to the ongoing battle for the sanctity of the unborn, to the present war against the forces of Islamism. Those principles will guide the Republican Party through the twenty-first century, and beyond. And we believe the GOP must rededicate itself to the idea of individual freedom – of being the party that believes not in government mandated parity, which wields the power of the bureaucracy to force a false equality of outcome, but in a level playing field for all Americans regardless of race, class, or creed – ensuring an equal opportunity to compete, succeed, and thrive.

The Republican Party must reclaim its rightful mantle as the leading champion of Freedom of Choice.

People must be free to decide how to direct their lives for themselves, and then be responsible for their choices.

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