While their numbers are small in comparison to the Democrats, their willingness to pursue public service is a testament to each individual. And as someone who has worked on many minority Republican campaigns such races can be the most grueling of sports.

This year they will have a rather unusually large number to go after. Below is a compilation of just a few of the minority and urban Republican candidates who are seeking elected office:

Robert Enriquez: A U.S. citizen, who was born in Honduras in 1956, he arrived in the US at age 13.  He was a U.S. Marine Officer on foreign assignments, speaks English and Spanish and is seeking to become the Secretary of State of Illinois.

Ryan Frazier: This African-American Republican has been tagged the conservative version of Obama. He is a 31-year old-city council member from Aurora, Colorado. He wants to be that state’s next Senator. He has won many of the major straw polls and is beloved by many in the conservative base.

Susana Martinez: A district attorney in New Mexico, she has announced that she will run to be governor of the state.

Quang X. Pham: A Vietnamese Republican, is running in California’s 47th Congressional District.

Van Tran: A Vietnamese Republican, he is running in California’s 47th Congressional District. Van Tran is currently serving as a Republican member of the California State Assembly representing portions of Orange County.

Esther Velazquez: This Hispanic Republican woman could make history in New Jersey by becoming the first Latino to win a council seat in the Borough of Hightstown

Charles Djou:  A Republican from the State of Hawaii. He is currently serving his second term on the Honolulu City Council where he represents District 4. He is seeking a seat in Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District. The seat is currently held by Neil Abercrombie who has since announced that he would run for Governor of Hawaii.

Duke Aiona: The current Lt. Governor of Hawaii. He is seeking to become that state’s governor.

Marco Rubio: In the state of Florida, Rubio, a young Cuban-American, is attracting attention from a  conservative base uncomfortable with popular centrist governor Charlie Christ.

Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (US Army, Retired): An African-American candidate in the State of Florida, he is making a run for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District against incumbent Democrat Ron Klein.

Ted Cruz: A 39-year-old graduate of Princeton and Harvard, this Republican is running for Texas Attorney General. Cruz was named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under age the age of 45 in America. He has been hailed as a “rising star” in the Wall Street Journal, and named by the National Law Journal as one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.”

Louis Huddleston: An African-American candidate for North Carolina’s 8th district. He just returned from fighting in Afghanistan.

Sasha Gong: An Asian-American Republican who is seeking a seat in the 46th District of the Virginia House of Delegates. Sasha Gong was born in China. At age nine, her family was forced from their home in the city by the communists and sent to a small village. It affected her early education because from age nine she was forced to work on a farm and later in a factory.

Isaac Hayes: An African-American, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago.  Hayes is running against Jesse Jackson, Jr., to represent Illinois’ 2nd Congressional district.

Ashok Chandra: A rising star in the New York City Republican community. Chandra is running for city council in New York City.

Nikki Haley: The first Indian-American Republican state legislator in the U.S., Haley is currently running for the Republican nomination for Governor of South Carolina.

Irene Kim Asbury: This Korean-American Republican is running for New Jersey’s 31st District, which includes Jersey City and Bayonne.  Her opponent, a Democrat, is under investigation and was asked to resign by Gov. Jon Corzine.

The list, of course, goes on and on with similar examples all over the nation. Whether or not they can win is anyone’s guess; but their presence in a Republican Party that is often ridiculed for being out to lunch on both minority and urban issues should not be taken for granted.

Michael Steele began his speech with a litany of sobering statistics on the fate of blacks in America. As he ended the speech he noted that instead of reading a recent study he was actually quoting John F. Kennedy from the 1960’s, sharply underscoring the fact that while there may be an African-American president, there is still much that has not been done for African-Americans.

The NAACP working with the RNC will indeed be a unique change of course given the often testy relationship between the two institutions. It is not without precedent given that many of the NAACP’s first defenders and early founders were registered Republicans. The future relationship between these two groups will be an interesting one to watch. Will it fade out as soon as Steele leaves his chairmanship?  Will other RNC chairmen participate in future events? Can the two groups work together on an urban agenda that encourages self-empowerment?

