John McCain

The one AZ Democrat who could beat McCain in 2010 is joining the Obama cabinet.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AJ11220081120

I don;t know what ripple effects this has on the rest of AZ politics, but this has to help us. I am unaware of the AZ Democrats having a similar figure in the wings so if Mac wants another term, he'll probably get one.

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.com.

A few hours ago, I received an e-mail from a Ron Paul supporter, and although the majority of the e-mail was rather condescending, the author makes an important statement that I do believe merits exploration:

You guys [at NextGenGOP] are … ignoring Ron Paul … and his contribution to gathering sincere and dedicated enthusiasm in American politics.

Indeed, the author is correct – our contributors have not really discussed the Ron Paul Revolution, despite the fact that there are a number of crucial lessons for the Republican Party to learn from his successes. Thus, without further ado, I will take this post to thoroughly explore this matter.

To his credit, Ron Paul’s campaign demonstrated that Republicans can indeed keep up with Democrats in the era of Web 2.0, particularly in the areas of grassroots organization and fundraising. In addition, his campaign won the hearts of many young voters in a way quite similar to that of President-elect Obama. This begs two critical questions: how did Ron Paul manage to accomplish these significant feats despite being widely regarded as a “fringe candidate,” and more importantly, what lessons must the Republican Party take from his success?

Ron Paul’s Successes

Let us begin by looking at the many successes of the Paul campaign, and how his performance compares to that of the two most significant candidates of the cycle: John McCain and Barack Obama.

1. Ron Paul energized his supporters, resulting in an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm for his candidacy despite being supported by an extremely small percentage of voters. McCain’s campaign created a short burst of energy during his selection of Sarah Palin and the convention, but it proceeded to fizzle out as time passed. Obama’s campaign continuously energized its supporters, resulting in unbelievably massive crowds at his campaign events. A Gallup poll from October 2008 confirms this phenomenon, clearly indicating the enthusiasm gap that Democrats had over Republicans.
2. Ron Paul effectively used the Internet to organize his grassroots efforts. Relying on existing infrastructures like Meetup.com – where he was able to recruit over 86,600 members in 1,150 groups that planned and held over 51,000 offline campaign events – the Paul campaign had enormous success in this arena. McCain’s website had its own network called McCainSpace, but at many levels it was not especially groundbreaking, and in contrast to the online outreach by Obama and Paul, it seemed to be used fairly lightly by supporters. In contrast, Barack Obama successfully built an incredible network at my.barackobama.com by bringing on Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Ask almost any Obama supporter, and they’ll tell you that they used Obama’s online tools in one way or another. What’s unique about Ron Paul’s success, however, is that his campaign didn’t spend enormous resources building its own tools. Instead, it successfully took advantage of tools that already existed and thus was able to build an incredibly comprehensive national grassroots network without having to spend a significant amount of its own money.
3. Ron Paul’s ability to raise funds online is unparalleled in the Republican Party. Indeed, for the final quarter of 2007, Ron Paul outraised all of the other Republican Presidential candidates. McCain’s fundraising was generally unexceptional, and his strategic error in choosing to take public funding will almost certainly never happen again. And of course, we all know that Obama was a fundraising juggernaut, particularly online.
4. Ron Paul strongly appealed to young voters. Exit polls for early primary states like NH, MI, SC, and FL show that a disproportionately large percentage of younger voters pulled the lever for Ron Paul (in many cases, roughly twice the percentage of votes he received from other age groups). As we know from the exit polling of the general election, these young voters overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over John McCain: CNN pegs Obama’s advantage at 66% - 32%.

How Ron Paul’s Successes Came to Fruition

At the most basic level, it was Ron Paul’s common-sense and decidedly libertarian platform that created so much interest in his campaign. While some of his positions, such as his staunch opposition to the Iraq war, stand in stark contrast to the Republican agenda, the fact is that the core of his message is quite in line with the traditional Republican message: reducing the federal government’s size and cutting its spending.

What made Ron Paul distinct, however, was his passion and commitment to accomplishing this. If you had to identify the single most important policy issue in a hypothetical Paul administration, it would unquestionably be reduction of government. Unfortunately, you cannot unequivocally say the same about any of the other Republican candidates, and certainly not of John McCain (read: McCain-Feingold, among other things).

