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Travis Childers has become an ominous symbol for Republicans. He has provided a wake-up call to party leaders that the great unwashed multitudes have understood for a while: the term “Republican” doesn’t stand for anything anymore. If the Republican Party is to survive, the brand will have to be rebuilt.Childers, by the way, is a Democrat who won Mississippi’s first congressional district – something virtually nobody thought possible. District One is one of the safer Republican seats in the country. If the Childers win is a harbinger, then look for the GOP to lose another twenty House seats in November. It’s possible that Democrats could pick up five seats in the Senate. If you combine that with a Democratic White House, the Republican Party fades to insignificance.

To understand how this has happened to the once-grand old party, you have to understand the concept of “positioning” of which “branding” is a part. Positioning is the art of creating a concept or “position” for a product in the mind of the prospective consumer. Once that position is established, you have a brand.

For example, both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble have web sites for selling books. But Amazon “owns” the position of being the on-line bookseller while people think of Barnes & Noble as a traditional store. These positions are strong brands.

It works that way with any product. If you buy a can of Folgers, you expect to get coffee. If you open the can and you get beans, you might think a mistake was made at the factory. You try again and this time, you get corn. The next time, you reach for another brand.

Back in the wilderness days of the 60’s and 70’s, the GOP didn’t stand for much and wasn’t particularly relevant. Then, in the wake of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, came Ronald Reagan. Reagan created a strong brand for the Republicans. He railed against Big Government, called for lower taxes, and a strong military. The Republican brand was established under Reagan as the party of empowering the people rather than the state.

It was a brand that showcased why the Republican Party was not only different from the Democratic Party – but better!

Then came the Bushes. The first President Bush famously said “read my lips, no new taxes,” then negotiated with Democrats to raise taxes. He talked about a “new world order” where Reagan had championed America. He bucked the brand and lost his reelection campaign to Bill Clinton.

Then came the second President Bush, who was thought by many to be more conservative than his father. Campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” he claimed the presidency after the Florida debacle and began a gradual shift to the left.

He busted the Republican brand by expanding the Education Department and creating an entire new department (Homeland Security). He lost the battle to fix entitlements and responded by creating a new one, the pharmaceutical benefit, and by expanding middle-class welfare through CHIP insurance. For six years, he failed to wield his veto pen as the Republican Congress spent the country silly and tacked on billions of dollars in earmarks. 9/11 exposed the deterioration of our military prowess that occurred under the watch of his father and Bill Clinton.

Now here’s the really strange part of all this:

The more leftward Bush has turned, the more the Democrats and the media have branded him an archconservative. So Bush’s failures have been ascribed to conservative policies when they have been nothing of the kind.

The election of someone such as Barack Obama would ensure that most of the Bush policies (with the notable exception of the war) would be retained and expanded. Where Bush gave us a new entitlement, Obama would give us nationalized healthcare. Where Bush spent big, Obama would spend bigger.

Obama would give us a third Bush term.

McCain would give us open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens and just slightly less climate-change socialism than we would get from Obama. What’s the difference? Only that Obama will be true to his brand. He will faithfully provide higher taxes and bigger government. McCain, as Bush has done, will bust the brand and give us pretty much the same thing.

The hopelessly misnamed People for the American Way cited me as a notable holdout among “right-wing activists” tripping over themselves to fall in line with the Republican presidential candidate.Despite the group’s penchant for mislabeling others as much as it mislabels itself, a dispatch did quote me accurately as saying: “All things being equal, I’d rather watch the Democrats destroy America for the next four years, holding out hope that a new kind of Republican leadership might arise to fight back in 2012.”

(DITTO!!!)

I said it, and I mean it.

There is no question in my mind that if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton sits in the White House for the next four years, especially with the backing of a Democratic Congress, that they will put in place policies that will anger Americans.

They will set the stage for their own undoing. They will have nothing to complain about any more. They will have all the levers of power at their disposal. They will have no excuses. They will be forced to create the panacea they have been promising for so long.

And, of course, they will fail.

Their ideas simply don’t work. They create misery, not prosperity. They create strife, not unity. They make war, not peace.

If the Democrats have all the cards, as they last did briefly in 1993 and 1994, they will overreach, and the American people will know who to blame.

On the other hand, if John McCain wins, he will institute most of the same policy prescriptions. He will steal your money to fight phantom problems like “global warming.” He will do away with tax cuts he opposed in the first place. He will approve federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He will promote amnesty for illegal aliens. He will sign legislation attacking constitutionally protected political speech. He will nominate judges who will get the easy approval of the Democrats in the Senate.

