Republicans' 'Liberal' Attacks on Democrats Losing Their Sting
Reader Comments
USA
This country is going straight to hell.
Stupid slogan
The Republican's "new" slogan, "The change you deserve" shows their complete and utter desperation. Not only does their emphasis of "change" make them look like second-bananas to Obama (where have they been the past year, and when was this slogan cooked up, 1992?) but of it's OBVIOUS vulnerability...
You mean there's change we DON'T deserve? How dare you!
Why it doesn't work.
It's kind of hard to make an accusation of "tax and spend liberals" sting when you and your party have been "cut tax and spend liberals" for going on 8 years.
When you get elected to office on a platform of limited government and fiscal responsibility and then you expand government power over people at record rates and engage in what is best described as "drunken debt spending sprees", you really do look like a fool if you try to preach against what you just got done engaging in.
The republican party has been the party of big brother government spending our future tax dollars with wreckless abandon and having nothing to show for it but an anemic economy teetering on the brink of ruin.
The change we really deserve.
I find it hilarious that the Republican party came up with any slogan with the word 'change' in it. As a conservative party, by its very nature, it is meant and seen to preserve and perpetuate the status quo. So how I read that slogan is, "We're not changing anything." Not because they won't. But because they can't. They're conservatives. Conservatives don't change anything.
Chalk it up to Bush's stubbornness and the Republican Congress' willingness to cater to his every whim, or to the fact that the ship of state grounded on the rocks of economic, environmental and political disaster under the Republican leadership. That's not the change we deserve. Shedding that image will take far more than a sound bite or a slogan or campaign promises. And so far, that's all they've given us.
If being a 'tax and spend' liberal is a bad thing, how much worse is being a tax cut and spend conservative? At least the liberals know that when you over-spend, you have to pay for it somehow and preferably not by indenturing our children's children's children as the Republicans have done.
The Republicans had their chance and they blew it. BIG TIME. When the status quo sucks, screaming "LIBERAL!!!!" at one's opponent is equivalent to saying, "YOU'RE NOT GOING TO DO WHAT I DID!!!!" And we, the voters, are saying, "Thanks god that liberal is going to FINALLY bring the change we deserve."
John W. Mashek covered politics in Washington for four decades with U.S. News & World Report, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Boston Globe. His primary beats were Congress, the White House, and national politics. He covered every presidential election from 1960 to 1996. He was a panelist in three televised presidential debates in 1984, 1988, and 1992.