Suppose consumers have tried your wine, and have decided that they don’t much like it. What do you do to recapture market share?
If you’re the Republican party, you don’t change the wine, and you don’t even change the bottle. You just try to sell them the same old wine in the same old bottle, just by telling them that it’s all new.
Eric Cantor is test-driving the latest 2010 sales pitch for Republicans: We’re not the same guys you tossed out of office in 2006.
In an op-ed on Andrew Breitbart‘s BigGovernment.com, Cantor essentially argues that the Republican Party that wants to take back the House this fall has learned its lessons from the Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert years.
“But the GOP in the House today is different. Very different. Led by a new generation of young and energetic leaders, we are committed to restoring the public’s trust in our ability to lead as responsible adults,” Cantor writes, without having to note that he is indeed thought of as one of the “young” and “energetic” leaders.
Cantor also tries to toss a little blame on his own leaders from the Bush years when it comes to the national debt: “I am under no illusions — both parties have helped to create a debt that everyone knows is dangerously high.”
It’s an open question as to whether voters will buy the idea that the Republican Party that took such a beating in the past two election cycles has truly changed, but Cantor and the NRCC seem poised to keep distancing themselves from the 2006 version of the GOP.
Perhaps voters might buy the idea that the Republican Party has truly changed more easily if there was any change at all in the policies they are advocating.
The same guys who put us into a car and drove us into a ditch — and then just walked away, and refused to do one damn thing to help us get out of the ditch — these same guys now want to persuade us to get back into the same car, with the same drivers, in the same impaired state, driving us down the same damn road.
And they’re hoping that a little bit of fast talking will prevent us from recognizing the same old same old that we’re being sold as all new?
They obviously think we’re idiots. Are we?