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Do young folk even care about "small government"?It was primarily young people's enthusiasm for Ron Paul in 2007 - 2008 that drove his campaign, platformed as it was on small government values. His campaign principles (and some of its messages) were then co-opted into the current-day Tea Party.
"Young people" -- as much as any over-generalized demographic can agree on anything -- seem to understand the value of small government, they just want a specific kind of small government: smaller military, less international presence, more infrastructure and social welfare (both at home and abroad).
> Dear Mr. Romney, you are pitching to the anti-Roosevelt faction of the country and it is rapidly shrinking.
Conservatism didn't suddenly appear in politics thirty years ago; it has been around, in this country, since before it was a country. In the colonial U.S., the conservatives of the time would have been called "Tories".
So while the demographics of modern conservatism might be mostly old white people, they'll either be replaced in a few years with idealistic young conservatives, or modern-day young liberals will slowly age into conservatism.
> If the GOP pushed an "innovation" platform...
...then it would no longer be the GOP. The GOP is not simply a group of people who like each-other and regularly meet to decide what they should have as a platform; it is the political realization of an idea, the idea of conservatism. You might as well say, "if the Democrats pushed a 'tax the poor, cut welfare, and abolish the estate tax platform'..."!
Conservatism exists for a good reason in society. It's there to act as society's "rudder", to (theoretically) keep it from evolving too rapidly and adopting too many stupid ideas. It can certainly be harmful when it gains a disproportionate amount of influence in a society, as in modern Afghanistan, but it is not inherently harmful -- and it shouldn't necessarily adopt aspects of a liberal platform.