There’s only a few things in this world that elected Republicans are good for: war, famine, pestilence and death, an over-abundance of hypocrisy, and the occasional laugh.
“Take our new campaign slogan – please!” It’s a Henny Youngman punchline, sans the punch, but it already has the citizenry rolling in the aisles.
My first thought on hearing it was an obvious one: What marketing genius came up with this crap? (My second thought was that it was probably Mark Penn – but that’s neither here nor there.)
After months of being inundated with Change We Can Believe In from the Obama campaign, the GOP – as creative and insightful as ever – have decided to relaunch their same-old/same-old product with all the imagination of a Pepsi PR executive coming up with Well, It’s Kinda, Sorta the Real Thing! in an attempt to appeal to Coca-Cola consumers.
Of course, there is an underlying, albeit inadvertent, honesty in claiming to offer Change You Deserve – because that’s exactly what the Republicans are offering: what they have determined the average, middle-class American “deserves”. And over the past eight years, we’ve all had a belly-full of the GOP’s idea of our just desserts.
One can only ponder what changes would or could be made that wouldn’t simply be an undoing of the disasters a Republican administration, aided and abetted by their party colleagues, has created to begin with. Perhaps by change they simply mean a lessening of the damage already done, a slight pulling-back from the precipice we, as a nation, are about to fall off of, thanks to their incompetence, self-service, and out-and-out greed.
I suspect the “change” they think the peasantry deserves is a slight restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law – perhaps a promise to suspend illegal wiretapping activities on statutory holidays, or maybe a public finger-wagging and a half-hearted shame, shame directed at our country’s torturers before they go about their business of waterboarding the next victim.
And no doubt the Change We Deserve will have its impact on the economy. I can foresee (after lengthy negotiations with the oil conglomerates at the next Republican-Exxon sleepover) a one-cent per-gallon price reduction at the pump, or (dare I imagine it!) raising our next “stimulus check” by fifty cents per family member.
Surely the biggest largesse that would flow from that promised Change We Deserve would be a reassessment of our occupation of Iraq: no, we still won’t leave, we won’t see a cohesive plan to end the violence, and we certainly won’t see a reduction in troop deaths. But once sworn-in, President John McCain will cut back on his golfing even moreso than his predecessor did – and you can take that kind of change to the bank, although there will be a hefty service charge for extracting those pennies from their paper wrappers.
Surely the Republicans, had they put their minds to it – assuming they had any – would have come up with a more apt slogan to launch what is already doomed to be a crushing defeat in November, like "We’re Really, Really, Really Sorry", "Contrary to Popular Belief, We’re Actually NOT With Stupid", or, more appropriately, the oft-used fallback position of the battering husband, "Gimme Another Chance, Babe, and I Promise Things Will Change!”
The great irony of the Republican wannabes running on a Change You Deserve platform is blatantly apparent to everyone (except, of course, the idiots promoting it). Had the GOP not mired the nation in an unwinnable war, an economy that sucks like an Eletrolux, and a standing among the world’s nations that makes the Third Reich seem almost respectable by comparison, the citizenry wouldn’t be clamoring for change in the first place.
Well, let me end with a prediction: After four years of a Democrat in the White House, and a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, the campaign slogan in 2012 will be, "We Promise Not to Change a Thing We’ve Been Doing". It’s a slogan that is bound to ensure yet another electoral victory four years hence, not only for the Democrats, but for the country.
