As you all know, I have a favorite saying about how I love it when they eat their young. But the current iteration of the GOP that starts chomping on its own tail, and is now working its way around the circle.
Moscow Mitch McConnell went back to school today. He went back to Louisville to give a speech to the assembled college students. In that speech he actually came out and said that Corporate CEO’s should stay out of politics and mind their own business. Really? I don’t seem to remember you saying that back when you were pimping Trump’s $2 trillion cornucopia of tax goodies for corporations and the uber rich. You were begging for their support in putting pressure on the Democrats, and basking in the praise.
I wrote an article yesterday about how the GOP’s being stuck in the web of The Big Lie were forced to overreact to Trump’s loss, and start creating state legislative uber restrictive voting laws, based on a nonsensical big lie theory everybody knows was a lie. And then knee jerking and threatening the very corporations they so desperately need for donations with revocation of tax goodies that they had already given these companies. But when you look all the way down to the root of it, it all comes down to a matter of messaging, and the GOP has lost all control of the messaging.
For generations, the GOP was the undisputed master of political messaging. They were monolithic about, and their success came on two tiers. On tier one, every damn time the Democrats rolled out a proposal, the GOP, having already foreseen it, rolled out a masterful messaging campaign painting the proposal in a terrible light for voters. As a result, the Democrats ended up defending the proposal rather than selling the proposal. The ACA is the ultimate example, with Canadian healthcare, and Death Panels for Granny!
On tier two was GOP political advertising. The GOP’s political operatives in charge of political election messaging were absolute messaging savants. There isn’t a Democratic candidate of the last couple of generations who hasn’t wished that they couldn’t steal away just one GOP ad guru, if for no better reason than to keep from being savaged by their ads.
But that’s all over now. And it’s over for the simplest of reasons. Because the GOP has lost its monolithic messaging strategy, simply because the GOP isn’t monolithic anymore, it’s a scattered bunch of warring camps, with no clear vision forward.
Here’s what I mean. With the stunning 2015-2016 success of Trump as the ultimate outsider, he spawned an entire generation of down ballot, far right, media seeking, conspiracy theorists to run, and some of them won. Short circuited Robots like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan became the public face of the GOP, simply because they had no more desire to govern than Trump did, only to get on television as often as possible. And their messaging was not helpful to the larger GOP. Maybe the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but when the squeak ends up meaning that the entire brake system is shot, oil is the least of your worries.
In January of 2021, for the first time in decades, the Democrats kicked the GOP’s in messaging. Biden rolled out his American Relief Plan for Covid, and he did it right. He took the message national, going for bipartisanship, not on Capitol Hill, but nationwide. Ad GOP Governors and Mayors fell all over themselves to sign on. And since all politics is local, local GOP leaders praising the bill has helped to elevate both the bill’s, as well as Biden’s popularity.
And now he’s doing the same thing with the infrastructure bill. And it’s not like it was a secret or anything, the Democrats have telegraphed that infrastructure was next. And yet the GOP seems to have been caught completely flatfooted. Mitch McConnell made some lame ass speech from the floor of the Senate, saying that the bill was a trojan horse, a tax increase on job creators wrapped in some roads and bridges. That isn’t going to cut it when set against GOP Mayors and Governors drooling at the thoughts of tens of millions of government dollars flowing into their cities and states to fix crumbling infrastructure.
And for that second tier, the whole advertising thingy? That’s long gone in the wind. Democratic challengers no longer have to worry about withering attack ads from their opponents. Because all of the best GOP strategists are now working for independent conservative organizations, slashing and burning their way through Trump friendly GOP candidates and incumbents! But don’t take my word for it. Just think about the GOP national and statewide ads you saw in 2020. They were nothing short of pathetic. If the GOP truly wants to rise to power again, they’re going to have to stop getting their ads from community college advertising 101 classes.
Just as in advertising, when it comes to politics, Image is everything. And right now, the national image of the GOP is one of a bunch of asylum escapees running around with their hair on fire. And that image isn’t going to get any better, as long as the GOP continues to tie itself to Trump, you are only going to see more insaniac candidates running for, and possibly winning office. Yep, you had to know this was coming. God, I love it when they eat their young!
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You are dead right Murph. Image is everything.
So it’s not just ‘the national image of the GOP is one of a bunch of asylum escapees running around with their hair on fire.’ that matters. People see that as what one side is, and in contrast to that they can see the Democratic Party as a bunch of cheerfully competent people getting things done and changing the world for the better. (While not resisting the many chances to poke fun and ridicule the hapless Republicans while they do so. Witness Psaki’s daily evisceration of whichever RWNJ ‘journalist’ when they ask what they think is a ‘gotcha’ question that isn’t).
It’s the dramatic contrast of ‘the hair on fire’ inanities and insanities of the one side and the understated competence and capable abilities of the other. And the list of achievements is already greater in a few months than the previous guy’s entire term.
That’s what we elect governments for, to DO things.
Governments that do things to improve people’s lives get re-elected.
Much as I adore Jedi Master Psaki, how can you also not mention Secretary Buttgieg, who gets invited to Fox “News” even now and routinely collects scalps from the idiots who fail to trap him?
You are quite correct. Pete Buttgieg is a genius and no-one on the right have the brains to take him on.
It’s more that no-one on the right seems to have any brains at all.
Otherwise they wouldn’t be on the right.
