Brand X

Eric Cantor and John Boehner and the Republican congressional caucus aren't desperate to refurbish their brand just because they want to make a successful endeavor more snappy and perky. No, their brand is seriously tarnished and absolutely toxic to large swathes of the population. Old white people, not so much, southern reactionaries and religionist lunatics... they're fine with the GOP brand. But young people, women, African-Americans, intellectuals, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, people with triple-digit-IQs... those groups aren't buying the reactionary policies of Greed and Selfishness tempered and popularized with Hatred and Bigotry. That's what people-- other than Southern whites-- hate about the GOP. And the rebranding effort isn't going anywhere near any of that. Which is why it will fail and fail dismally.

Ever buy a pair of shoes from Toms? The way they've branded their stores is with a simple statement on top of their website: "With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One." They have vegan shoes and they have an interesting and unique story and their branding isn't like anyone else's. They just opened a flagship store at 1344 Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice. You could have a problem recognizing it as a retail space, although Blake Mycoskie's shoes and eyewear are on sale there. It's designed like a living room and that's what it feels like. There's a cafe with stuff from Pressed Juicery, Valerie Confections and Cafecito Organico. They offer craft classes and screenings, extended hours and do everything they can to make you want to hang out there. That's not how Cantor and Boehner are going about building their tattered brand.

The clowns on Morning Joe-- and in the Beltway media generally-- may present Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan as "policy wonks," but these are grubby political hacks and well-paid shills for the corporations who underwrite their very lucrative careers. More discerning observers than the Morning Joe crew might even present Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and their ilk as obvious criminal types who manage to stay out of prison because they and their kind write the laws defining bribery, corruption and graft.

Cantor's task Tuesday was to somehow make his party sound less conservative while extolling the virtues of conservative policies. He's wasn't very convincing. I don't think it made anyone who voted for Obama two months ago want to go back in time and recast their vote for Mitt Romney. I don't think hearing Cantor's speech would have saved the House seats lost by Allen West, Joe Walsh, Frank Guinta, Ann Marie Buerkle, David Rivera, Dan Lungren, Brian Bilbray, Chip Cravaack, Charlie Bass, Marie Bono Mack, Nan Hayworth, Quico Conseco, Roscoe Bartlett, Robert Dold, Judy Biggert and Bobby Schilling. And I don't think if Cantor had only made the speech on November 1, we'd now have a Senator Todd Akin, a Senator Richard Mourdock, a Senator Tommy Thompson, a Senator Connie Mack, a Senator Scott Brown, a Senator Rick Berg, a Senator George Allen, a Senator Josh Mandel, a Senator Pete Hoekstra, a Senator Linda McMahon, a Senator Linda Lingle, a Senator Denny Rehberg, nor Senators Charles Summers, Wendy Long, Heather Wilson, Tom Smith, John Raese, and Joe Kyrillos. And Orrin Hatch's 65% win wouldn't have swelled, nor would have John Barrasso's 76% win nor Confederate crackpot Ted Cruz's 56% victory.

It's now a net negative for a politician to be endorsed by the NRA. The latest polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Americans support a pathway to citizenship the GOP was fighting and labeling "extremist" even while Cantor was making his speech. And it's not just Democrats who favor what reactionary Judiciary Committee chairman Goodlatte called "extreme" Tuesday. 53% of moderates, 52% of independents and even 45% of self-described conservatives and 42% of admitted Republicans prefer comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship. But those Republicans-- let alone the moderates and independents-- are not part of Eric Cantor's and John Boehner's dysfunctional House caucus. These are the people catering to the Southern Know Nothings and racists who want to deport 11 million Hispanics living in the U.S. And Cantor was trying to soften the GOP image while keeping those people happy.

