5/15/09 Update: What you see here is a placeholder between what was and what is to come for GOP.com. Don’t get too used to this page–the complete rebuild is around the corner. Soon we’ll have a new look and a more enjoyable, modern, open and participatory way to share our ideals with the Country.

On Friday of last week, we chose a vendor to rebuild our website and digital presence; the two are not the same and the distinction matters—a lot. It matters especially so for us.

The website you see today is difficult to update, hard to use, and locked in a Web 1.0 environment. It is also stale. It is in need of a massive spring clean. To be fair, my predecessor and good friend, Cyrus Krohn, and his team were on the way to changing all of this. Then, we elected a new Chairman, re-grouped, re-staffed and then, finally, we locked & loaded.

The project is underway.

You will soon witness some preliminary changes and, less soon—though, faster than I have ever seen done—you will see the new GOP.com in its entirety. This is where you come in.

Pew recently released a study about politics and technology. I quote (the emphasis is mine): “Despite the Dem’s recent success in using the internet, Republicans as a whole (68%) are actually more likely to be online political users then Dem’s (53%). 84% of Republicans go online and of that group 79% are online political users. Only 40% of Republicans engage in online activism. (Online activism is defined by three components; 1) going online for political news and information 2) communicating with others about politics online and 3) using social media tools (FBOOK, Twitter, Email) to interact with other voters/campaigns.)”

As you can see, this is where you come in—we hope.

For many of you, Facebook and Twitter are like Tide and Big Macs, BrightKite is old-hat and you have already beta-tested Vine and Footprint. Cool. Will you help the rest of us?

For some of you, this will be a new and exciting way to exercise your political muscles. Perhaps our friends in the know will lend us a hand.

I mentioned the important distinction between a website and a digital-presence. You are our digital presence and it is our job to make your insurmountably important role in our Party fun, easy, compelling, two-way and meaningful. The website can be a meeting place, an information gathering place, the action center where you can prepare yourself to help people discover that hope & change really means poverty & pain. Or, it can be a website. We are determined to provide the tools necessary to make it the former. If you have thoughts on what that should include, please tell us.

Thank you for being our digital presence … especially through the past few months.

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Yes, contrary to what I seem to read everywhere, we are neither dragging our feet moribund in our loss, searching around for a future, or living in denial of the Herculean work we have to do. To a person, we seem to recognize the challenge of facing up to a popular president willing to do anything to gain, keep and radically expand his power: fund a campaign with anonymous donations, appoint a group charged multiple times with perpetrating voter-fraud to count the Census, send David Axelrod on TV to claim the “Tea Parties” were “dangerous” and, as a parting shot at the idea of a free market, refuse to take repayments –with interest- from banks who neither wanted nor needed our tax money.

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