College Republican Convention: 'We need to find our Happy Meal'

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Rebecca Freitag

In the last couple of years, the GOP lost control of the Senate, House, the White House, and more recently, their mouths in Washington, D.C. at the College Republicans National Committee convention June 4-6.

At the 58th biennial convention, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) gave the keynote address. And among the other speakers at the event were Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Republican National Chairman Michael Steele, Phyllis Schlafly, former Sen. Rick Santorum, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA).

The turnout for the convention was less-than-thrilling. Attending the more well-known speakers, such as McCain, Steele, and Pawlenty, audiences barely reached 200 people. A significantly smaller group attended the others.

Those numbers seem worse when you consider that according to the blog of outgoing National Committee Chairman Charlie Smith, there were 203,000 proud College Republicans on 1,800 campuses in all 50 states.

Because of these small attendance numbers, one of the main focuses of the weekend was how to increase membership in the barely-breathing GOP.

Elicia Huffaker, a GOP Youth Convention recruiter, suggested that the party advertise itself in a different way, using McDonalds' strategy as a model.

"[They] don't advertise dead cow meat, they advertise a Big Mac or a Happy Meal," Huffaker said. "We need to find our Happy Meal or our Big Mac in order to energize the party."

The GOP doesn't need a Big Mac, they just need their dead cow meat to stop mooing in front of the camera.

And speaking of metaphors, Michael Steele had his favorite hat packed in his suitcase for this trip. His standard invisible "GOP hat" was put on four students, four different ways. One had the brim facing the front, one had the brim cocked to the left, one cocked to the right and the other was backwards. To a thunderous applause, Steele told the students to put the hat on and stand with the GOP.

"The strength of the party is in this," Steele said. "It's not how you wear the hat, but that you put the damn thing on."

Steele said that too many people in the country were taking the hat off because the GOP has decided that they don't like the way others wear it, much like the way he didn't like the way Barack wore his hat in the 2008 election.

"Barack Obama asked your generation to use his hat. The hat of one man," Steele said. "I'm asking you to go out and ask your friends to wear our hat -- the hat of an idea."

His idea hat wasn't on that day, but his comedian hat was. When confronted with the question about reaching out to black voters, Steele joked with a straight face, "I ain't doing anything. Black people don't vote for Republicans."

But after a few minutes, Steele put on his serious hat and talked about his struggle through the traditionally white male Republican Party, and the one young black woman in the audience. He said that when they say they're reaching out to minorities, "It's a lie. It's B.S. This party has never made a serious effort to do that."

But apparently Steele doesn't have an outreach hat, because it still isn't in the GOP vocabulary.

After all that, the hole wasn't deep enough for the GOP leaders, so they decided to keep digging. Gov. Pawlenty took a cheap shot when he said the only thing growing faster than the national debt was the man crush Chris Matthews has on President Obama.

If these partisanship displays weren't enough to convince people that the party is in its own kind of downturn, Sen. McCain, the king of bipartisanship roused the rebels with a touching speech.  "You are a brave band of warriors," McCain consoled the students. "You will be able to look back some day and say look, I was part of the Republican Party when times were the toughest. ... It's hard trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan."

In an overall unproductive convention for the College Republicans, Chairman Steele, Gov. Pawlenty, and Sen. McCain helped propel the party into a downward spiral toward dysfunction with their lack of ideas and solutions. Just like Gov. Pawlenty told the students behind closed doors that last morning, without the younger generation of Republicans, the GOP will die. Party's over.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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