At it's heart-- for lack of a better word-- the Republican Party is really about reducing or eliminating regulations for Big Business, low or no taxes for corporations and the very wealthy and an end to public services for the middle and working class. This agenda has never been all that popular among normal people-- so they've made a deal with the devil and added in all the racism, religious bullshit, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia, etc. It's a tactic as old as the political right itself is. There is no other way to get that toxic agenda supported in a democracy. Cantor attempted the impossible-- making Republicans look less Republican without offending a base that has been brainwashed and empowered by Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. Steve Benen found his rhetoric inconsistent with reality. He took discredited right wing ideas, "stuck them in the microwave for a minute, and tried to pretend he'd prepared a fresh meal. Cantor still wants to repeal 'Obamacare,' fund private school vouchers, and encourage colleges to 'provide prospective students with reliable information on the unemployment rate and potential earnings by major'."

At its core, the Republican agenda is still the Republican agenda. Slightly different packaging is irrelevant, and the fact that Cantor's speech was so thin reinforces the perception that the party isn't really prepared to change much of any thing, their recent defeats notwithstanding.

Cantor seems to realize that another "government is evil" speech is pointless-- for all the assumptions about the "center-right nation," he realizes that the American mainstream sees a role for a healthy public sector that promotes the general welfare. But the problem with this latest rebranding campaign is that Cantor wants to present a Republican agenda that will "benefit families across the nation," but he can't fill in the blanks.

There's a reason for this, which the right generally prefers not to admit: conservatism isn't an effective governing philosophy when it comes to using government to make a positive material difference in the lives of working families. Cantor spent 45 minutes trying to jam a square peg into a round hole, and it was ultimately unsatisfying because his pitch lacked any kind of persuasive depth.

Tweaking the tone is not going to do it for 'em and until they start backing away from policies that are unpopular with ordinary working families, they're stuck with the crazy base which is demanding policies that are even more hated than the GOP core values. Think Progress offered 8 salient examples of how Cantor served up a new GOP that is exactly the same as the discredited old GOP.

1. SCHOOL FUNDING: “Imagine if we were to try and move in this direction with federal funding. Allow the money we currently spend to actually follow individual children. Students, including those without a lot of money or those with special needs, would be able to access the best available school, not just the failing school they are assigned to.” This is a redux of Mitt Romney’s school funding plan, which while a decent idea in theory, wouldn’t be possible alongside the House GOP budget’s call for $2.7 billion in cuts to spending for disadvantaged students. As The Nation’s Dana Goldstein explained, this plan calls for shuffling funding “without guaranteeing the federal funding or regulatory support necessary to ensure quality.”

2. HIGHER EDUCATION: “Over the course of this Congress, we will also work to reform our student aid process to give students a financial incentive to finish their studies sooner. We will encourage entrepreneurship in higher education, including for-profit schools.” The House Republican budget would eliminate Pell Grants for more than one million students. Many for-profit schools, meanwhile, take huge amounts of taxpayer money while leaving students burdened with debt and facing bleak job prospects. Their focus is corporate profitability, not education, and they use aggressive marketing tactics to target vulnerable students.

3. WORKING MOTHERS: “Federal laws dating back to the 1930s make it harder for parents who hold hourly jobs to balance the demands of work and home. An hourly employee cannot convert previous overtime into future comp-time or flex-time…Imagine if we simply chose to give all employees and employers this option. A working mom could work overtime this month and use it as time off next month without having to worry about whether she’ll be able to take home enough money to pay the rent.” Cantor’s proposal would do far less good than simply ensuring that all workers have access to paid sick leave and paid maternity leave. The U.S. is currently the only developed country with no paid sick leave policy and one of just three without required paid maternity leave.

4. TAX REFORM: “Loopholes and gimmicks benefitting those who’ve come to know how to work the system in Washington, are no more defensible than the path of wasteful and irresponsible spending we’ve been on for decades. Working families should come first. Everyone agrees a fairer, simpler tax code would give us all more time.” Republicans pay lots of lip service to tax reform, but want to raise no new revenues through the closing of loopholes and deductions, despite the fact that the deficit reduction implemented since 2011 has come overwhelmingly via spending cuts.

5. IMMIGRATION: “It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home…. I’m pleased that many of my colleagues in both chambers of Congress on both sides of the aisle have begun work in good faith to address these issues.” Republicans have embraced immigration reform after losing the Hispanic vote in the 2012 election. In 2010, Cantor and 160 other Republicans voted against the DREAM Act, a measure that “would offer a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people who attend college or serve in the military.”

