I heard a story once about a brilliant marketing plan for selling a new brand of dog food.
 
     The manufacturer retained the best advertising company in the business to write and produce the advertisements, purchased the best advertising slots in major print and broadcast outlets, bought product placement pitches in popular entertainment mediums and hired a brilliant public relations firm to orchestrate all of the events surrounding release of the new product.

     Almost everyone with a dog had heard about this new dog food, and large numbers of them were convinced that this was a product that their dog could not do without. The product started flying off of the shelves as soon as it became available.

     The marketing campaign was a miserable failure, and the manufacturer lost huge sums of money on the dog food. Why? Because the dogs would not eat the food. Marketing, no matter how brilliant, was not going to turn that fact around for the manufacturer.

     I don’t know whether the dog food story is true or not, but it is certainly an apt allegory for the situation facing the Republican Party today. The Republicans in this story are the manufacturers of the dog food, and the dogs are the American voters who have discovered that they do not like what they are being fed.

     The Republicans have certainly been very successful in marketing their public policies to the voters over the last few decades. The result has been that they now control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and have substantial numbers of ideological allies on the judiciary. Because of these successes, they have been able to start passing their policies into law.

     Now that people have actually been able to try out the product, they do not like it at all. They have educated themselves about the No Child Left Behind Act, and learned that it is destroying public education in the United States. Voters have been painfully shocked by the high energy prices resulting from market manipulations by Enron and other Republican cronies.

     They have sniffed the Clean Skies Initiative and have been overwhelmed by the choking smell of industrial pollution. They have gazed upon the Healthy Forests initiative, and seen that it looks like the remains of a slash and burn operation. They have had the awful offal of bloody war stuffed down their throats, and are gagging on the taste.

     The voters don’t seem to like the flavor of the Republicans’ dog food dogma. Recent polls have consistently shown that less than 40 percent of the voters like what they have been offered by the Republicans.

     This does not necessarily mean that the voters will select a reduced Republican diet in the elections this fall. For that to happen, a more palatable kibble must be available. We don’t yet know what the fall menu will offer, but there is a great opportunity here for those who are willing to serve the voters a meal that they will actually enjoy.

---