Earlier today, hubby mentioned that the republican party is just falling apart. My reply was yeah, they’re all either idiots or crooks. Now they have no party line to sing. That, combined with the fact their unseemly underbelly was revealed by former guy, but they are not only sticking to that hateful routine, they are doubling down on it. Who would really vote for that, besides trumpies?
In the end, I was right in my comparison to Jimmy Carter vis-a-vis Trump in that the latter was the last gasp of Reaganism just as surely as the former was the last vestige of the New Deal coalition.
The major corporations and banks made out like bandits with the Trump tax cut. While Trump was selling his bullshit about them investing it in jobs, THEY were pretty upfront about their intent to instead use it to buy back stock, pumping up the value and cashing in on the profits of the higher share prices. Which is what happened. For anyone who hasn’t cashed in on the higher share prices (or stock splits) and added a boatload of money to their bank accounts, and who also cashed in pretty damned well during the past year to to the slush fund nature of last year’s big COVID relief bill that conservatives built in they knew the handwriting was on the wall long before election day. Trump was going to have a fight on his hands against Biden no matter what but it became all to apparent (and early on) how he was mismanaging the COVID response. Especially since as I noted there was that slush fund/corruption chunk of that first relief bill that corporate America lobbied for and got.
My point is that they hedged their bet and made sure they would be able to cash in on Trump’s economic policy fearing a Blue Wave and the repeal of that tax cut. It doesn’t claw back all the money they’ve already gotten. A LOT of money. It only affects them moving forward and they need the economy to get back on track as much as anyone. It’s not that they aren’t greedy assholes still, it’s just that sometimes they (or at least enough of them) realize that they’ve proverbially sliced the baloney too thin. If people either don’t have ANY money to spend on anything besides food, housing and transportation (and haven’t even been able to do that) or even if they have a bit extra are afraid to spend it then money stops flowing through the economy.
The bigwigs in corporate America HATE the idea of their taxes going up but I think maybe started not only accepting there was a good chance of it happening in the foreseeable future (which is now) but planning for it. Companies started cutting back on ad buys on “State TV) aka Fox News and responded more quickly than might have been expected to calls for boycots. And the speed with which some jumped on the state of Georgia was for me at least rather startling. Registered Republicans only make up about a third of the electorate, and even the lion’s share of them still will shop at certain places or buy certain products. Just like union workers in a men’s outerwear factory in my hometown who were all hard core union types at work but shopped at virulently anti-union Wal Mart (this was in the early 1980s) so will many conservatives still drink Coke, or fly on Delta etc.
Georgia Republicans already went after Delta and will probably smack Coca Cola around some too but neither company is going to feel much impact. However, by reacting so quickly and publicly and now with Mitch McConnell egging the GOP on to do more (and various states will do what Georgia did) the GOP’s new “screw you corporate America” is about as stoopid as it gets. The GOP lags badly in the individua donations fundraising game and the news of Trump’s scam won’t help them grow it anytime soon which means the GOP badly needs money from the folks they’ve always been able to count on.
Wouldn’t just love to be present for call or meeting between McConnell (or some other GOP honcho) doing the “ask” for a bigly huge PAC or Super PAC donation (or even just a piddling individual one straight to the candidate’s main re-election fund) only to hear the response: “Didn’t you tell people like me to stay out of politics? My answer is no.” And for good measure if they are having the discussion over a fancy dinner having that donor tell the waiter “Separate checks please!”
A quotation I’m rather fond of, from the sourcebook for the tabletop game Vampire The Requiem, sums up what Corporate America will likely tell the GQP: “Let me be clear. You can accept my offer now or later. You will like it much less later.”
After 40 long years the GOP is finally devolving, no longer ascendant. At long last.
It really can’t be overstated how losing the people who would go on to make the Lincoln Project hurt the GQP. Any incompetent leader can get by if their support staff is solid. And the Lincoln Project MIGHT have returned to the fold if the GQP hadn’t remained bound to Trump. To paraphrase the immortal (if always dying) Sean Bean in Goldeneye, good for Democrats, bad for them.
It’s worth noting also that the real problem with all the Trump wannabes is that, for all that “outsider” bull Trump and his cohorts kept pushing, Trump had more than 3 decades of a public face and had spent the better part of the 2010s as a grandstanding foil against Obama (which helped bolster his standing with the GOP’s teabagging racist base).
All these johnny-come-latelys, seeking to “capture Trump’s fire,” lack all of that. There’s no decades of history in the public eye as “successful entrepreneur” and “billionaire businessman” to build off of (Gaetz was only born in 1982 and Greene was born in 1974; for all his recent scummy behavior, Trump had far more magnetism than Jim Jordan could ever hope to have).
In other words, they’re the idiots from my age bracket still trying to be “somebody”. All that just strengthens my eventual conclusion that the truly powerful and influential do not advertise nor are the type any conspiracy theorist could ever find.
The GQP has shaken the box so many times and the real money people have really nothing to show for their inputs, and now, those scatter brains like “GYM”, Jordan, have prattled their wares to people that no longer care … the rush to grift from any money we spend on repairs to our country will HAVE to be blocked by earmarking to the work forces and educational fees to equip millions of jobs in green sustainable power and new roads and bridges … the flash of renewed optimism and REAL patriotic flag waving will completely stunt McConnell and other loud mouths like him …
Waking up the morning of July fourth this year will be an exciting prelude to glorious fireworks that evening …
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