6. OBAMACARE: “The new medical device tax in ObamaCare makes it harder for researchers to develop these innovative devices in the U.S….ObamaCare has unnecessarily raised the costs of our health care. “ A tax on the medical devise industry-- which will benefit from health care reform-- will help fund coverage expansion, without undermining innovation. As the Center For Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) points out the tax “does not apply to eyeglasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, or any other medical device that the public generally buys at retail for individual use.” It would also have minimal impact on innovation since “tax rate is just one of the many factors affecting financial incentives.” The Affordable Care Act has had a very small effect on current premiums.

7. MEDICARE: “We should begin by ending the arbitrary division between Part A, the hospital program, and Part B, the doctor services. We can create reasonable and predictable levels of out-of-pocket expenses without forcing seniors to rely on Medigap plans…. “ President Obama has included many of these efficiency reforms in his budgets-- but the GOP’s proposal move far beyond increasing program efficiency. Cantor and almost all Republicans support transforming Medicare into a voucher or premium-support program that will shift health costs to seniors without reducing overall health care spending.

8. MEDICAID: “We can provide states more flexibility with respect to Medicaid that will allow them to provide better care for low-income families in a way that ultimately lowers costs… And we must make it faster and simpler for states to gain approval of federal waivers to modify their Medicaid programs.” Democrats support increasing state flexibility in the Medicaid program, though Republicans-- and Cantor himself-- have voted to slash federal funding for Medicaid by 1/3 and shift some of the burden of Medicaid’s growing costs to the states. As a result, states could reduce enrollment by more than 14 million people, or almost 20 percent-- even if they are were able to slow the growth in health care costs substantially.

Despite Cantor's Lame Attempts At Rebranding His Decrepit Party, The GOP Wars Against Women And Against Hispanic Rage On

Yesterday, Cantor made a much-heralded speech trying to repackage the Republican Party's toxic agenda in bright, shiny wrapping paper. He failed miserably as the reality of the GOP War Against Women and War Against Hispanics came home to roost. No one wants Cantor's shilly-shallying bullshit while Republicans in the Senate vote against women, Republican leaders in the House refuse to allow a vote at all in fear that the Violence Against Women Act will pass, and the highest ranking Republican in America, John Boehner, announces that even if he's OK with letting some Hispanics and Asians stay in America, he's opposed to a-- any-- path to citizenship! How's that for a day of rebranding?

Monday, 8 Republican Senators tried to stop the Senate from even taking up the Violence Against Women Act again. 85 senators voted against them and their anti-women bigotry. The right-wing extremist die-hards?

• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Mike Johanns (R-NE)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)

The GOP idea of a Violence Against Women act is to arm everyone with an assault rifle. That isn't going over very well. When mainstream conservative Steve LaTourette of Ohio was in Congress until a few weeks ago he had an "A" rating from the NRA. Now he's the president of the conservative Main Street Partnership and he's warning his former House colleagues that they're blowing it with women. “I think the Republican Party, at its peril, is seen as in the pocket of the NRA and not willing to engage in the conversation. We haven’t fixed our problem as a party with women. And women don’t quite understand why the Republican Party, in my opinion, is so resistant to doing what the Supreme Court said in the Heller decision … that yes, the Second Amendment is an individual right that needs to be protected just like the right to free speech and the right to have a jury trial but you can have reasonable regulations upon that right... To just say, ‘No, we’re not even going to have a conversation,’ that’s a perception [the GOP] shouldn’t have." But they do.

