Pushing the next president to use participatory media; GOP.com launches the Obama Spendometer; if we get President's Day off, shouldn't we get Election Day off?; comparing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's organizing philosophies; Ron Paul staffers describe his online campaign, deride Obama has too top down; how do offline GOTV operations actually work?; Vermont's having a primary too, and ice cream moguls Ben and Jerry are riding around in their ObamaMobile to support Barack.

Michael Steele's Republican National Committee is circulating a Request-for-Proposal (pdf) to rebuild the RNC website. The sketchiness of the document is raising speculation that Chairman Steele is simply going through the motions, having already picked out a consultant for the job -- despite his pledges to pump some oxygen into the party's tech ecosystem with outreach like the recent GOP Tech Summit. That, or there's something funny in the air over at party headquarters. The RFP lays out RNC HQ's tech vision in a way that might make more sense were hallucinogenic substances involved: "If we haven't thought of it -- think about it. If it hasn't been tried -- why not. If it's going to be 'outside the box' -- then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn't even reached yet." Like, woah.

Red State's Erick Erickson is a bit circumspect, but see if you can suss out his take on the RFP by reading through the lines: "[T]here is no way any competent person would put together an RFP like this. It's crap. It is not legitimate. It is unprofessional. It is illusory." The RFP is all buzz words -- "Flash," "widgets" -- but little in the way of specifics. No matter: the RNC wants all bidder to attach a firm price tag to their proposals. How much is "some place the box hasn't even reached" going for these days? On the Next Right, Dale Franks is holding on to some glimmer of hope: "Surely this is all some sort of elaborate joke. Perhaps on Monday the RNC will tell us that they were just having us on. Then, once we've all had a good laugh, they'll release the real RFP."

Check out the RFP after the jump.

"It's time this stopped," writes the Next Right's Patrick Ruffini. "Conservatives need to decide who we want to see succeed and who we want to see fail. We then need to calibrate our reactions to the inevitable missteps from either camp accordingly." Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, and Bobby Jindal, writes Ruffini, are "all important personalities that we should all want to see succeed." Each of the three putative leaders of the Republican Party have had a few rough weeks, though for distinctly different reasons. The Louisiana governor, of course, for his widely-panned response to Obama's non-SOTU. The RNC Chair and the radio host, meanwhile, have gone punch for punch over Limbaugh's use of the "fail" word in close proximity to talk of the Obama presidency. Read the Atlantic's Chris Good for all the gory details. Ruffini's call to circle the wagons has sparked a fascinating batch of comments. Several commenters object to lumping a rising GOP elected official like Jindal with a incendiary media figure like Limbaugh.

Former McCain online aide Mark SooHoo digs into the archives for a 2002 Request for Proposal for the rebuilding of GOP.com from then-RNC eCampaign director Chuck DeFeo. The document makes for an interesting contrast to the RFPs the RNC is currently circulating, with the 14-page document detailing everything from the audiences the site should target ("party loyalists," "persuadable voters") to how the backend database should be designed to how user accounts should function. Have a look...

The RNC's recently-hired new media director Todd Herman joined a conference call of participants in the RNC's tech summit grassroots group to lay out what he sees as the pillars around which the Republican National Committee can rebuild itself online -- and, by implication, offline. Herman's clearly spent time thinking through his vision for the party. (TechRepublican's Meghann Parlett has a recap of the call.) In the hour long chat, Herman testified that the Republican Party and chairman Michael Steele are planning an aggressive strategy to ready to move on the web front; a new web development firm has just been retained to implement the RNC's first round of online changes.

Or as Herman phrased it, the GOP is ready to "lock and load, down into code."

Step zero was, said Herman, was basic: Rebranding the RNC's "e-Campaign" as a modern new media department, not the IT desk. This is a strategic, proactive wing of the new GOP, he said -- not a service department there to help struggling elected officials log into their email accounts. (And here I was thinking those "No, I will not fix your computer" shirts were obsolete.) That settled, Herman detailed his five strategic principles for revitalizing the RNC online...

With the admission it's been a few days since my last visit to GOP.com, the Republican National Committee has a new splash page up that applies a considerably more modern, polished, and frankly, hip look to the site. (Here's a peek at the old design.) The RNC, of course, has been eager to reboot its digital operations and close what is seen as a gap between its online activities and that of its Democratic counterparts. "What you see here is a placeholder between what was and what is to come," blogs new Internet director Todd Herman. There's not much to the redesign, yet. But if this temporary home page is any guide, the GOP plans to focus increased attention on state and local networks, as well as social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The site also includes a prominent call for software developers to "Get Involved."

In other Republican National Committee news, Michael Steele's shop has released a hard-hitting new web ad that uses LBJ's famous "Daisy" TV spot -- which depicted the supposed risks of entrusting our nuclear future to Barry Goldwater -- to highlight differing statements by Democrats over closing the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Via TechRepublican, we have video of RNC new media director Todd Herman's presentation at PdF '09 earlier this week. Herman's talk certainly caught attention, but what was also fascinating was to take in the reactions to it amongst the conference crowd. Our Andrew Rasiej described the audience as falling about 80% on the left side of the political spectrum and 20% on the right, but the more interesting split might have been between the political and the technological. While generalizing is generally a dumb thing to do, one impression take from the contemporaneous Twitter stream was that some more tech-minded folks applauded Herman's words about making transparency a "purple issue" while the more political amongst the crowd tended towards skepticism of the idea of a more open Republican Party.

But that's admittedly just a crude read, and you don't take my word for it. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can watch Herman's preso while reading the Twitter stream and it will seem as though it were happening in real time. Wow.