Nevertheless, a more interesting question is: How is the Republican Party doing with regards to reaching out to minorities and urban folks in general? What has the message been in the past and what will it look like in the future?

I believe that at the heart of the GOP’s failure to effectively reach out has been an unwillingness to mention race or demographics with regards to any type of legislation that may be favorable to minorities or urban America in general. This is to say that we do not take credit where credit is due, often giving Democrats the opportunity to claim such ideas as their own.  Recently John H. McWhorter, a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow in Public Policy and a Contributing Editor to City Journal, stated on a recent radio interview that Republicans don’t take credit for the things they do to benefit black America.

He stated that Bush and many other Republican presidents had polices implemented that helped minorities and urban areas but never took credit for those policies. They preferred to highlight other policies while allowing the Democrats to take credit for their ideas. One example of this theft is the Democrats increasing willingness to accept charter schools. Democrats knowing that charter schools are popular are trying to take credit for this implementation also. It’s actually one of the hardest polices for them to take credit for because Republicans invoked race when selling charter schools. The GOP argued earlier that charter schools would benefit minority and urban communities and made this very clear.  Amongst a host of other things, however, we have not made it clear who its beneficiaries will be.

A solution to much of this idea-stealing would be the creation of a broad taskforce and initiative working with a coalition of urban and minority Republicans around the nation. Imagine a team of urban Republicans from around the nation: from the Bronx, Harlem, Los Angeles and Detroit coming together and offering up strategies and suggestions for winning the hearts and minds of urban and minority voters. Once thetaskforce gets the results in, it could send the results over to Michael Steele. Michael Steele, in working with the RNC, could create an urban Republican website which would come up with practical solutions on a host of urban topics.

These topics could include such issues as transportation, education, gas prices and housing just to name a few. Also, the taskforce could request a panel of urban Republican experts in various fields who could offer some suggestions for improving urban America. Another important factor is using the voter vault to empower those already registered as Republicans. How many registered Republicans are in Harlem or the Bronx or Detroit? The RNC and state chairs could begin reaching out to these Republicans in the inner-cities. While it is true that most of these areas are heavily Democratic, there are still hundreds and thousands of registered Republicans and independents in these areas.

One suggestion for those interested in this issue is to read a study entitled Blacks & the Republican Party by the Joint Center for Economic Studies. The document is a great start in chronicling where we, as a party, went wrong. Perhaps it can demonstrate where we can turn the tide. In order for the GOP to win in urban America a few hard systemic questions must be asked and analyzed.  The questions asked should be strong questions.

For instance:

Who is responsible in each state for minority and urban outreach?

What type of accountability structure is in place to determine if the State is doing the job or the task assigned?

Is an urban and a minority coalition team in place?

What are the goals of such a team?

Does the party have a strong nationwide urban platform?

Has the party figured out why many black Republicans who run for office do poorly in polls?

What modules could be used to better propel a candidate?

Have we begun to effectively create an online strategy to use micro-targeting via Facebook and blackplanet.com?

Are we targeting the young?

The future of African Americans and other minorities in the GOP should be focused primarily on young people. We must, therefore, make sure that in every policy decision that essentially our message is targeted toward the youth. In other words, we want The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s, Carlton Banks, not his parents.

Another, more important, issue deals with resources. Are we, as a party, going to put our money where our mouth is by creating a special fund for minority and urban outreach? If such a fund were created would it have an advisory board and an auditor to see what metrics work and what did not?

Also, we must ask:

Have we built effective candidate farms in which scouts find up and coming talent? Do we stand behind them should these urban and minority candidates choose to run? Or do we encourage them to run and hide behind them just to see what happens?

Have we started a school to train minority and/or urban candidates before they seek office?

Have we made sure that urban minority GOP state groups have functioning websites?

Are state chairs taking their responsibilities seriously by making outreach a real goal? If so, are they funding such outreaches? Are the outreaches effective? These and many other issues must be considered.

Given that state chairs have a great deal of power in our party, 70% percent of the work in this area will be up to them; not the RNC. A suggestion would be to allow the RNC to run all such operations if the state chairs neglect to do so.