Ron Paul’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to his limited government principles brought a huge influx of dedicated supporters to his campaign. The resulting enthusiasm among these supporters translated into impeccable successes.

Lessons for the Republican Party

1. Democrats aren’t the only ones who can fully take advantage of the Internet, both in donations and in building a grassroots organization. Indeed, you don’t even necessarily need to build new tools to win the battle online. That said, in order to see Ron Paul-like success, there are two crucial components that must exist. First, you must have enthusiastic supporters who are not only willing but excited to help the organization. Second, you must be willing to allow online tools to step into areas that have traditionally been controlled internally, such as grassroots organization.
2. We cannot underestimate the importance of our ideals of smaller, less expensive government – and our candidates’ commitment to these ideals. To paraphrase a McCain stump line, Republicans were elected due to their promises to change Washington, but instead they let Washington change them. As a result, the voters turned to Democrats in 2006 and 2008, at least in part because they simply don’t trust us to keep our word. In 2010 and beyond, we need to run candidates who have a proven commitment to these principles – perhaps signing off on a Contract with America 2.0 similar to what I’ve previously suggested – and in doing so we will generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm for our candidates.
3. Successfully using the Internet saves money. A lot of money. Of the major Presidential candidates, Ron Paul’s campaign devoted by far the smallest percentage of its budget to paying staffers. One of the most important reasons for this is simple: by successfully using the Internet to build the grassroots backbone of the campaign, there was considerably less need to pay staffers to organize outreach efforts. Yes, the sheer notion of such a decentralized campaign may be unsettling to those who are used to running traditional campaigns. However, Web 2.0 is shaking up the foundations of many traditional infrastructures with resounding success. If we want to survive in this new era, we need to allow it to shake up our organizations, too. Just imagine if John McCain had been able to slash his campaign’s payrolls by just 15% due to such decentralization – in fiscal year 2007 alone (well before McCain was the presumptive nominee), McCain would have been able to save $2.3 million.
4. Republicans can win back the younger voting bloc. My experience has been that the vast majority of my peers – voters age 18-29 – fundamentally agree that they want the government in their lives as little as possible. The Republican Party is the party of individual freedoms and liberties, and if we can manage to resecure the public’s faith in this, we can win back young voters.

The bottom line is that we simply cannot afford to discount Ron Paul as a “fringe candidate” whose successes hold no lessons of value for the Republican Party. Instead, we must to adapt these successes into the new Republican Party. Viva la revolución!

I have spent the last week recovering from the disappointment of election day. I have spent a lot of time talking to the mid-level operatives from the McCain campaign. (the top level are on TV playing the recriminations games, in undisclosed locations, or drinking their brains out in Vegas)  There are things that we can learn from this election.

The first is that John McCain won the primary because of an often neglected part of the coalition: military voters. Redstate's Erick Erickson said the point well on the night of the Florida primary:

Tonight was not a failure of conservatism, but a triumph of military voters who have made their home in the Republican Party because we are the party of a strong national defense.

In both South Carolina and Florida, they won it for McCain. In the grand coalition of the GOP, we've talked about social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. We've all ignored the military voters, except John McCain. And he won them big. His message resonated.

This is not a sufficient grassroots for the GOP in a national race, but it was a powerful one in the primary. We as a party should feel and water this part of the coalition better than we have done in the past. We will likely get a generation of candidates who served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan who will be powered by the volunteer work of volunteers who supported McCain. In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if this developed into a meaningful faction in GOP politics in the next couple of years.

Second, the GOP is good at managing the mechanics of GOTV. However, we are not very good at managing and empowering our grassroots. The Democrats are. Open Left's Mike Lux, now on the Obama transition team, said:

I am grateful that field organizing and working with grassroots volunteers is actually in fashion again, and in so much bigger a way than it has ever been in my lifetime.

At a time that technological and volunteer energy was at an all-time high, even on the GOP side, the RNC deployed a mythically small number of field staff, opened a mythically small number of campaign offices, and generally deprioritized grassroots. We simply didn't tap into that energy effectively. Often we failed because we were inept. Often, these were the product of intentional decisions by state parties (see below) who were afraid of new people (see above). More broadly, a whole number of volunteer engagement plans failed to materialize. I still have drafts of some of them.

