Is this The Onion? Is Slate staging some sort of high-minded comedic prank by letting their guest conservative writers become charicatures of exactly what they are trying to address?

Hilarious Irony aside, you blogging heads are inadvertantly pinpointing the exact problem with Republicanism right now - the party has focused way too much on how to market their policies, and has ignored the actual substance and content thereoff.

Instead of thinking about "how do we sell this hooey to voters?" maybe you should think about upgrading your product. Message management is all well and good, but when the message and the product become one-and-the-same, thats when you know you have a problem.

Joe the Plumber, vis-a-vis Sarah Palin, best encapsulates this. Now Joe himself was clearly just a know-nothing human symbol, plucked by the McCain campaign to try and represent the "real americans" that they were fighting for. But you compare his presence in the campaign and his reasons for being there to Palin's, and man, its one and the same.

The republicans didn't offer any solutions this election. They tried to run on a platform of change, which meant running on a platform that was nearly identical to Bush's, but under the title of "maverick." Americans do love some good advertising, but c'mon, we've got to get something similar to what is advertised.

Only when you folks figure out the disconnect between creating policy and selling policy, will the republicans win again.

Until then, be my guest to keep fighting amongst yourselves like infants.

jwschmidt:

Is this The Onion? Is Slate staging some sort of high-minded comedic prank by letting their guest conservative writers become charicatures of exactly what they are trying to address?

Hilarious Irony aside, you blogging heads are inadvertantly pinpointing the exact problem with Republicanism right now - the party has focused way too much on how to market their policies, and has ignored the actual substance and content thereoff.

Instead of thinking about "how do we sell this hooey to voters?" maybe you should think about upgrading your product. Message management is all well and good, but when the message and the product become one-and-the-same, thats when you know you have a problem.

Joe the Plumber, vis-a-vis Sarah Palin, best encapsulates this. Now Joe himself was clearly just a know-nothing human symbol, plucked by the McCain campaign to try and represent the "real americans" that they were fighting for. But you compare his presence in the campaign and his reasons for being there to Palin's, and man, its one and the same.

The republicans didn't offer any solutions this election. They tried to run on a platform of change, which meant running on a platform that was nearly identical to Bush's, but under the title of "maverick." Americans do love some good advertising, but c'mon, we've got to get something similar to what is advertised.

Only when you folks figure out the disconnect between creating policy and selling policy, will the republicans win again.

Until then, be my guest to keep fighting amongst yourselves like infants.

Thank you for the best, most sensible post I've read in a long time! BRAVO!

Focusing on the form of the message and not the content is what political types usually do after losing. People get into politics because they want to implement policies, not create them. President-elect Obama got into this do something, not because he wanted to be a messenger. If Obama had lost, Slate would undoubtedly be doing the same thing with Democrats and the discussion would still end up focusing on failures to get the message out.

I‘ve had some experience on that side of things. I was a Jimmy Carter volunteer in 1980. Post-election post-mortem discussions then had the same tone: the consensus was that we did not get our message out clearly. My suggestion that maybe we got our message out too clearly and the voters did not like it was not appreciated.

My favorite aspect is the assertion that the USA is still a conservative nation. It is not, regardless of how people self-identify. People want the government services, and they want a solution to the health care problem. So far, Americans have managed to let the Chinese pick up the bill. That's ending.

Democrats no longer represent every special interest out for their own piece. Instead, they are now the party of fiscal management and prudence. I firmly believe that what people demand, more than anything, is competence and growth. So, for the Republicans, they are screwed until the Dems make a mistake. That might take a while.

As an aside, nothing makes me laugh harder than Republicans talking about abortion. It must be very hard for right-to-lifers to realize, but this issue that they feel so strongly about is one that nobody else cares about. Or at least, not one that they care about more than keeping their jobs.

Eventually, this revolution (and it is the beginning of a real change) will consume itself, as all do and as Reagan's did. Until then, the only way for a Republican to win is to run as a more competent Democrat, just as Clinton did the reverse. For the health of America's democracy, I hope that's the case. But it won't happen quickly: after Carter's defeat, the next Dem nominee was Mondale. And then Dukakis.

I am absolutely pro-choice but I think you should respect other people's values and definitely not laugh about them. This does not mean that you have to give up your position. You might point out to them that making abortion illegal in all probability will increase the number of abortions. And you might very well challenge them that imposing their values on everybody else is not acceptable.

I also wonder if you should restrict the political competition to Democrat vs. Me-too Republicanism. It violates my sense of fairness for everybody being able to engage in the political process with some measure of chance to at least get part of the agenda realized. The problem with the conservatives of today is that "my way or the highway" attitude that indeed cracks up this discussion on Conservative Crack-Up.

Finally, I have some doubts about your prediction: As much as I hope that this Republican Party never gets hands on the lever again, the mess they left is so big that the Obama administration won't be able to clear it up quick enough. And as I wrote in an earlier post: Elections mostly are not won by the incoming crowd, they are lost by the outgoing.