Does it look like the highly touted effort by some in the Republican Party to do a major “rebranding” will work? I answer the question in my first column for The Week Online:
Don’t believe all the talk about a major rebranding of the Republican Party. Because if there’s a serious attempt at rebranding, it’s off to a barely discernable start.
Today’s Republican Party seems like The Coca Cola Company in its failed 1985 attempt to replace Classic Coke with “New Coke.” For the last few years, Republicans have offered voters the New GOP, heavily flavored with tea and talk-show-style rhetorical bile. Many voters from growing demographic groups don’t like that product. They yearn for Classic GOP, flavored with real, thoughtful, compassionate, traditional conservatism.
Sadly, GOP Classic won’t return anytime soon. Despite Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plea that the GOP stop being the “stupid party,” there are few signs that ideological groups such as CPAC, Congressional Republicans, right-wing media, and conservative bloggers want to thoughtfully discuss issues and offer substantive, achievable solutions.
To truly rebrand, the GOP must extricate itself from a talk radio political culture that glorifies and rewards confrontation, brinksmanship, snarkiness, over- the-top verbal demonization and division — and considers consensus oh, so 20th century, and compromise as something akin to treason.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.