Damaged Goods


Following three straight Congressional losses in formerly solid Republican districts in the Midwest and Deep South, the party leaders started to speak about the Republican tag as a damaged brand. A few of those party leaders will still whisper the name of the man who has done much of the damage, though most would rather call him old news, even though he still has five months at the top spot.

So what did the party leaders decide to do about the sad state of Republican affairs? Did anyone dare to suggest a change in direction, moving away, if ever so slightly, from the pro-war, pro-torture, pro-megarich, pro-megabusiness, anti-science, anti-regulation, anti-civil liberties, anti-union, anti-reason bend that the Republican party started to take three decades ago, which has brought the country to its extremely illogical conclusion? Are you kidding? Of course not! They decided that what the party needs is a new slogan.

I guess Support the Troops isn't working so well any more, maybe because the word coming back from the Iraq vets is that the stuff falling on their heads and sticking to their shoes isn't rain. Also, quite possibly the newspaper series about Walter Reed made clear the real meaning behind the stickers at the 2004 Republican Convention that confused a purple heart with a band-aid.

And what slogan did they pick? Seeing how well Obama is doing with his change thing, they decided to run with The Change You Deserve. I guess that fits, because if we as a country vote these folks back in, we will get what we deserve, and it won't be pretty. If fact, as ugly as the last seven-and-a-half years have been, it really can get uglier.

Why pick such a neutral slogan? Do the Republicans once again want to lower expectations? After all, if they promised change for the better in any way, some voters might expect some answers next time around when they didn't deliver. But whether the change you deserve is good change or bad change -- that's somewhere in the ear, and mind, of the listener. And if you think you deserve something good and your lawmaker thinks you don't, guess who wins!

Tough break for the Republicans, though -- that slogan's already taken, and it belongs to a megabusiness drug used to treat depression, which just shows that megabusiness minds think alike. In this megabusiness-friendly world the Republicans have created, megabusiness beat them to the punch with the bumper sticker slogan of the moment.

About three decades ago Ronnie Reagan turned the Republican party and the nation off the progressive route taken by FDR and into a new direction with his own bumper sticker slogan -- Government is the problem, not the solution. He hid his pro-megabusiness, anti-union agenda behind the slogan, but he also had a complete bill of goods to sell -- it he hadn't, he could hardly have made it to the oval office. The package he got the American public to buy could probably be distilled to a single phrase -- "You can have your cake and eat it too!" Now as we get closer to the reality of what the Reagan Republicans sold us, some people are figuring out that maybe you can't have that cake you've already eaten.

During the Bush 1 era, I spoke with a right-winger who told me he thought the FDA was so ineffective it should be abolished. At the time I thought his statement sounded too stupid to need a reply, but one lesson of the Bush 2 era is to never pass up the chance to answer the right-wing foolishness, because you never know when one of these clowns might find his way into the oval office. Before the U.S. government created the FDA, people died from problems with food and drugs. Now near the end of the Bush 2 era, people have again died from problems with food and drugs, as the Bush crew has loosened the regulations as much as they can. Who knows how many more would die if they could get their wish to end the FDA!

You see, Ronnie lied when he said government is the problem. He had a little joke, saying that he thought the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Personally, I thought "My name is Ronald Reagan and I'm your President" was a much scarier nine words, but as to Ronnie's little joke, in late August of 2005 no one in New Orleans thought that line was very funny -- in fact, many were literally dying to hear it. It turns out that maybe most Americans really want their government to be there to help them out in a major disaster. They just don't want that government run by a bunch of rich Republicans who don't care to help anyone with less than a million dollars, which, strangely enough, leaves out most of us.

8/12/08