Third, many of our state parties are completely dysfunctional. COMPLETELY. There have been some horror stories out of state parties that should have been able to pull their own weight but simply weren't. I won't name names yet, but it is not good. There is indeed a correlation between the states that have lost elections and the state of their parties. There are two solutions to this. Either someone needs to take them over from below or, much less preferably, they need to be fixed top-down from DC with new staff, bypassing and eventually surpassing the state parties.

Fourth, history will probably show that the mistake of squashing of the libertarian grassroots out west in the form of the Ron Paul campaign could resonate for years. Fewer activists, less money, etc. Many people will try to blame McCain and/or his campaign, but I do not believe that a single state party stood up for a significant part of their grassroots. Often, the parties were so weak that they ended up being complicit in tossing out Paul-supporting libertarians because they were afraid of new people coming in and taking over. These same parties were already in desperate places because of their inability to respond to the growing strength of latino voting blocs with outreach to bring them over. These are not the responses of healthy parties.

I'll confess that at this point in 2004, I had at least a passing interest in 2008. By May 2005, I had set up my 2008 Presidential Wire, and I had begun coding it 2 months earlier.

This cycle though, I won't be focused on 2012 for a while, and it's because of I've learned from 2008. 

Barack Obama was not even mentioned as a potential candidate until October 2006. Mitt Romney, by far the most well-prepared of the early 2008 contenders, was defeated in Iowa by Mike Huckabee (who was accused of slacking on the early ground game) and in New Hampshire by John McCain (whose early organization got shredded). The hottest GOP contenders at this point in the last cycle were George Allen and Bill Frist. And all John McCain's early legwork got him was an excessive burn rate and campaign implosion, until he retooled into a leaner, meaner machine.

In October or November of 2007, few people would have predicted Barack Obama or John McCain as the nominees. If we can't predict three months out, what makes us think we can predict three and a half years out?

Nor was 2008 a total fluke. There are structural forces at play here. On the one hand, the campaign cycle has been lengthening. But on the other hand, the Internet, and specifically a richer information ecosystem that allows us to pay more attention to also-rans like Huckabee and Ron Paul is operationalizing the Feiler Faster Thesis where challengers rise and frontrunners implode faster.

This means that in a primary, money and organization don't go as far. McCain got nominated with half the resources of some of his competitors. Mike Huckabee got to be the second to last guy standing on financial and organizational fumes. When Barack Obama's YouTube channel is worth more than the entire budget of a respectable primary campaign, you know something is up.

So, I implore you, quit focusing on 2012, and focus on 2010 and on showing the Republican Party can rebuild at the state legislative, Congressional, and statewide levels in 2010. (That's where we're starting with Rebuild the Party.) Start blogging about potential candidates for Congress now. Even if we somehow manage to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, it won't mean very much if our ranks in the House and Senate remain decimated, and we've redistricted into oblivion until 2022.

I'm disgusted that the Republican Presidential campaign has chosen to go out with backstabbing, blame assignment, and media leaks, not to mention a very clean clock.

I was utterly disappointed with the way that McCain ran his campaign in the last week (refusal to hammer the judgment of Obama's radical associations; refusal to hammer the Democrats with the CRA, ACORN, Fannie/Freddie and the economic disaster; obsession with campaigning in Pennsylvania at the expense of Red states).

I'm especially disgusted with his deafening silence on behalf of Sarah Palin - his vice presidential selection - and the fact that he is allowing his staff to anonymously have their way with her reputation in the media.

The buzz is that allegedly senior staffers (and possibly McCain himself?) are motivated to ensure that Governor Palin cannot possibly run for President in 2012. I guess we'll see about that in 2012, but the big question for me is, where is John McCain's formidable honor now?  Why isn't he speaking out and emphatically insisting that the responsibility for the failure of his campaign is his alone, as well as a perfect storm in favor of all Democratic candidates?  As the Palin rumors grow legs, it appears more and more likely that he'd rather lose an election and blame it on his Vice Presidential partner than remind his staffers that discretion is the better part of valor.

Palin needs to stand accountable for her petulance regarding the Couric interview.  That's the only unprofessional public event I know of in her disfavor, however.  And even that faux pas pales in comparison to Biden's blacklisting the TV anchors in Florida and Pennsylvania, for which of course he receives a pass and an "atta boy!".  Regardless of how challenged she may or may not have been intellectually, regardless of what happened behind closed doors, Governor Palin's public persona was extremely optimistic, professional and appropriate at all times (as were her political instincts about how to run against her opposition).