The building blocks for repairing the GOP’s fractured relationship in urban areas must start as soon as possible. It will take all sectors of the party coming together and making firm commitments to change. Whether we as a party are up to this daunting and Herculean task still remains to be seen. Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that as a party we pull through. Let’s remember also that outreach is not pandering its being responsible for taking action to grow our party in communities where we are currently under-represented.

There is a lot of talk in Republican circles about “RINO hunting.”  RINO hunting can be described as: kicking out anyone in the party who does not fit the definition of Republicanism. The self-styled RINO-hunter believes he is the tried and true Republican. Our party, therefore, lost this past presidential election because of moderates like Sen. McCain.  The history of the Republican party is one of genuine coalition building and interest coming together to better the nation. Martin Rybicki in his article “The Real Republicans: The Case for Moderates, Liberals, and Pragmatic Conservatives in Our Party” argues the historical fallacies in the RINO hunter’s purist arguments:

In trying to find out who we should be as Republicans we must first look back in history to see what the party stood for. Many in the party, hard-line conservatives for the most part, are calling for a return to the roots of the Republican party. Fair enough. I think that is precisely what we should do. And to do this, the facts that can be bothersome to some must be brought to the forefront of this internal debate. The roots of the party, of course, must be from the very beginning of its conception.

The Republican party was formed in the late 1850’s in response to the Democrats who supported the expansion of slavery into the new territories, which the new party was vehemently opposed to. The party was from the beginning, a progressive party and by no means a conservative one. It was a party that sought to modernize the country, not to keep the status quo especially if the status quo was not working for Americans. They sought to modernize the country by supporting higher education, free homesteads to farmers (a rather non-conservative thing to do), free soil policies against slavery, banking, railroads, industry and cities.

This was a party that not only was aiming for the rural vote via homesteads, but also one that had a heavy lean towards urban America. Again something that is not apparent with today’s conservative-controlled Republican party. It was a party that believed industry and free markets were superior to slave driven ones. These were the founding principles of the party and it is these principles that should define real Republicanism instead of what has crept into the party over the last few decades. Taking into account these founding ideas must also include Abraham Lincoln himself who was a man of principle as well as pragmatism in being the first iconic leader of the Republican party. Lincoln from his early years warned against the slave-holding Southerners continuing power.

Of course so called RINO-hunters, are not big fans of the historical record because history is rarely ideologically neat or clean. If the RINO hunters have their way, they would choose candidates who emphasized social issues such as: anti-immigration or abortion over more substantive issues like job creation as their ideal winning strategy. To them, moderates in the party are the problem not the solution and must be tossed. This reasoning may seem strange given that despite their rhetoric and finger pointing most polls show that moderates were far from the problem this year. Instead, to the contrary, they may have been more of a help than any other faction of the party.  

Also, if any of these RINO-hunters did just a little homework and checked the Census Bureau data, they would clearly see that the nation is undergoing a huge demographic shift. The population that Reagan reached out to in the 80’s is getting older and replacing them is a new group of kids who grew up in the 90’s. Most of these kids know very little about Reagan, but they are very familiar with the Clintons and now Bush. This new voter group is internet savvy; write daily on blogs and communicate through text messaging. The GOP’s old “my way or the highway” is destroying the party’s image and turning off young and potential new voters.

Of course, all of this is nonsense to the RINO-hunters because to them young voters are unreliable, whereas the base is tried and true. What they fail to grasp is that these younger voters are the future of this nation. How these younger voters vote early on can be an indicator of what party they and their children will choose.  No more perfect example of this is a group we “did” reach out to yet still lost by large margins this year – Latino voters.  

The Joint Center, a non-partisan research firm in Washington, DC, noted that Latino-Americans overwhelmingly voted for Sen. Barack Obama. In trying to explain their voting behavior, the Center’s pollster said that in every poll the key reason for supporting Obama was a disdainful reaction to certain xenophobic messages proclaimed loudly throughout our party. Despite McCain’s record of moderation on this issue, the GOP’s anti-immigrant image lost the Latino vote.   

Some Republicans dispute such arguments as pandering. They think that we can ignore these voters and stick with the base. They can hold onto this belief, but they do so at our party’s own peril. Ignoring the handwriting on the wall will mean a GOP that is on its way to being a party without power and influence.   