It’s really difficult for me to see any substantive difference between McCain and Obama or McCain and Clinton.

Oh, he will continue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he will ensure our troops are handcuffed by rules of engagement dictated by politicians who simply have no comprehension of the kind of enemy we face. And McCain will be content to keep fighting, presumably without victory, for 100 years, as he suggested.

In other words, Americans lose no matter who wins in November.

But, there is more hope for positive change in the short term with a Democratic sweep.

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(article Link) Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign is trying to tap a new audience of potential voters by taking his campaign message straight to liberal and nonpolitical issues-based blogs, which reach millions of readers but don’t often delve into conservative politics.The strategy was in full swing yesterday when Mr. McCain invited non-conservative bloggers to join his regular blogger conference call, just hours after he delivered a major speech previewing his war strategy and other priorities for a first presidential term.

It already has started a war among liberal bloggers over how to react to Mr. McCain’s overture.

In answering the first question on the call, Mr. McCain said his likely Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, lacks the judgment to be commander in chief, which set him up for a bruising from the readers at TalkingPointsMemo.com, a liberal-leaning site that joined in the call.

Blogger Greg Sargent said it amounted to “what may be [Mr. McCain’s] most direct attack yet on Barack Obama’s national security credentials.” But commenters were split: Some took aim at Mr. McCain, some said they were thankful for the intelligence on “what the enemy is planning,” and others lashed out at Mr. Sargent, saying he should have been harsher in evaluating Mr. McCain’s attack.

“This IS a Democratic blog, and as such, it would seem to me that there SHOULD be SOME bias with regards to how YOU report of McCain’s craziness, as opposed to treating his ranting and attacks with a sort of dignity they and he DO NOT deserve,” wrote one emphasis-abundant reader.

Mr. McCain’s campaign said the Web outreach is a logical extension of an attempt to reach voters beyond his base. It also builds on his successful use of conference calls with conservative bloggers during the Republican primary, which blunted many of the harshest criticisms of the senator.

“The plan is to take the work we’ve already built on with conservative bloggers and to open up a dialogue with non-conservative bloggers and even nonpolitical bloggers,” said Patrick Hynes, Mr. McCain’s point man for blog outreach.

John McCain’s global-warming speech on Monday made it clear that there will be no presidential candidate this year willing to question the assertion that global warming (a.k.a. “climate change”) is manmade, or the assertion that we can fix global warming by passing a few laws.

Along with Clinton and Obama, McCain’s proposal to attack global warming now gives voters three choices for a car color — as long as it is black. Like Clinton and Obama, McCain’s proposal involves a “cap and trade” mechanism to legislatively limit CO2 emissions in the coming years, with the free market minimizing the economic damage by allowing a trading of emission credits between companies. He also includes an allowance for carbon offsets, although everyone (except Al Gore) believes this to be more smoke-and-mirrors than a real-world strategy for reducing carbon emissions.

What worries me is the widespread misperception that we can do anything substantial about carbon emissions without seriously compromising economic growth. To be sure, forcing a reduction in CO2 emissions will help spur investment in new energy technologies. But so does a price tag of $126 for a barrel of oil. Finding a replacement for carbon-based energy will require a huge investment of wealth, and destroying wealth is not a very good first step toward that goal.

When the public finds out how much any legislation that punishes energy use is going to cost them, with no guarantee that anything we do will have a measurable impact on future climate, there will be a revolt just like the one now materializing in the U.K. and the EU. At some point, as they are faced with the stark reality that mankind’s requirement for an abundant source of energy cannot simply be legislated out of existence, the public will begin asking, “Just how sure are we that humans are causing global warming?”

And this is where the science establishment has, in my view, betrayed the public’s trust.

Even though there has never been a single scientific paper published that has ruled out natural variability for most of the warming we’ve seen since 1850, Big Science has managed to convince politicians and much of the public that the science is settled. Apparently, our addition of nine molecules of carbon dioxide to each 100,000 molecules of air over the last 150 years can now be blamed for anything and everything we choose. Hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, floods, glaciers flowing toward the sea…. all of these used to happen naturally, but no more.

The warming that allowed the Vikings to farm in Greenland 1,000 years ago was surely natural. But we are now told that warming in Greenland today is surely manmade. Glaciers retreating in western Canada have revealed evidence of previous forests, showing that warming and cooling cycles do indeed occur, even without SUVs. Yet the SUV is now the scapegoat for retreating glaciers.

