That angry wailing noise emanating from Washington right now is actually the sound of the slow, painful and undignified death of the Democratic Party and everything it has come to represent in recent years. That’s a pretty bold statement I’ll admit, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that history will remember the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as the DNC’s very own New Coke moment.
For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, the New Coke analogy is often mentioned in both business and political circles. It originates from Coca-Cola’s calamitous, damaging and completely unnecessary re-branding exercise in 1985, when one of the strongest and most iconic brands on planet Earth decided to ditch the very formula which had made it into such a global phenomenon in the first place. Predictably, it wasn’t long before the Coca-Cola board and their overpaid marketing people were scratching their heads as to how an indestructible brand was very nearly destroyed. Ironically, the only thing that saved Coca-Cola was reverting to the tried and tested and well-liked recipe of the past. Alas, the New Coke debacle is a political lesson that the DNC seems hell-bent on ignoring.
We are now witnessing Coca-Cola’s once toxic combination of hubris and panic being replicated in today’s marketplace of ideas. It’s this lack of either perspective or principle which has led a seemingly intelligent group of people to throw their considerable weight behind a brazen, desperate and completely unconscionable attempt to defame a thoughtful, decent and boringly honourable man as some kind of serial sex offender.
Unfortunately for them, the new antibiotic of the Trump Effect has ensured that the latest Democratic campaign to poison a man’s reputation has infected the DNC instead, and the damage has yet to be fully assessed. I’m willing to bet that by the time the mid-term elections come around, the average US voter will have firmly associated the logo of the Democratic Party with ideas of dishonesty, media manipulation and political intimidation.
Having already lost control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government, the Democrats were only too aware of the stakes when it came to the intellectual direction of the remaining Judicial branch. Indeed, the fact that they were willing to even consider, let alone enact such a high-risk strategy lends credence to all those right-wing nutjobs who’ve been banging on about judicial activism for decades now. Why else would the Democrats risk their own already tattered reputations and future electoral chances unless they knew absolutely everything was at stake?
The pundits and historians of the future will point to the Democrats’ mean-spirited mishandling of the Kavanaugh confirmation process as one of the greatest political blunders of the modern age. This is a drama which has been many decades in the making and it won’t be over any time soon. The unexpected election of Donald J Trump and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh are just the first of many, many chickens which a large part of America’s body politic believed would never come home to roost.
Just like the board of Coca-Cola all those years ago, the Democratic Party and their mainstream media enablers have no-one to blame but themselves as they’re brutally sucked out of their ideological vacuum and cast into the political abyss.
Image courtesy of David Lat at FreeImages.com