Even before Cantor dragged his ass up on stage to try the fatuous repackaging job, anti-Hispanic bigot Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Boehner's pick to head the Judiciary Committee convened the first hearing since President Obama asked Congress to get serious about comprehensive immigration reform. Virtually all Goodlatte did was find a bunch of racist pigs as "expert witnesses" to testify against reform. Goodlatte is vociferously opposed to a path to citizenship and he doesn't want to hear from witnesses who disagree. Among his "experts" are Jessica Vaughan, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing anti-immigrant hate group, notorious racist Julie Myers Wood, who failed miserably as Bush's head of ICE, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, who insists that there is no need for more working visas, and the lunatic fringe head of Immigration Customs Enforcement, Christopher Crane, who's busy suing President Obama for not deporting enough Hispanics. Goodlatte told the Washington Post's Greg Sargent that, basically, what we’re debating here is “some kind of legal status,” and a chance at “being a fuller part of our society.” Translation: Only second class legal status will be acceptable to House Republicans.

Cantor, meanwhile, said this morning that he thinks Marco Rubio’s plan (which contains a path to citizenship, contingent on strict enforcement triggers) is “the right direction,” but he stopped short of endorsing that path. (Curiously, this comes on the same day that Cantor is set to give a speech “softening” the GOP’s image, something which has suffered in no small part from its immigration policies.)

Raul Grijalva, on MSNBC with Melissa Harris-Perry helped explain why some Republicans are sniffing around the margins of mainstream policy on immigration reform: "Frankly, the beating the Republicans took in this last election in the Latino community, and in the Asian community as well, is the barometer of the future, and they know it. And so whether it’s by heartfelt instinct that my Republican colleagues are coming to the issue of comprehensive immigration reform or expediency-- political expediency-- I really don’t care. This is a chance to do something that’s right, and it’s been a long time coming. Much sacrifice, much frustration, much heartache in our communities. Immigration is not the only issue for Latinos, but it became the moral compass in this last election.”

Republicans Trying To Figure Out How To Expand Their Collapsing Whites-Only Pup Tent

With the GOP continuing to fracture along ideological lines-- just today Mike Huckabee followed Jeb Bush, Jr in endorsing radical right insurgent Marco Rubio against the Republican Establishment's pick, Charlie Crist, in the race for the open US Senate seat-- Republicans are wondering how to persuade voters that the party is on the mend and not some hothouse dominated by right-wing extremists with contempt for mainstream sensibilities.

Republican Party propagandist Tucker Carlson, who became a Fox News consultant last week, thinks the way to turn things around for his floundering party is to start a right-wing version of the Huffington Post. He's calling it The DailyCaller and its purpose will be to make Fox and Hate Talk Radio seem almost mainstream in comparison to the incendiary, hysterical anti-Obama jihad that will be its hallmark. Doesn't sound likely to expand the tent? No one else thinks so either. And isn't David Frum already failing at his attempt to do the same thing?

This morning's CQPolitics reports on another initiative, this one by Republican Party operative Douglas Holtz-Eakin who wants to start another right-wing think tank. Right wing think tanks have been very successful, financially, for the folks that wind up being underwritten by them. Holtz-Eakin says his new one would be modeled on the progressive think tank Center For American Progress. His mission is to keep the base from shrinking any further, to appeal to more diverse groups, and to see if they can find anyone on the right who has any new ideas that might appeal to the mainstream.

“I think there is now pretty widespread recognition that the Republican Party needs to become demographically broader, more welcoming of different ideas,” said Holtz-Eakin, who ran the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005. “And it’s time to think strategically about how to appeal more broadly outside the South.”

...The irony, of course, is that the Center for American Progress itself was developed as a liberal answer to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been a source of Republican policy ideas for decades. But Holtz-Eakin says established think tanks of the right, like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute, were “not helpful” during the McCain campaign because they weren’t politically engaged or innovative in their media strategies.

It sounds something like what Eric Cantor, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and a bunch of other tired old right-wing politicians tried to launch in a Virginia pizza parlor a few weeks ago, the so-called National Council for a New America. After Rush Limbaugh denounced it, it kind of ground to a halt and disappeared without a trace. But where Cantor and his clique was just regurgitating tired old right-wing talking points in a pizzeria, Holtz-Eakin wants to broaden the Republican message so that it will have some relevance to people who aren't members of whites-only country clubs. Ex-Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) thinks its hopeless, at least for now, because the base is so far to the right and close to clinically insane, that it isn't open to anything short of domestic terrorism. “I think the grass roots right now is in an ornery mood-- ‘we are who we are.’” And no one wants to get anywhere near to who they are. "Ornery" isn't nearly as descriptive as "ugly."

