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By David Kiley

GOP to Detroit: Drop Dead

Democrats may have been the big victors on Election Day. But the Republicans still in charge in the White House and representing a possibly immovable minority in the Senate may keep the U.S. auto industry from getting the help it needs before Barack Obama is inaugurated as President in January.

To convince wary Republicans to go along with a rescue package, a House bill being crafted would give the government stock warrants, an equity stake in the automakers. It also has a provision that would put taxpayers at or near the head of the line for debt repayment when the companies recover.

Without at least $15 billion in loans, General Motors (GM), say insiders, could face bankruptcy next year. The total loan package sought by Democrats for automakers and their suppliers could be as high as $50 billion, a number floated by aides to President-elect Obama.

GM's CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr. said Thursday, Nov. 13, in an interview with Automotive News that he is willing to accept just about any condition on the loans he has heard expressed by political leaders. "Whether that's stock warrants, restrictions on executive compensation and golden parachutes, we've said we're very willing to accept those," Wagoner said. In announcing GM's fifth straight quarterly loss last week (BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/08), Wagoner said GM may run out of cash to operate before mid-2009.

Questions for the Auto Chiefs

Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli said Thursday that he doubted his company could survive without government loans. "It would be very difficult to make it through this unprecedented downturn" without help, he said at a conference in Palm Desert, Calif. At the same time, said Nardelli, the automaker "cannot assume we are going to get financial assistance" and may have to close two more assembly plants.

The House and Senate committees overseeing the financial-services industries have called hearings on Nov. 18-19 that will involve testimony from the CEOs of GM, Ford (F), and Chrysler, as well as other authorities from the auto industry. Last week, hearings were considered unnecessary. But there is so much mounting GOP opposition to auto industry loans that Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the chairmen of the House finance and Senate banking committees, respectively, changed course.

Questions for the group are expected to focus on the following:

• How did GM get to the point of near-bankruptcy?

• What kinds of guarantees can you offer Congress that your companies will be viable after a possible infusion of loans?

• How sure are you that you will be able to pay it back? How real is the threat of more than a million jobs going away if GM files for Chapter 11?

• Why are you so top-heavy in trucks and SUVs, when Toyota (TM) and Honda (HMC) are not?

• How specifically will you use the liquidity?

To GM and Chrysler:

• Will you use the money in 2009 to help achieve a merger of your two companies? If so, why is it necessary?

• Will you commit to significant restrictions on executive compensation as a condition of these loans?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As Republican leaders sift through the ruins of the 2008 election and debate the party's future at the Republican Governors Association meeting this week, one of the GOP's potential standard-bearers is instead on a Caribbean cruise.

But it isn't just any cruise and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney isn't just any Republican. Since the economy began its historic downturn six weeks ago, Romney's stock in his party appears to have skyrocketed.

The former business consultant and founder of Bain Capital handled economic issues during his campaign with an ease and confidence that seemed to elude Sen. John McCain. As the stock market tanked throughout the fall, a growing chorus of conservative pundits speculated Romney would have boosted the GOP ticket considerably more than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin did.

Now the onetime front-runner for the Republican nomination is schmoozing influential party insiders on the National Review's annual cruise -- a gathering of 700 conservative activists and the same forum where Palin wowed the movement's media elite last year, beginning her meteoric rise from obscure governor to vice presidential nominee.

But even as Romney publicly declares he has no intentions to run again, several former aides said they believe he will, and this week's get-together with leading conservatives is only the latest sign the man who spent more than $50 million of his own money to vie for the party's nomination last year is itching to do it again. Watch more on the GOP's rising stars »

After all, in many ways Romney's campaign for 2012 appeared to begin the instant he abandoned his primary bid in February. Instead of the conventional location befitting most losing candidates -- his home state, surrounded by friends and family -- Romney broke the news to grass-roots activists at a gathering in Washington.

The last-minute announcement was greeted with cries of surprise and was seen as a public attempt to bolster his standing with the key GOP voting bloc that largely broke former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's way through the first round of primary contests.

"There he was addressing the largest gathering every year of conservatives, and it was extremely symbolic in many ways," said Matt Lewis, a writer for the conservative Web site Townhall.com. "That's where he chose to say for the good of the movement he was going to get out. It was very well-received by most people, and he is now in a better position to garner more conservative support because of it."

After bowing out, Romney maintained a constant presence on the campaign trail and cable news circuit on McCain's behalf, signaling to political observers that he still harbored presidential ambitions, even after he was passed up for the No. 2 spot on the party's ticket.

Romney also has maintained close relationships with key supporters in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to party officials there, and could easily revive the infrastructure he built should he launch another bid.

If the economy continues to flail after four years of Democratic rule, Romney's economic acumen may be in demand when it comes to restoring GOP power to the White House.

