It's Not About the Brand: The Trouble With Republicans Part 2

Leadership is not merely a matter of image management. It's not simply a matter of choosing personality instead of policy. It's not only a matter of asking- not so subtly- when in doubt WE are more like you than they are. All strands of the McSame campaign.
The mistake that Republicans make, over and over again, is to attack the wrong problem. Then the entire country gets bogged down in the right way or wrong way to solve a second order problem. While the most serious and intractable problems fester, grow ever more serious and are ignored.

Terrorism? Big problem. But Iraq is not the place to fight terrorism.

Health care? Big problem. But the real problem is Medicaid not Social Security.


Energy?
Big problem. But we can drill everywhere in America and we will still be dependent on foreign oil.

Pork barrel spending? An 18 billion dollar problem. In a budget measured in trillions of dollars.

Why the systematic missing of the mark? Because deep in the hearts of many Americans- most of them die hard Republicans- is the notion the the American Way of Life=AWOL- is our birthright. A fact that the world must accept.
OK- we will drive a flexfuel Suburban. OK- we might send a few troops to Afghanistan. OK let's form a bipartisan commission to study all the real hard problems. But Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Japan, Venezuela and all you other second rate countries. We get first dibs on all the good stuff. And don't you forget it.

Perhaps we might want to rethink our misplaced feelgood mindset.