“Promoting The Republican Brand”: The GOP Should Just Embrace Being A Party Of The Past
Scientists believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth until their extinction 65 million years ago. The religious right believes dinosaurs were with us until six thousand years ago. They’re both wrong. Anybody who watched the Conservative Political Action Committee conference last weekend or the Republican Party for the last few years knows the giant reptiles are still with us.
On Monday, the Republican National Committee released its own research on voter attitudes towards the GOP. The RNC study reports that Americans see the party as “narrow minded” and full of “stuffy old men.” These are the RNC’s words, not mine.
The RNC report also states that the party has to find better ways of getting its message across to the public. This will be much easier to do than changing Republican policies that the public finds so disturbing: things like killing Medicare, opposition to attempts to curb violence against women, and protecting federal tax freebies for big oil.
Here are my ideas for promoting the Republican brand.
The Major League baseball season starts on April 1 and I’ve come up with a great promotional tie between MLB and the GOP. The Republican Party can sponsor “Turn Back the Clock” nights with each of the major league teams to demonstrate the party’s commitment to the past. Wouldn’t it be great to see Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell wearing the throw back rainbow uniforms of the 1970’s Houston Astros or the brown and yellow uniforms made unpopular by the San Diego Padres?
A new brand needs a new slogan and I’ve come up with some ideas. Since the GOP is hell-bent on driving away the voters they need to win, I thought I’d help them along. It’s the least I can do to put the party out of its misery. This is what I came up with.
Vote GOP to Turn Back the Clock: Republicans do fine with seniors, but the party is woefully inept with the fast growing population of millennials, voters born since 1982. A good example of the GOP’s problems is the growing support for gay marriage. ABC News and The Washington Post released a new national survey Monday showing that support for gay marriage is at a record high (58 percent favor-36 percent oppose). Ten years ago, a large majority of Americans opposed gay marriage. An overwhelming number of millennials support gay marriage and support for the idea will grow as these young people become a larger proportion of the electorate.
Only Real Men Vote Republican: The GOP research report indicates that voters feel that the Republican Party is full of “stuffy old men.” If the GOP doesn’t change, the only people who’ll vote for the party will be stuffy old men. Maybe that’s why it is known as the GOP for Grand Old Party. Former First Lady Laura Bush told an audience that the Republican Party “frightens” many women. Republicans love to talk about rape and a majority of the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives voted recently against the Violence against Women Act.
If you have any ideas to rebrand the GOP, feel free to comment here and send them to RNC chair Reince Priebus. The new RNC autopsy states that Republicans were far behind Democrats technologically. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, didn’t use email and Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, Stuart Spencer, refused to use Twitter. I don’t know if the GOP has email or Twitter yet. So you might want to send your ideas to the RNC via snail mail at 310 1st St. SE, Washington, DC 2003.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, March 21, 2013
“Just Another PDF File”: Back To The Drawing Board For The GOP, Again
The Republican’s “Growth & Opportunity Project” isn’t comprehensive enough. It’s a document filled with marketing and campaign tactics: improving messaging, appealing to minorities, building a data infrastructure, adjusting fundraising, and compressing the primary process. Don’t get me wrong, these are all good ideas, but what’s the long-term vision?
The tactical recommendations rest on a single-case: the mistakes that Mitt Romney made that lost him the presidency. What about how the GOP governs in Congress? How will representatives change their legislative behavior to reflect the new messages? Most importantly, how is the Republican National Committee going to get state and local party organizations to buy in?
Political parties are decentralized organizations. There’s no “top-down” command structure to enforce compliance, and even if there was, it takes a while for change to take root. The GOP only needs to look as far as how reorganizations play out in major corporations. They’re messy affairs that often lead to a lot of employee turnover. In decentralized organizations, there are no mechanisms to make change happen; the RNC can offer state and local parties incentives to tow the line, but incentives alone don’t work.
The party wants to start recruiting more women and minority candidates, but it’s going to be difficult for these candidates to get a seat at the table. Most races are not competitive: there are just a few open races with no incumbent running. Incumbents are hard to beat. They get reelected 90 percent of the time. Challengers could make some headway mounting primary fights, like the Tea Party did in 2010, but Republican leaders have been pretty clear: protect incumbents.