With failed leadership like this, I'm completely depressed that I contributed so many hours and dollars to a victory effort on McCain's behalf.  Now that the whole sordid story has unfolded, I can see how wrong I was to support the candidate I thought could successfully win instead of the candidate who most closely represented my conservative/libertarian values.  I've been in denial, I've made excuses about McCain-Feingold, McCain-Lieberman, and McCain-Kennedy. I've been sick about it all week.  I've learned how important it is to vote my conscience instead of my interpretation of probability.  Lesson learned and duly noted. 

Now, onward.

Newsweek has done a post mortem labelling the McCain campaign effort among the worst in recent history, even comparing it to McGovern/Eagleton

http://www.newsweek.com/id/167561

The reasons were primarly as per Newsweek a) Palin and b) McCain's failure to be optimistic.

Now I think this is nonsense, pretty much. Had McCain chosen a bland, experienced running mate GOP turnout would have been even more dismal, probably ending another dozen house careers and 2-3 senate careers.  And running "morning in America" in the face of a single digit "right track" number would have been mocked as painfully out of touch and clueless. 

But there's a bigger problem with this thesis. McCain's effort was only mildly subpar compared to its "peer group"

Since 1960, the following candidate have tried to get a third consecutive term for their party.

1960; Nixon 49.5%

1968 Humphrey 42.7% (third party in double digits)

1976 Ford 48%

1988 Bush 41  53.4%

2000 Gore  48.4%

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

McCain ran slighly behind the number that Nixon, Ford and Gore had; all of whom were running in better economic times than this year.  He ran ahead of Humphrey, who was saddled with fallout from a far more unpopular war than Iraq, but due to the weird quirks of 1968, nearly won the popular vote and nearly forced the election into the House.  The only candidate of the bunch that stands out is Bush 41, who ran under times of peace and prosperity; had the brilliant Lee Atwater running the campaign; and faced a very weak opponent.

The proximate cause of McCain's defeat was , in my opinion, the Wall Street bailout. In specifics, once he made the call to suspend the campaign he needed--barring such immovable objects as scheduled debates--to get the issue off the burner as soon as possible.

On September 29, McCain left Washington for a rally with Palin in Columbus OH. Now he was going back to OH plenty more---what he needed to do was beg, borrow and plead with House Republicans to pass the bailout bill that afternoon so he could declare the crisis resolved and get back on the campaign trail without having this hang over him. I have no diea if haunting the Capitol building would have squeezed out enough votes--I just know the bill failed in the House, keeping the crisis at full boil for another precious campaign week.  http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/09/29/ (Yes, the bailout was a "crap sandwich"; but McCain had already endorsed getting one passed;  the ship had sailed as far as coming out against it)   

September 29, 2008 was the day John McCain's best chance to become President slipped away. This was one political event that should have been left to Governor Palin to handle solo.  Having gone "maverick" and back to DC,  switching gears to go back on the campaign moved to be a tragic miscalculation for McCain.

The Newsweek article does point out McCain's inability to stay on message as far as policy differences between Obama and McCain.  That observation isn;t very novel and when I sit down and catalog the myriad Mac errors, that will be among them. 

I have begun the difficult but exciting process of carefully thinking about what specific issues a new Republican party can run on in the future (planning for 2012, but we may be ready for 2010).

Steps for Success

Our problem is the party's race relations. For decades now Republicans (and even conservatives in general) have very successfully been labeled as racists and bigots. Yes, this is very largely because our opponents have driven this message to the public, but ultimately it is our fault for not working hard enough to selling ourselves and our accomplishments in this area.