"If the economy remains the dominant issue, there will certainly be a draft Romney movement, you can count on it," Lewis said.

Romney also may be positioned to attract a wider base of support than some of the other figures on the Republican bench, including the now-GOP rock star Palin and Huckabee, whose 2008 campaign outlasted Romney's. Both have shown the ability to generate excitement among base voters but appear to remain fairly unappealing to the more moderate faction of the party -- not to mention independent voters who are permitted to vote in some Republican primaries.

Al Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator who attended a summit of prominent conservatives in Virginia last week, said movement leaders continue to toss around Romney's name as they look to the future.

"People are going to have to compete for what will be the equivalent of several interviews with conservatives as to whether they fit the job description, and Romney would certainly be one of these contenders," Regnery said.

But even as the Romney drumbeat already can be heard in some corners of the party, it remains possible the former governor will face the same problems that hindered his 2008 campaign -- namely the perception he is overambitious and given to flip-flopping on issues for political expediency.

"Many conservatives never really trusted him," Regnery said. "A lot of people think he pretty much adjusted his message to meet the needs [of the base]. He's going to have to go back around and talk to the dinners and talk to the small groups and large groups and write op-eds with a fairly consistent message."

Steven Wayne, a professor of American government at Georgetown University, also noted that not holding elected office now makes it more difficult for Romney to stay relevant on the political scene.

"He's going to need some vehicle to stay in the public eye and comment on the economy and, if appropriate, be critical of the new Obama administration," Wayne said. "One of the problems that people who are not in elected office have is that they don't have a ready platform until you start running for office."

But should Romney decide on a second presidential run, he's likely to face a friendlier reception than his first go-around. The base may to be more convinced of Romney's conservative commitment if he's willing to take another stab at the presidency, activists say, and the Republican Party has a history of rewarding presidential candidates who have run at least once and lost.

"There is a tradition in the Republican Party -- you run first for the nomination and lose, and then you run and get it," Wayne said, pointing to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, former Sen. Bob Dole and McCain.

"Losing once is almost a badge of honor among Republicans."

Editor's note: Republican Leslie Sanchez was director of the Bush White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other." She was not a paid consultant to any 2008 candidate. Sanchez is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

Ever since John McCain and Howard Dean in 2000 showed the Internet's potential for fundraising, the question was always whether the Web could be effective at "GOTV," or getting-out-the-vote.

Among young voters at least, Barack Obama has proven that it can -- and, in the process, he's uncovered a major flaw that cuts to the core of the Republicans' approach to party organization and discipline.

Obama poured many of his campaign's millions into his social networking operations on the Web, which his campaign rightly saw as critical to building grassroots support and enthusiasm.

A community organizer by training, occupation and nature, Obama saw his databases for the potential they represented -- an army of supportive voices, a legion of potential volunteers, and a division of precinct captains.

Such is the world not just of Chicago ward organizations, but of politics everywhere.

The McCain campaign, reflecting the broader skepticism I've seen in the GOP about the Web, doubted whether the Internet could get voters out of their Barcaloungers (or, in the case of younger voters, off their futons) and into the polling booth.

Michael Palmer, McCain's Internet director during the primaries, told ABCNews.com last June that if Obama's online efforts "don't have an endgame political benefit, then they don't help you at the end of the day."

On Tuesday, Obama showed the Republicans the Internet's endgame.

On Facebook alone, Obama signed up 2.4 million users as supporters, compared with just 624,000 for McCain. A Facebook virtual ticker challenged users to actually go out to the polls, and clocked more than 1 million by noon on Election Day and 5 million by the time all the polls closed.

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University, the number of voters under 30 rose by 3.4 million compared with 2004.

About 66 percent of those voters supported Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. By contrast, the overall voting population gave Obama a much narrower margin of victory -- 53 percent to 46 percent.

In previous elections since 1976, according to CIRCLE, the percentage of young voters supporting the winning candidate varied by an average of only about 2 percentage points from the overall voting population.

At the least, young voters contributed to Obama's wins in North Carolina, Indiana, and Virginia.

When Mark Penn, then Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, chided Obama's supporters as "look(ing) like Facebook," he was right. While some of us over the age of 29 are just now mastering Twitter and Facebook, a UCLA survey of 272,000 college freshmen found that 86 percent spend "some time" each week on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Obama realized that the 70 million Americans on Facebook (the vast majority of them under the age of 30) have become accustomed to a Web experience that's interactive.

Web-based political social networking requires empowerment -- introducing well-trained, highly motivated local supporters to one another and then turning the campaign over to them.

McCain's official site included a social networking area, McCainSpace, but it was mostly an afterthought, competing for attention with messages from the candidate, campaign ads, issues summaries, photo galleries -- and of course the obligatory online donations and volunteer signups.

