Inept gop.com relaunch could signal deeper problems for Republicans

The Republicans have regrouped a little this year, but they might want to rethink what is going on at the Republican National Headquarters.  They recently launched a new website for the Republican Party, gop.com, and it was a disaster.  It had, and has, numerous technical glitches, and they feel they need to be given another month before it really comes together. 

This is not a good omen from a party that nominated a man last year who did not use e-mail.  Seriously, it shouldn't be that difficult to have a website work smoothly after it's launched, particularly for a group with plenty of money like the RNC.  I'd give them a pass if it happened in 1995, but not in 2009.

They want to use social networking effectively, like Obama did to perfection last year, which is understandable.  Unfortunately, RNC Chairman Michael Steele's blog was named 'What up?'.  It has, mercifully, been changed to 'Change the Game', which also isn't very good.  Someone should have realized that was not going to play well before it was launched.  Looking back, maybe we shouldn't have been surprised:

What up with that, RNC? In February, Steele promised an "off the hook" outreach to "urban-suburban hip-hop" settings: "We need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets," he said.

Then, in a section honoring the Great Republicans, called Heroes, of which an amazingly high percentage of were African-Americans from the 1800's, they decided to use the ridiculous term Ronaldus Magnus as part of a description of Ronald Reagan.  It has since disappeared from the website, but it was up long enough:

Our country has to decide, said Ronaldus Magnus, "whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether to abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives better than we can plan them ourselves."

On top of that, the person that Steele tapped to write the 'heroes' and 'accomplishment' sections was unnecessarily provocative and controversial.  A lot of Republicans are probably much more optimistic about 2010 and 2012 than they were earlier this year, but this is a bad sign for them.  This will likely be a minor problem in the long run, but indicates quite a bit of incompetence at the RNC right now.  Remember, there are much more complicated things coming up for the party than launching a website.