Holtz-Eakin thinks the way to go is to "apply conservative principles in innovative fashion and develop solutions on issues that haven’t been a priority for Republicans." One of the darlings of his "movement" is clueless and over-hyped Wisconsin reactionary, Paul Ryan who came up with the Republican Party's "innovative and alternative" health care plan. Ryan's plans-- like Ryan's alternative budget of a few months ago-- have met with dersion and scorn from all sides.

The conservative TV pontiffs and their print counterparts, including The Wall Journal editorial page, are saying all hail the free market alternative to the Democrats government takeover of our uniquely American healthcare system. The Republicans are eager to admit that the current system is broken, but reform should not destroy it. After all, for those that can afford it or get unlimited care from the government or their employers, the care is the best in the world.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Patients' Choice Act” is a thinly masked rehash of "McCain Healthcare: An Evil Play on Words." Both the Ryan and Senator McCain plans depend on the states, out of the goodness of their hearts, to provide “guaranteed access.” Neither plan actually forces private insurance companies to eliminate medical underwriting, nor provides for enforceable state high risk pools or for a government plan to insure the people a private insurer rejects.

Ryan’s “Patients' Choice Act Q&As” helps us dissect the illusion of guaranteed access. Guaranteed access was never intended to be confused with or imply guaranteed issue. First, consistent with McCain, Ryan would move the tax advantage from employers to employees and individuals. Next, the same type of voluntary insurance exchanges would be regulated at the state level, as would any high risk pools. Each state would act as a laboratory of innovation in cost control and adverse risk redistribution amongst private carriers.

...The Ryan plan actually offers nothing concrete. Just the dream that states might want to reform health insurance on their own. Many decades of experience has already proved Ryan wrong.

Greg Sargent points to another dynamic frustrating the Republicans who are attempting to move away from the Limbaugh-Cheney-Gingrich GOP model of extremism and mindless obstructionism-- the far right's shocking reaction to President Obama's nomination of a respected moderate woman judge to the Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor was nominated only 24 hours ago, but a familiar pattern is already visible: The overheated conservative reaction to the pick is likely to further complicate the GOP’s efforts to shake off its image as intolerant, backward-looking, harshly obstructionist, and captive to extreme elements.

While some Republicans, particularly those who will have to face the voters next year, are starting to get cold feet about the disgusting smear campaign against Sonia Sotomayor, the shriveling GOP base hasn't gotten the new talking points yet and they're marching off to war-- against America. This kind of response from Tom Fitton, head of an extremist Republican Party front group, Judicial Watch, is what makes Americans mistrustful of the GOP.

David Shuster: "What evidence do you have that she would put her feelings and politics above the rule of law?"

Tom Fitton: "Because President Obama chose her."

As Christy Hardin Smith pointed out, "Taaaa daaaaaaaaaah; She was nominated by a Democratic President. Ergo, she must be unacceptable without any factual foundation as to why." That's the GOP mindset and no amount of Paul Ryan budgets without numbers or recycled plans to kill health care reform and no number of pizza parlor media opportunities with Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush will change what Americans have come to see in the Republican Party-- and hear from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and extremist members of Congress like the 3 crazy Jims (Inhofe, Bunning and DeMint) every single day. Watch the GOP mindset in action:

Republican Rebranding Effort-- Taking Over the Democratic Party?

Everyone agrees that the GOP needs a new image

A gaggle of Republican would-be leaders-- from Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor to Stormy Daniels-- are launching listening tours to figure out what voters want. While Stormy stumped in her native Louisiana to gage the dissatisfaction with obstructionist fanatic David Diapers Vitter, the others ate some pizza. "Fewer than 35 percent of white voters said they will definitely vote to re-elect Vitter; 39 percent said they would consider someone else; and 22 percent said they will definitely vote for someone else." Stormy Daniels will be meeting voters at Roux House in Baton Rouge on May 5th and at Serio's Po' Boys & Deli in New Orleans on May 6th.