Democrats won state by state by making room for centrists within their party, and by not allowing the hard left to dictate every local election. In a similar move, the Republican party must reject any movement that calls for purging moderates. The truth be told, in order to win nationwide we need all ideological schools within our party.  Often times, moderate Republicans are our best chance to withstand a Democratic tidal wave. By their very nature moderates are consensus builders. This often gets them into trouble with the purists in both parties.   

Saying we lost solely “because of scandal and broken promises” has to stop! This train of thought is getting old. The facts are clear. We lost for many other reasons as well, and until we deal with all of these issues we will continue to loose.    

In hindsight, however, instead of tearing down moderates, we should try to listen and to possibly learn from them. Perhaps their experience of running successful campaigns against an army of Democrats might be what the party needs. There is no better time like now; especially given that we will have four years to do so.  

while most people in the world like music, different songs have different meanings to different people. The GOP has become a one-hit wonder acting as if there is only one song and one tune. We need to be playing tunes that resonate with different people.

The person saying this was not suggesting the Republican Party give up on music and instead, read a book; but that it begin to expand its overall collection of songs. If ever there did exist within the GOP such a thing as a music director, i.e. conductor that had the skills and know how to provide a harmonious melody to this musical ensemble, it is the Party’s new Chairman Michael Steele.

Laughed at and mocked by the media for his “unorthodox” approach to getting the Party’s message out and his willingness to embrace such terms as “Hip-Hop Republican,” Steele has become an easy target for some on the left and on the right. In lieu of such attacks Michael Steele has taken a Jay- Z “dirt off your shoulder” approach to such ridiculous taunts Ñ and rightly so.

Some years ago, while still relatively new to politics, I began looking for an internship in Washington DC to help me to become more familiar with politics. I remember looking in the City Paper, which is DC’s version of The Village Voice, for something. My eyes settled on a group calling itself the Republican Youth Majority. Given the liberal leanings of the City Paper, I thought the ad to be a bit odd. At this point, I was not a Republican but I knew that I was not a Democrat.

Growing up, I saw many of the problems other urban youth have lived through especially in the inner cities. Most of these problems stemmed from bad public polices of which Democratic authorship was on most, if not all, of them. This is not to say that the Democratic Party itself was corrupt, but that the individuals who were promoting ineffective polices were never challenged.

The Republican Party of course was nowhere. The Democratic Party became the only party in town. Consequently, people saw elections only in the context of a Democratic primary. Despite my seeing a corrupt government, it was not a wholesale rejection of government. Mother Theresa once said, “If we must ask why there is so much evil in the world then we must equally ask why there is so much good.” I saw government as having the potential to do good things, but it also had the effect of negating individuality.

Ideologically it was about this time that I found myself looking to intern in DC and happened upon the ad for the Republican Youth Majority. I scheduled a meeting with its founder, offering my resume to him. I explained to him that I was not sure what party I should be affiliated with. RYM, nevertheless, opened its door to me allowing me to intern for the summer. It was during my time at RYM that I was invited to hear the chairman of the Maryland GOP speak. I had no idea who the person was and could have cared less given the previous weeks of bland and out-of-touch speakers. The speaker was Michael Steele!

When Steele entered the room, a strange thing occurred that rarely happened at previous RYM events: a crowd of young people of all ages literally surrounded him and began to get his autograph.

During his speech, I waited for the usual Republican talking points, but this time the talking points were different. They hit home. I did not only understand Steele but I also felt what he was saying. Instead of talking about states rights, Steele spoke of personal empowerment. Instead of speaking down, he encouraged Republicans to uplift those less fortunate. He spoke about the struggles to create a nation that reflected Martin Luther King’s vision of a world based not upon race but merit.

Steele’s speech left a great impression on the many young people present including me. Years have passed since that speech. Many of those young people who listened to Steele speak have moved on to do other things. I can tell you this: They are all still fans of his. He was for many of them the first real politician who seemed somewhat approachable in an often stuffy and politicized Washington, D.C. In a city as political and partisan as D.C., such character is less then welcomed. Nevertheless, the future of the Republican Party has and remains with Steele.

Say what you may about his style, the man is genuine and unquestionably capable.