Last night I braved the Red Sox traffic to attend an event at a private home in Brookline. Greg Marglin of JR Telegraph had organized a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition which was attended by new Party Chairman Peter Torklidsen who was to be questioned by the crowd.

Being chair of the Republican Party in Massachusetts is no easy task, and Torkildsen certainly has a serious job ahead of him. What he outlined sounds more or less like rebuilding the party from scratch, which is probably what's needed so that we actually have a two party state once again, and that's going to require everything from the nitty-gritty of supporting and encouraging local Republican groups and their recruiting efforts to finding ways of reshaping the Republican image.

We just had an election in which a guy (Deval Patrick) was elected who studiously avoided getting into the specifics on any of the issues, and who, when his own positions were compared to the electorate, it showed that they shouldn't be voting for him on the specifics. Yet he won, and he won because voting for him made people feel good. Patrick is a minority, articulate, has an interesting life story...and people voted for him in spite of the details. They may live to regret that vote -- many undoubtedly are, considering his early gaffs -- but nevertheless...

It all shows to me that the Massachusetts voting mind-set (and not just Mass., but that's what we're talking about here) is ruled to a great extent by form over substance. People use their vote, as with so much else in life, in a way to make themselves feel good.

The question then is, how does the Republican Party, which certainly doesn't have a feel-good image in Massachusetts, ride this? I remember when I first got into blogging and exploring the blogosphere I really enjoyed finding blogs by gay conservatives, Jewish conservatives, Black conservatives...it changed the image of the word "conservative" in my mind...it gave this long-time "liberal" permission to switch and provided an internal comfort zone.

So my ears pricked up when I heard Peter start talking about local events like a "river cleanup day" sponsored by a local Republican group. This is the kind of little thing that has a big effect in a marketing and image sense, that will give some fence-sitters who don't want to feel "mean" by voting for Republicans the internal permission to do so.

One of the more interesting moments (to me) came when I passed on this question from Tom at Libertarian Leanings who couldn't be there himself:

Peter immediately started to smile when I began reading the above to him, obviously remembering the events quite well and only correcting the fact that it had happened during his first term, so he in fact won one more and thought it might have in fact helped him. He says he still has the letter, on White House stationary, somewhere in a pile of boxes from around 1994.

I said if he ever gets a chance to spend some time and go fishing for that letter, the blogosphere would love to see it. It's probably as relevant and interesting now as it was over ten years ago, and in this age where the thing could be shared widely it would likely have an impact all over again. The more things change...