Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Republican brand doesn't exist so GOP E can stop wringing its hands about Trump's effect on it. Too late anyway...GOP should've started shoring up a brand years ago-Boston Globe, Meredith Warren

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9/23/15, "GOP voters are ready to move into Trump Tower," Boston Globe, Meredith Warren, opinion

"Years of weak Republican leadership, lack of a unified rallying cry and scores of unhappy investors — or in this case, voters — made the GOP ripe for the picking. It wasn’t even a hostile takeover. He just walked right in.

As summer turns into fall and Trump continues to hold his front-runner status, the Republican establishment is wringing its hands over what Trump is doing to the Republican brand. 

But you can’t damage a brand that doesn’t exist.

Republican voters have gotten used to seeing House Speaker John Boehner — who has a penchant for crying in public — and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell hold press conferences after getting out-maneuvered by President Obama and the Democrats again and again on a variety of policy issues.

When the GOP finally gained control of both houses of Congress in January, it seemed like perhaps our ship had come in and the party would finally make some headway. But it turns out Boehner and McConnell were still the mushy, mild-mannered leaders they were before. They barely made a peep when Obama found a way to shove the Iran nuclear deal through Congress, right under their noses....

Enter Trump.

He didn’t even need to run third party, as some pundits predicted he might. Instead, he worked within the rules of the GOP to take over the primary contest. He did the debates, he signed the pledge, he ate a pork chop on a stick at the Iowa State Fair.

And he’s still in the lead.

The political arm of the conservative group Club for Growth is trying to reason with Republican voters and is spending $1 million on an ad campaign attempting to out Trump as a liberal because of his positions on tax increases and other nonconservative stances.

But judging by Trump’s popularity in the polls, his positions aren’t turning off Republican voters. What GOP voters really want is to win one, finally. They are ready to move out of the 11-story building that is the current Republican Party and become Trump Tower.

When Trump campaigned against the Iran nuclear deal on the lawn of the Capitol, he declared, “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning.”

After years of Republican Party drudgery, can you really blame voters who yearn for what Trump is advertising?

So for Republicans trying to figure out how to put a stop to Trump, the answer may be that it’s too late for that. If they wanted an establishment candidate to be their standard-bearer in 2016, they needed to shore up the brand years ago, build a solid agenda for Republican voters to get behind, and stop acquiescing to the Democrats.

In other words, they need to take a page from Trump’s bold and aggressive playbook if they want to win. Because, as they say, and as Trump found with Trump Tower — if you build it, they will come.

"Meredith Warren is a Republican political analyst and consultant."

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The Democratic and Republican parties have held a monopoly on power for the last century.

8/19/15, "Donald Trump blazes a European path in American politics," Boston Globe, Eric Horowitz, opinion

"One way to understand Trump is to see him as the vanguard of a new movement to bring right-populist politics into the United States, bending the whole political spectrum in service of an agenda that is anti-immigrant and also pro-American-worker.

His ideas are getting serious traction. A large bloc of American voters really does want to reduce immigration and also strengthen Social Security, even if this combination is rarely reflected among options at the voting booth.

But building a wedge movement like this is a daunting undertaking, certain to attract fierce resistance from the Democratic and Republican parties, who have held a monopoly on power for the last century."...(near end of article)





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