• This starts with our history as the party that ended slavery under President Lincoln, but continues right up to President George W. Bush's very racially diverse administration. We must build grassroots marketing campaigns to make sure the public (especially young people) know that the Republican party is the historical party of racial liberty and opportunity. These grassroots campaigns should start on popular Internet social networking sites and conservative blogs, but could eventually create multimedia advertisements to be picked up and distributed on broadcast stations by political organizations with money. We will receive much ridicule from the left at first, but if we stick to these campaigns we can at least get this out into the "public consciousness" so it isn't such a strange idea when 2012 comes around.
• Reach out more to an ethnic population very often overlooked by both conservatives and liberals: Native Americans. With the power of charities and grassroots fundraising, we can take the message of self-reliance and hard work to the communities that are trapped in alcoholism and welfare. People may scoff at this, but it would go a long way not only to helping Native peoples, but also our reputation among the public. And assuming initial success we could expand the message to immigrating Hispanics, who oftentimes identify themselves with mixed Native heritage depending upon the region they come from.
• And the hardest, but most important one: we have to take a long, hard look at our traditional stance on immigration. Does this mean accepting "Amnesty"? No. But it does mean being willing to come up with creative solutions to the problem and packaging those solutions in digestible ideas for sound bites and campaign slogans to persuade people. Below are ideas on how a Republican immigration plan can look and be marketed. The bottom line is that we have to be willing to bend a little on this issue and heavily market this in order to ever overcome our unfair reputation as the anti-immigration party.
• We have to also work harder at digging up hard examples of how welfare and big government nanny-ism hurts immigrant families in the long run. Counter that with hard evidence of how entrepreneurship and learning English in these families leads to greater success. And when we have these examples and raw information, we need to package and market deep inside ethnic communities (Spanish-language television stations, newspapers, churches and other organizations).

Legislative Leadership

Assuming Senator John McCain decides to stay in office after this election, he would be a tremendous asset to this immigration campaign. He has championed borderline Amnesty immigration reform, but if we come up with solutions that are less strict than we traditionally have pushed, we could convince him to meet us half way. He has also been a huge advocate for Native Americans in his time in the Senate (which is something I am sad never was brought up during any of his stump speeches or television spots), and his reputation in this could lift up other Republican politicians that work with him (legislators or governors) and provide them a foundation to build on.

Are there any other Republican politicians that are working on immigration reform or relations within the Native American communities?

Possible Features

Some ideas for this future immigration reform, for your consideration to get discussion started:

• Whatever programs for helping educating and integrating immigrants into America must come from charities and other private sources, not the federal government (although state governments would be free to partner with these programs, of course). The federal government may help co-ordinate these disparate organizations so that people in need of the services have a single website and phone number to get information from, but that is the extent of government involvement. We can start here by making a list of existing charities that are in this field already.
• It may be necessary for some federal taxpayer money to be used to help these programs with their expanded administrative costs at first, but even if this is true any annual financing should have an automatic expiration date that fades away over a set number of years.
• A combined guest worker and academic study program with a defined path to citizenship. Allow a certain number of people from all over the world to come to the U.S. for 2 year blocks of time to work or go to school. They would never be eligible for the welfare programs, so if they loose their job and can't find another one to buy food or health care, their guest permit is revoked. They must show some level of English, although wouldn't have to be fluent (that should come while they work or learn here). If they break any significant crime they would loose their guest permit (drunk driving would be enough, but a speeding citation may not).
• The above guest worker/student program can be used to funnel all potential citizens into our country. Therefore, there would not be any hard line between foreigner one day then full-blown citizen the next. Everyone would come in to work or learn while proving to the government they can follow the laws and become fluent in English in order to attain full citizenship.
• I do not think the guest worker/student program should cost the foreigner much money. It should be cheap and easy to become a "guest" for at least 2 years. Their presence in the country by paying taxes and being productive would be benefit enough to our economy. However, the costs for becoming a full citizen should pay for themselves through application fees. Even at most I don't expect that to be more than $2,000, and even that may be high.
• Give all applicants in our current system that have been waiting more than 2 years a priority treatment to become guests as soon as possible, and waive their application fees to become citizens when they are ready (assuming they meet all qualifications).
• To become a guest worker, the individual must apply through a U.S. Embassy in their native country (or an auxiliary office of the Embassy in large countries). There would not be any way to apply within the USA, therefore encouraging immigrants who are here in the U.S. illegally to return home first. We would allow them to leave in peace, and in fact may even set them up with charities or other programs to help them pay for the trip back. Once they properly apply, they may be given a priority treatment to become guests because of the prior experience with the U.S., but it would not be greater treatment than those immigrants who are grandfathered in from the old system.
• And of course, securing the border is an absolute requirement. Leaving it open and unguarded is a huge national security risk as we all know. I believe we can successfully sell this to the public if our plans for legal guests and immigrants is seen as accepting and humanitarian enough. The only real questions are whether this secured border would be a physical wall (sorry, a "fence" isn't going to cut it), or a virtual one of cameras and UAVs patrols in the air. I'm leaning towards the virtual one. And also whether the National Guard would be involved by activation by the federal government on short term rotations (3 months would be best).