The Obama social networking site invited each new user to post a blog right away upon signing up. To the Obama Web team (which included one of the founders of Facebook), putting users in touch with one another was almost as important as putting the user in contact with the campaign.

Team Obama posted nearly 2,000 videos on YouTube, and the campaign contracted to build a text-messaging campaign that reached millions of voters geographically on their mobile phones. All told, it was a hefty viral marketing combination.

During the primaries, volunteers could sign in online, download a list of phone numbers and make calls from home to voters in the target states -- a virtual phone bank that other campaigns had to pay for.

Joe Trippi, the Democratic operative behind the Web-savvy Howard Dean campaign, was quoted in the New York Times noting Obama's progress: "We were like the Wright brothers," he said. Obama, on the other hand, "skipped Boeing, Mercury, Gemini -- they're Apollo 11, only four years later."

A college student and editor-in-chief of www.scoop08.com, Alexander Heffner, believes young voters were serious about voting this time around. "So many young people invested in him [Obama], unlike with Bill Clinton," Heffner told me.

The Obama campaign's use of the Internet will change campaign politics just as much as the fax machine and the autodialer did. If the GOP is going to compete in this growing tech world, they'll have to do more than just reverse-engineer the bells and whistles on Obama's Web sites.

They'll have to analyze Obama's entire approach to social networking -- a bottom-up, unruly approach that turns first-time voters into activists. That'll be easier said than done for a hierarchical organization that values order and discipline over all else (except, perhaps, seniority).

Nevertheless, if the GOP wants to compete on an even footing with the tech-savvy, social networking Obama-crats, they've got a real revolution ahead.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Republican Party faces a long list of problems with no clear national leader and an identity crisis that will play out during a period of good will for the first African-American elected president.

Barack Obama not only won a clear majority of the votes Tuesday night, but he won with a coalition that dramatically recolored the Electoral College map and creates an opportunity for Democrats to have the upper hand after a long period of Republican electoral dominance.

It is the combination of Obama's success among young voters and Latino voters that many Republican strategists see as particularly troubling to their party's long-term health.

"We learned from the Ronald Reagan years how generational support for a candidate can ripple through the demographics for years to come," said one leading GOP strategist close to the McCain campaign.

In other words, young voters who were attracted to Reagan in 1980 remained loyal to Republicans as they aged, providing the base on the party's presidential success over the past 25 years. Watch how Obama won in GOP country »

In digesting Obama's 67 percent to 31 percent edge over McCain among Latino voters, this strategist said, "We've got to get a handle on these voters before they turn completely. They have become increasingly the key to a number of critical swing states."

That assessment rang true as New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada were all carried by Obama on Tuesday.

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said a good deal of where the GOP goes from here depends on how President-elect Obama governs. Duncan drew historical analogies to when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton took office, in 1977 and 1993, respectively, in making the case that Obama might overstep his mandate.

"The success of his presidency will depend on his ability to force Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy to the center," Duncan said. "If he can't, well, we look forward to the mid-term elections. The last two times Democrats controlled the House, Senate and the presidency, they choked on the bone of responsibility. They lurched far to the left and introduced the country to President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Newt Gingrich."

In both cases, the GOP had leaders in waiting -- Reagan had come up short in a challenge to then-President Ford in 1976 and was a conservative favorite, and Gingrich emerged as a leading critic of Democratic policy during the Clinton administration from his perch in the House Republican leadership.

Five senior GOP strategists, when asked late Tuesday who they now view as their party's leader, had similar answers. Watch more on the GOP's next moves »

"No one," was the response of two. "Don't have one," said a third.

"Six or eight people think it is them, but no one else agrees," said a longtime party veteran.

"Damned if I know," said the fifth.

It will immediately be a subject of sharp debate. Watch what went wrong for McCain »

Conservative activists are meeting in Washington this week to debate the party's future. GOP governors will also meet for a post-election meeting in Miami next week that will involve a great deal of public and private soul-searching. iReport.com: McCain supporter speaks out

A number of prominent Republicans are vying for high profiles.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, despite her roller-coaster campaign performance, proved she has a populist and conservative base. Watch Palin discuss future plans »

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was an active campaigner for McCain and other GOP candidates after he dropped out of the Republican presidential race and has built up a loyal following.

Gingrich also plans to have a higher profile in the weeks and months ahead in promoting policy alternatives to the Obama administration.

As they studied the debris Wednesday, some Republicans took solace in the knowledge that it could have been worse.

Predictions of losing more than 30 House seats did not come true, and with a few races still up in the air, it appeared likely that Democratic Senate gains would fall shy of the 60 votes needed to cut off debate and prevent a filibuster from stalling key debates.

"I feel like Republicans dodged a bullet last night,' said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who said the climate now looked strikingly similar to the early days of the Clinton administration.

"After that election, Democrats held 57 Senate and 258 House seats," Ayres said. "Two years later, we took both houses back."