So if most incumbents stay in office, how is the GOP’s new messaging going to work? Conservative incumbents don’t have records that are friendly to minorities. It’s not just about changing the talk – you also have to change the walk. Provide a consistent narrative, otherwise you come across as a flip-flopper. And flip-flopping sinks campaigns. It certainly drowned John Kerry’s 2004 and Romney’s 2012 bids for the White House.
The GOP must go back to the drawing board and come back with something solid. Otherwise, the work they’ve done so far will be a wasted exercise — just a PDF file with a cool cover page filled with pretty circles and a white elephant.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, March 21, 2013
“Stuck With Each Other”: The Religious Right Can’t Get Away From The GOP, And The GOP Can’t Get Rid Of The Religious Right
Imagine you’re a religious right activist, used to being a serious player within the Republican party, the kind of person candidates court and party chieftains huddle with. You’ve done well at making sure that just about every politician in your party has the right position on your issues. You may not always get everything you want as quickly as you want, but you know that you don’t have to waste energy fighting rear-guard actions within the GOP.
But then bad things start to happen. We spend a couple of years talking about nothing but the economy and budgets, ignoring your favorite issues, and some in the party suggest that the real culture war isn’t your culture war, it’s an economic one. A couple of your favorite candidates get a little too candid with their views on rape, and end up losing at the polls, leading some influential strategists to suggest that the party needs to shift its focus away from your issues. Then one of your party’s senators comes out in support of same-sex marriage, and even though it’s only one senator, all the pundits agree that he won’t be the last, and it’s only a matter of time before your party abandons its insistence on “traditional” marriage entirely. Then some party bigwigs come out with a report on how the GOP can win future elections, and it says nothing about you and your issues. There’s talk about how libertarian the party should become and how it can appeal to minority groups, young people, and women, but all that makes you feel pretty left out.
As McKay Coppins reports, that’s leaving religious right activists more than a little peeved. But he puts his finger on a big reason that some in the party feel free to encourage a move in a leftward direction:
If Republican officials feel confident that they can soften the party’s stance on social issues without any real risk of losing their religious base, it may be because the Christian right hasn’t presented a united front in nearly a decade. Not since 2004, when Evangelicals swarmed to the ballot to support a marriage amendment in Ohio, and re-elect George W. Bush, have those voters managed to coalesce around a winning presidential candidate.
In the 2008 Republican primaries, they were split between a culture-warring Mitt Romney and the insurgent Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, and neither won. Then, in 2012, conservative Evangelicals vacillated between a bevy of Republican candidates, allowing the well-financed Mormon guy — who had dropped the social agenda rhetoric and was now just talking math — to navigate his way around them and grab hold of the nomination.
You can get a religious right leader to threaten that his people will stop voting unless they get what they want, but nobody believes that. There’s no question that the religious right is still a core part of the Republican coalition, but the problem they face is that national Republican leaders aren’t afraid of them anymore, or at least those leaders are less afraid of them than they are afraid of continuing to alienate young people and minorities.
That isn’t to say, though, that the religious right won’t continue to wield great influence. Just as they don’t have the ability to move en masse, the party leadership can’t just snap its fingers and change the party’s image. A national party is made up of thousands of people with their own agendas and ideas. Karl Rove can say, “No more Todd Akins,” but that doesn’t mean there won’t be more Todd Akins, spouting off retrograde ideas and getting lots of attention for them, because there probably will. Reince Priebus can say, “Let’s chill with the anti-gay stuff,” but that won’t stop Rick Santorum from running for president again if he wants to. The party can try to move away from the religious right, but the religious right is woven so tightly into the party at every level that it will be almost impossible to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 20, 2013
“The Stinch Of Formaldehyde”: GOP “Autopsy” Is Dead On Arrival
The Republican National Committee released its long-awaited post-2012 “autopsy” Monday, in the form of a 99-page report titled the “Growth and Opportunity Project.” Although the report pushes for some drastic changes in the way that the Republican Party conducts itself during elections, it ultimately fails to confront the primary problem: Its policies just aren’t popular with voters.
With the exception of a qualified push for immigration reform, the Growth and Opportunity Project centers around the idea that the Republican Party’s platform is sound, while the messaging is at fault. That comes as no surprise — it was RNC chairman Reince Priebus, after all, who recently declared “I don’t think our platform is the issue” — but this plan is startlingly divorced from the Republicans’ present reality. On nearly every issue facing Congress — from raising the minimum wage, to cutting federal programs, to strengthening gun safety laws, to fighting against climate change — most voters side with Democrats over Republicans.