Consequences

If we fail to reclaim the label of racial liberators, then the Republican Party will fade away, faced with a Democrat Party constantly growing off of changing ethnic demographics all over the country. The two party Republican/Democrat dynamic would eventually be replaced by a split in the Democratic party between their far-left and left-of-center factions. Yes, the core conservative heart of the American public will live on, but an organization large and sufficiently funded enough will not be there to empower them.

A disclaimer: I am a conservative, but registered Libertarian, not Republican, although that may change in the future depending where the party goes.

We welcome Governor Huckabee to the front page on this important night. -Patrick

I'm very proud to have supported Senator McCain and the only regret is that more Americans didn't share my conviction that he would have made an outstanding President. I not only recognize, but respect that we are a nation in which the people choose and tonight they have chosen Senator Obama. He was not my choice, but he will be my President and I will pray for him to lead this great nation with God's help and grace. He will face serious challenges to lead our country and he will need all Americans to give him a chance.

The campaign is over and now is the time for governing and leading. The Republican Party must now reassess where it is and where it is going. Our problem is not that our views aren't acceptable, is that many in our party have abandoned the very principles that once drew Americans to trust us. Our party will be back with strength, but tonight we should all celebrate the historic nature of this election and put our country ahead of our party.

As disappointed as I am that we have lost the election, I can't help but feel that many courageous leaders of the civil rights movement look down from heaven tonight with a smile that the day has come when a man is elected without regard to his color. I salute President-elect Obama for his discipline and tenacity that has given our country the opportunity to witness this significant event.

Politics is not an event but a process. We sometimes lose the events but it never gives us the right to stop being faithful to our principles that enlisted us in the process. We shall live to fight another day.

This blog is cross-posted at www.HuckPac.com.

According to an American Spectator item this morning, the race for RNC Chair appears to be over. Or maybe it's not. But the game of who is in and who is out has some tongues wagging.

It seems the South Carolina GOP Chair Katon Dawson has been campaigning for the gig since last year sometime (Ok, not really. Just since the convention, according to the AS piece.)

Dawson, the owner of an auto-parts-supply company, has been calling GOP donors and fundraisers, among others, telling them he has lined up enough votes within the 168-member national committee to make him a prohibitive favorite for the job.

"He's made it clear he doesn't expect John McCain to win the presidency," says one RNC fundraiser who has received such a call. "Katon's an ambitious guy. He's made no bones about the fact that he wants the RNC job."

But no one takes seriously the notion that Dawson is anywhere close to having a large voting bloc of RNC votes. "There are too many others poised to get into the race," says one RNC member. "We're looking at between 10 to 15 potential candidates and maybe seven or eight of them already have constituencies on the committee. No one is in a position to call this thing over, particularly since our next president, John McCain, gets to pick the next chairman."

That point is something that Dawson has seemingly overlooked, and his aggressive campaigning at a time when most Republicans are fighting hard to get McCain elected President has angered a number of Republicans because they understand why Dawson, who has been a local GOP chair in South Carolina, and won the state party job in 2002, is running: in part, to help jumpstart a presidential bid for the governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford...

Dawson was actually campaigning for the job during the Republican Convention, something that angered not only the McCain campaign, but other Republicans with longtime ties to the RNC.

Apparently, some people are upset because Katon Dawson is actively campaigning while they're trying to elect John McCain. On the heels of all the "reform the rightroots movement" posts, this may stirke some people as odd.

I'd like to throw this out for discussion. Given all the chatter about reforming the GOP, is it bad form to start a campaign for Chairman months before the election?

I suspect it will only be another 36 hours or so before we see a lot more people jockeying for the RNC gig. After all, it is one of the three most visible positions within the GOP if McCain should fail to hold the White House. However, how early is "too early"? Should the body be cold before campaigning begins? Does it even need to be dead?