Yesterday, in a showy display, Bush, Romney and Cantor met actual flesh and blood voters at the Pie-Tanza Restaurant, a pizzeria in Arlington, Virginia, a few minutes away from the Inside-the-Beltway cocoon that has helped the GOP insulate itself from real people with real problems looking to government for help. RNC chairman Michael Steele, who was pointedly not invited to help with the rebranding effort, reminded Republicans that GOP credibility is shot as far as voters are concerned because the party "left them along the side of the road on our way to drinking that Potomac River water, getting high on power and influence and forgetting how we got where we are."

Steele reached out to mainstream Americans to give the GOP another look, although he warned them that if they expect the party to change its direction away from mindless obstructionism and the failed policies that George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rubber stamp Congress latched onto to drag the country into a ditch, they'll be very disappointed. "All you moderates out there, y'all come," he giggled at the Radisson Hotel in downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin. But he warned that they'd better leave their moderate ideas at the hat-check stand. "Understand that when you come into someone's house, you're not looking to change it. You come in because that's the place you want to be." There aren't many people who want to be in the Republican Party house right now-- around one in five Americans.

On CNN this morning Cantor and Romney-- tie-less-- showed what kind of change the Republicans are talkin' about. "We have a web site," bragged Cantor, as a demonstration of how the GOP is learning from the Democrats-- and right after he and Willard agreed with each other that no matter how many states allow same sex marriage, it must be stamped out on a federal level. Let me turn to Mike Lux's book, The Progressive Revolution and its sharp analysis of why the right-wing mind is unable to deal with real change:

We must adhere to tradition because once we tamper with tradition, society goes to hell. It’s a scary world out there, and the people who have always run things can protect us, but only if we stay with our traditions and keep things the way they have always been. People who are different from us create problems, and we don’t want our traditions or the carefully built structure of our society undermined.

And, yes, they are very scared-- of everything. John McCain's yappy daughter Meghan is one that absolutely wants a place at the Republican table. But do they want her? “I just wish that moderates like myself-- more moderate Republicans and more socially liberal Republicans-- weren’t looked at as, ‘Get rid of the dirty moderates. Get rid of them,’” the 24-year-old told CNN affiliate KTAR radio in a joint interview with her father."

Ex-Republican congressman Bob Barr is hardly a moderate, but he thinks the problem with the GOP runs deeper than anything a p.r. stunt at a pizzeria will cure. Yesterday he said it would be impossible to "overestimate the damage" that the GOP has done to itself because there's a "lack of any coherent philosophy, vision or leadership" and that "the Republican Party is in very deep trouble right now."

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Saturday that it's time for the Republican Party to give up its "nostalgia" for the heyday of the Reagan era and look forward, even if it means stealing the winning strategy deployed by Democrats in the 2008 election.
"You can't beat something with nothing, and the other side has something. I don't like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that."

I don't know for sure what the "it" he thinks the Democrats have, that the Republicans don't, is. In reality, though, is what the Democrats have is that they're not Republicans. But even that's changing! With the rise of the Evan Bayh's anti-Obama Bloc and the assertion by reactionary Democrats like Ben Nelson and Max Baucus that they will do the bidding of their corporate masters and join with GOP obstructionists to destroy Obama's change agenda, the Democratic Party is morphing into everything that voters hate about the GOP-- namely that it serves the interests of a few wealthy campaign donors and not average American working families.

And now we have the repulsive absorption of Arlen Specter, an unrepentant Republican obstructionist himself, who just this morning crowed on Meet the Press that he adamantly opposes health care reform and insisted that he will not be a "loyal Democrat." Just what Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters want to hear-- because Democratic primary voters hate loyal Democrats and hate Democratic ideas like health care? Later this evening (5pm, PT) we'll be talking with a real Pennsylvania Democrat, Rep. Joe Sestak over at Firedoglake and maybe someone will get a chance to ask him if he's going to let the GOP take over his party in his state.