"rebranding"
Jeff Miller responded to my criticism of the Republican’s attempts to “rebrand” with:
This argument would be stronger if the Democrats hadn’t just won the White House through their own rebranding … flashy designs, facebook widgets, renaming welfare payments as tax cuts, and the like.
Really? You think that the closest thing we’ve had to an electoral blowout in decades was because of a few facebook widgets? It’s true that Obama’s campaign generally did a very good job at keeping itself on message—but I also think the American people had a pretty good grasp on what was at stake.
The Obama campaign did well in a few places where the McCain campaign failed—but ultimately it prevailed by having a coherent and appealing message.
The entire Obama campaign was an exercise in branding, from the Greek columns to the speech in Germany, to this stuff, to the slogans CHANGE and YES WE CAN, to the MyObama website, to Facebook groups, to the text messages, to the will.i.am videos, to the Oprah endorsements, to the half-hour infomercial, to the election night party in Grant Park … the entire campaign was a mastery of emotion and personality and worship of “the One.” All of this grandeur combined with the incompetence of the current administration and the current economic mess to give the Democrats their victory. Let’s not pretend that the Democrats did some sort of soul-searching in the last four years, or that they tossed aside parts of their party’s ideology that didn’t work, or that they came up with new and novel ideas. They didn’t do any of these things. They won on image and circumstance. So to expect more from the Republican party is to hold the Republicans to a higher standard, when in fact, both parties are perennial disappointments that occasionally know how to put on a show. And this year, the Democrats put on a better show.