Further complicating the RNC’s mission is the fact that the GOP has shown absolutely no signs of being ready to change the conduct that led to the party’s overwhelming losses in November.
For example, the Priebus plan notes that “if we are going to grow as a party, our policies and actions must take into account that the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty,” adding “The perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years. It is a major deficiency that must be addressed.”
Improving outreach to the poor seems like a great idea in theory. In practice, House Republicans are preparing to vote this week on Paul Ryan’s extremist “vision document,” which explicitly promises to slash funding for programs that help the needy in order to finance a massive tax break for the wealthy.
The report’s suggestion that Republicans “learn once again how to appeal to more people, including those who share some but not all of our conservative principles” seems like a no-brainer. But in reality, those people are called RINOs, and are almost automatically disqualified from national races. Priebus’ report can’t change that reality. Even while the autopsy suggests that “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” most of the GOP’s brightest stars spent the weekend at the insular Conservative Political Action Conference — to which popular governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bob McDonnell of Virginia were not invited, for the unforgivable crime of compromising with some of their states’ many Democrats.
In theory, the report’s suggestion that “if we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity,” makes perfect sense. In practice, the GOP seems to be going out of its way to antagonize minority voters; even as the autopsy suggests showing sincerity, the party continues to push for voter-suppression laws that nakedly attempt to keep minorities away from the polls. While the autopsy suggests that the GOP “must be inclusive and welcoming” to Hispanic-Americans, Senate Republicans are simultaneously gearing up for a racially-charged filibuster of Thomas Perez, the only Hispanic nominee for President Obama’s cabinet.
The report pushes the party to “establish a presence in African-American communities and at black organizations such as the NAACP,” but it seems to forget that Mitt Romney tried that in July. He ended up getting booed repeatedly for promising to repeal health care reform, and patronizingly claiming to be the best candidate for the black community.
“It all goes back to what our moms used to tell us: It’s not just what we say; it’s how we say it,” Priebus said of his report Monday morning. He is forgetting a more important factor: what they do. The Republicans’ problem isn’t that voters aren’t getting the message about the party’s policies; it’s that too many voters read the GOP loud and clear.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 19, 2013
“We’re The Anti-Party”: This Really IS The GOP Message
I have always loved the story of the ad makers and dog food manufacturers arguing around the conference table. The actual makers of the dog food were convinced their product was full of all the right nutrients, pretty food coloring, right combinations of everything possible. The ad makers were really impressed with their ad campaign, the logos, colors, not to mention the exciting TV ads. The sales force was everywhere, all over the marketplace.
So, the head of the company screamed out—”why is our dog food not selling.” A wise lone voice: “the dogs don’t like it, sir, they won’t eat it.”
What the RNC has just done with their “what went wrong in 2012” report is to ignore the fact that the public isn’t buying what they’re selling. They could point to advertising, they could point to their ground game and metrics, they could cry over changing demographics, they could condemn their polling samples, and they could criticize their process of debates and summer financial problems. They could even critique their candidate.
All that might be true—to a point. But the bottom line is this: the public didn’t like the dog food, they didn’t like what they were selling, they didn’t like the message. The Republican Party became captive to the extremists, and if you followed CPAC this weekend, it was all there in full force. From Donald Trump to Sarah Palin to Ann Coulter, this is not the path to a majority.
How can a party that is perceived as anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-middle class, ever hope to change the basic electoral dynamic by tinkering with process and techniques? The RNC has to deal with the fundamental problem: The Message. And they are ignoring that debate within the party. They have to fight it out. They have to decide who they are. They have to confront the divergent views and decide whether the Tea Party is dominant or a more reasoned, moderate view will take hold.
Can they moderate on gay marriage and issues like abortion and women’s health? Can they hold views that are pro-environment and truly confront climate change? Can they embrace real reform on immigration and stop focusing on bigger fences? Can they support a tax system that is fairer to the middle class and isn’t stacked toward the wealthy? Can they balance their approach to taxing and spending? Fundamentally, can they stop the incessant ranting against government and demonizing people?
As long as they are the “anti-party” they will be increasingly out of touch and represent the old, angry, white males—and there are fewer and fewer of them. It is all well and good that they try and get their tactics right but, like a turtle, they won’t make progress until they stick their necks out and have that battle for the soul of their party.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, March 19, 2013
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