GOP Rebranding — Three Plus One: It's Alive, It's Alive

Three New Faces (Dowee, Cheatum, and Howe) plus Old One

The Chicago Tribune (here) asks:

Did the GOP really need to commission a 98-page report to discover it's disconnected from female, minority and youth voters?  RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is now focused on modernizing how the GOP delivers its message to various voting blocs. But it seems the RNC only desires to change its face, not its spine. And let's get real: The GOP's problem isn't rooted in communications.

The GOP self-help or self-analysis in stark terms from the LA Times (here):

A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.

That blunt assessment on the state of Republicanism at the national level comes from a major new report, out Monday, that will likely shake up an already battered party. It was commissioned by the head of the Republican National Committee in the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat last year.

Without offering detailed policy prescriptions, the 98-page report calls on the party to “smartly change course,” modernize itself and develop “a more welcoming brand of conservatism that invites and inspires new people to visit us.”

The cost for the rebranding:  To improve the party's image, the RNC plans to spend $10 million on a rebranding effort to reach out to minority voters.  They are acting just like Karl Rove did when he spent $200 million trying to buy an election and came in last place, so will this plan fail.

Lest, We Forget (from Salon here):

What are Republican priorities? Who do they dislike, and who do they attack all the time (you know that 47%, the "takers, not the givers," and all the free-stuff crowd). It’s safe to say that the Republican Party and their rebranding campaign by suddenly reaching out to poor people, who they have battered for decades, is motivated more by their naked desire to win votes anyway possible, or some Gandhi-like benevolence. So, let's look back in time, shall we?

High Priority: Giving tax breaks to billionaires and corporations.
Not A Priority: Helping and allowing state employees to keep their pensions, their Union rights or their unemployed benefits.

High Priority: Cutting funding to NPR, PBS, the EPA, and Public Education.
Not A Priority: Cutting funding to NASCAR, and gas/oil/energy subsidy, and college loans.

High Priority: Cutting funding for Pell Grants for college students.
Not A Priority: Making sure Teachers, School Administrators, and other Union workers have their rights.

High Priority: Going to war even for bogus reasons
Not A Priority: Helping Veterans.

High Priority: Spending money to sterilize wild horses.
Not A Priority: Spending money to provide women with contraception and other forms of birth control.

High Priority: Protecting fetuses at any stage of development not matter what.
Not A Priority: Protecting pregnant and especially poor women from dying. Abolishing the death penalty, ending unnecessary wars, and torture of detainees.

High Priority: Lowering taxes for the richest people in the country.
Not A Priority: Creating jobs and helping the unemployed.

High Priority: Make Obama a one-term president and fail on all his proposals.
Not a Priority: Protecting voter rights.

"A leopard cannot change it's spots, nor a zebra it's stripes."  — Proverb