In regards to DougJ’s post about Michael Steele, the thing that cracks me up about the entire thing is this bizarre belief that the real problem with the current GOP is marketing failure. They simply don’t seem to understand that the public did not reject their packaging and messaging, they rejected their product. Not the other way around. George Bush was nothing if not a marketing success.
In fact, an argument could be made that they have managed to sell a deeply, deeply flawed product for years, and that only their successful marketing kept them in the game. See “death tax,” and “patriot act,” and “sanctity of marriage” and the whole host of clever terms and names that they have used to get their way. Did any of you notice anything either “compassionate” or “conservative” about the previous eight years? Now granted, smarter conservatives have figured all of this out, but being smarter conservatives, they are completely shut out of the debate.
To further illustrate my point at how successful they have been at marketing and branding, look at the number of issues in which the American people repeatedly have what would be considered left to hard left opinions, yet time and time again the right wing side of that opinion is presented as “centrist.” (* Update: How timely. Steve Benen has a post up about this just today). Ask the same people who provided the “liberal” response if they are “liberal,” and they shriek in horror and run. The Democratic party in the United States would most likely be a center-right party in virtually every country in Europe. Mr. Overton, your window is open again. At any rate, entire movies have been dedicated to this sort of thing at the Media Education Foundation, and Marc Crispin Miller and George Lakoff and the staff at Media Matters and other folks who follow this could talk for days about it, so there is no point for me to go on and on about this.
To reiterate, this notion that the real problem with the GOP is just a packaging problem is delusional. It is akin to the CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America deciding that their current fail should be blamed on a shitty looking wrapper. “Don’t worry shareholders- we have a brand new logo coming out.”
I have no idea why they think this, although perhaps they bought into the Clinton spin of “just words” from the primary, and honestly think they were just beaten by better marketing. To them, everything is “just words,” then you DWTFYW once you are elected. That certainly would explain their idiotic campaign in the fall, to include desire to win every news cycle at the expense of anything resembling a coherent message.
At any rate, far be it from me to tell my former party how to run itself, but let me suggest that if the GOP thinks that all they need to do is just re-brand themselves, they are crazier than even I thought they were. Considering they spent the last couple of weeks voting no against the stimulus bill before racing home to promote it in their states and districts, they might just be that dumb. “Look-see! We are the party of fiscal conservatism, and we voted against all this pork and wasteful spending. Which, by the way, will create 7500 jobs right here!”
But then again, you know what they say about going broke and estimates about the intelligence of the American people.
And there are all sorts of typos, errors in grammar, and other mistakes in this, and I am too lazy to fix any of them. Deal with it.
*** Update ***
And via the comments section at Eunomia, I see that as always, the Onion or the Daily Show was there first: