The Democrats finished their product launch last night, and the networks even covered it in primetime this time. As with the detergents that first gave television’s soap operas their name, the packaging colors were bold reds, blues, and whites, and sheer repetition made it impossible not to get the message.
New. Improved. Stronger than Strong.
Was it a triumph of modern marketing? That depends, as ever, on whether the public is buying or not.
I’m not.
I think the framing is all wrong, and that the relentless Democratic drumbeat of militaristic jingoism is precisely the wrong framework for contesting George Bush in November.
Of course the Democrats have suffered for decades from GOP attacks on their party as being “soft”on defense, and their collective decision to fight fire with fire by appropriating Republican issues, imagery and language has never been more apparent than at this week’s tightly controlled and carefully scripted convention.
From the moment the delegates were called to order on Monday, the leadership drilled the message of strength, strength, and more strength into their (and our) brains so fiercely that at times it became absurd. Case in point: Rep. Louise Slaughter, on stage with 41 other members of the House Congressional Democratic Women’s Caucus announcing, “Senator Kerry, your troops have reported for duty!” Or General Wesley Clark’s weirdly cadenced “War. I’ve been there. Heard the thump of enemy mortars. Seen the tracers fly. Bled on the battlefield. Recovered in hospitals…”
So it came as no surprise when the presidential-product-of-the hour strode forcefully onto the stage at long last last night, promptly saluted, and announced that he too was ‘reporting for duty.” Nor that he immediately promised to ‘make America stronger at home,” soon proclaimed “We are a nation at war,” (I must have missed the constitutionally-required Congressional declaration?) and promised once again “I will never hesitate to use force when it is required.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being at war– particularly an ill-defined one and supposedly unending war, a ‘clash of civilizations” dating back to the Crusades and going forward, I’m told, for decades at least, if not centuries.
I’d prefer to be a “nation at peace” again, like we were one (Democrat) president and a mere four years ago — when we had few enemies, engaged for the right reasons in a limited police actions like Kosovo, had a booming economy, were actually talking about eliminating the entire federal deficit — and the worst thing anyone worried about was Monica Freakin’ Lewinsky!
And what I expect to hear from Democrats is a plan to wage peace, not war without end. At least, that’s what I expect to hear from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” as Howard Dean once admirably phrased it. Now even Dean seems to wish he had enlisted and fought in Vietnam, instead of dodging the battles to go skiing… Now it’s all upside down and standing in its head, and the Baby Boomers want to play boom-boom and transmogrify themselves into the “Greatest Generation, Part Deux.”
Dude, Where’s My Party?
How did it come to pass that thirty years on we’re still on Vietnam– only this time “our guy” is the one who volunteered to go over and kill Cong, and ‘their guy” is the one who did his best to duck out?
Marketing. Money. Mad Ave.
But the Democrats are trying to sell us a pig in a poke by trying to come off as something they’re not, something even they don’t believe in — and it will inevitably show. People aren’t stupid, the camera doesn’t lie (even when the politicians do) and sooner rather than later enough undecided ‘swing voters in the battleground (here we go again!) states’ will figure out that the message is phony and the detergent isn’t new or improved in any way. So why switch brands? By focusing on war, the Democrats (Republicrats?) will play right into the hands of their opponents, because when Americans think war, they think Republican.
Bottom line (politics being, like detergent sales, nothing if not a bottom line business) this whole week-long sales effort, this new-improved-red-white-and-blue-flag-waving-allegiance-pledging-stronger-than-strong product launch, may have been a huge and very expensive mistake. And, unless ‘externalities’ like the economy and Iraq go even further south in the next three months, it may well portend another Republican victory in November.
Correct me if I’m wrong — but wasn’t it Harry Truman who once said, “Given a choice between a Republican and a Republican, people will choose a Republican every time?”
