RNC meltdown continues: on-line director quits

The bleeding continues at the RNC.  After new chair Michael Steele fired most of the staff, other key contributors have begun leaving on their own.  Last week it was finance chair Tim Chapman, and now the man in charge of all on-line operations has left — without any immediate prospects:

Arguably the most respected technocrat in the Republican Party, Cyrus Krohn is just the latest in a string of officials to resign from the RNC; last week, the RNC’s finance director quit. But because GOP Chairman Michael Steele made leveraging the Internet to attract voters to the Republican Party a top priority ina tech summit two weeks ago, Krohn’s departure comes as an especially heavy blow — not just to the RNC, but to the conservative blogosphere.

As Matt Lewis notes, though, this is really the most disturbing part of the story:

In an interview, Krohn said he’s moving back to Seattle with his family. He has no job lined up at the moment, he told The Post, but he’s thinking of running for office.

So he quit without having another job lined up?  In this economy?  Krohn had to be pretty desperate to leave, and Republicans have to ask themselves why.

In just four weeks, the RNC has shed almost all of its staff, and now suddenly finds itself without leadership on fundraising and on-line operations, two of the most critical efforts for the party in the next two years. It will take weeks, if not months, to find suitable replacements for the two and get them up to speed.  The GOP has lost continuity on two major fronts and now must rebuild from scratch on both.

These aren’t road bumps; they’re collapsed bridges to victory.

One source close to the situation acknowledges that the RNC needed to trim its staff, as it had been increased for the Coleman/Franken recount and the Chambliss run-off in Georgia, but that the terminations in February cut out the meat as well as the fat.  It takes a lot of people to handle all of the connections to state organizations, volunteer groups, and vendors, and it’s simply not getting done now.  What’s worse is that now we’ve lost the people who would hire the staff necessary for meeting those obligations, which means it will take a lot longer to recover.  How much time does the RNC have, anyway, before they fall hopelessly behind?

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