Monday, March 09, 2009

QOTD

Assistant Village Idiot on the fortunes of the conservative movement:
One main difficulty is believing that it is only a PR problem. But in all the instances above, it is not just marketing at issue. We are advertising groceries, our opponents advertising drugs. People do not just believe in progressivism because the liberals are cooler and control many persuasive outlets. People also want to believe those ideas, the easier reality where good things come just by wishing. We battle not only against the external competitors for their ears, but their inner voices as well. It is a disadvantage that will not go away.

4 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

I made a comment about this over on AVI's blog. I'll let you go over there to read it.

AVI's got the idea partly correct -- what the Left sells is attractive, "Drugs".

What conservatives were selling, following Reagan, however, had far, far more appeal -- it was (yeah, ironic, innit?) Hope.

As the 90s transitioned to the 00s, though, the GOP lost that focus, and went into the Drug business, which they just don't have either the heart or the self-serving chutzpah to be any good at.

The conservatives, and the GOP, need very much to get back on track in the Hope business. They need to ack that they screwed up by being too timid to refuse the demands of the Left, and forgot their own core principles, and to politely request that they be given another chance to start making things work again.

I think that, after about 18 months more of this current crap, that message will be quite well recieved.

.

@nooil4pacifists said...

Hope alone isn't enough. We need to convince the electorate to trust our answers. And, right now, the right doesn't have any answers (not that the left does).

OBloodyHell said...

Sure we do. Tax cuts alone would be helping the system far more than what those asshats are doing.

You know this, I know this, every competent economist know this.

And part of it's just having the right attitude, which is something different from what the Dems are selling --

The Dems are selling "Things are horrible!! Give us lots and lots of inspecific powers so we can 'fix' it... somehow!!"

Conservatives should be selling "Yes, we admit it: We screwed up and lost track of why you elected us. Give us a couple years to show that we've learned our lesson, then toss us out if we show you we're lying. We certainly aren't going to do stuff both you and we KNOW doesn't work, and obviously isn't, unlike some people. We aren't going to screw everyone over trying to force an agenda down everyone's throat."

From the right people, ones that people grasp have integrity, that message will sell.

And that's one reason I think Palin has a lot of potential. She's known to be an outsider, she's known to place integrity and 'job one' over party loyalties, and she's a lot smarter than anyone on the left is going to grasp until they're out of office. If she can keep Alaska doing better than most of the other 56 states (smirk) she'll come out of the next couple years smelling like a rose.

Let Rush lead the way on this, and be the lightning rod for the Left's ire (especially since they're already dogging him), while Palin and someone else, maybe Jindal, does the quiet consensus building needed to get things back on track. Assuming it's Palin and Jindal, both should focus on doing what works in their own states, so that both of them can say "Hey, MY state isn't doing too bad!" and build from there.

In the meantime, the GOP neeeds to work on that contrite apology to their base to get them firmly behind them, so that they can rein in the Dems in 2010, and also start working on the moderates for 2012.

The economy isn't going to help the Dems that much. There's a reason the Dow's been dropping steadily since The Big O took orifice//// Sorry, "office". It's going to limp along for the next 18 months, not getting massively worse, but this is going to be the 1970s all over again at best.

OBloodyHell said...

P.S.
http://biz.yahoo.com/cnnm/090311/031109_state_unemployment.html?.&.pf=career-work

Only Louisiana's jobless rate decreased. It fell to 5.1%, 0.4 percentage point lower than the previous month.

Jindal's stock gets an uptick.