McCain pointed to shrinking Arctic sea ice and collapsing Antarctic ice shelves as obvious evidence that humans are to blame, even though the sea ice did the same thing in the 1920s and 1930s, and those ice shelves must break off eventually, as new glacial ice flows toward the sea to take their place.

But McCain has made it clear that the science really does not matter anyway because, even if humans are not to blame for global warming, stopping carbon-dioxide emissions is the right thing to do. And if we had another choice for most of our energy needs, I might be willing to accept such a claim as harmless enough.

But carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth, and I have a difficult time calling something so fundamentally important a “pollutant.” Maybe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher now than it has been in hundreds of thousands of years. So what? I am increasingly convinced that its influence on climate pales in comparison to the influence that natural climate events like El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation have on regional climate. Indeed, most of the warming we’ve seen in the last century might well be due to these natural modes of climate variability alone.

The trouble is that no one has been funded by the government to investigate such a possibility, and the mandate for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to address manmade climate change — not natural climate change.

So, here we are with bad science ready to support bad policy decisions that will lead to bad economic times ahead, and no presidential candidate who is willing to ask the hard questions. While we hate to be pandered to by politicians, in this case I can only hope that they really are pandering — that this is hot air and not prospective policy.

— Dr. Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is author of the new book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.

I told you yesterday about John McCain’s plans to speak to the National Council of La Raza (The Race) in July. Here are the top 10 reasons he should repudiate the radical open borders, speech-squelching group that he has long embraced:10. La Raza supports driver’s licenses for illegal aliens.

9. La Raza supports in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students that are not available to law-abiding US citizens and law-abiding legal immigrants.

8. La Raza opposes cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state, and federal authorities.

7. La Raza sponsors militant ethnic nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars, including the “Aztlan Academy” in Tucson, AZ, the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, AZ, and Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn.

6. La Raza gives mainstream cover to a poisonous subset of ideological satellites, led by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA), which the late GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood rightly characterized as “a radical racist group…[and] one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West.”

5. La Raza opposes a secure fence on the southern border.

4. Former La Raza president Raul Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic outreach advisor said this:

“US English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks.” He was referring to US English the nation’s oldest, largest citizens’ action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.

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In response to the “speech” given by Liar McCain that apparently has Shit Sandwich Republicans in the throes of orgasm with renewed hope and fervor, we have very little to say.Other than: You really, honestly expect us to give a rancid turd when the dog who didn’t like Samuel Alito because he was “too conservative” and “wore his conservatism on his sleeve” suddenly starts barking about the kind of judges he wants to nominate as opposed to his opponents?

You really, honestly expect us to pay attention when the same guy who ripped out the First Amendment of the Constitution with his “Campaign Finance Reform”, shat on the paper and smeared the smelly, old fart, runny load in our faces talks about how he opposes “activist judges bypassing the legislative branch?”

You do? Are you fucking NUTS???

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Also check out: “But He Still Won’t Give Conservatives the Time of Day”

Through a spokesperson with the colorful name Tucker Bounds, McCain has denied telling me he didn’t vote for Bush in 2000. “It’s not true,” Bounds told the Washington Post, “and I ask you to consider the source.”My sentiments exactly — because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true.

He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry’s ‘04 running mate — then later admitted he had, insisting: “Everybody knows that I had a conversation.”

He denied admitting that he didn’t know much about economics, even though he’d said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun.

He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record.

He denied that he’d ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He’s also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, “consider the source.”

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More McCain Stuff:

Back in February, Victor Davis Hanson wrote incisively about the ethnic hatred La Raza and its satellites foment. He also observed: “By November I don’t know why either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama should not have been asked to repudiate the support of an organization self-described as “The National Council of The Race.”How about McCain?

Why would Senator McCain choose a venue where his rejection was virtually guaranteed? Not only did he not get his message out, the message that came out through the media is that this black audience rejected him, which is readily portrayed as if blacks in general rejected him.The Republican strategy for making inroads into the black vote has failed consistently for more than a quarter of a century. Yet it never seems to occur to them to change their approach.The first thing that they do that is foredoomed to failure is trying to reach blacks through the civil rights organizations and other institutions of the black establishment. The second proven loser is trying to appeal to blacks by offering the same kinds of things that Democrats offer– token honors, politically correct rhetoric and welfare state benefits.

Blacks who want those things know that they can already get them from the Democrats. Why should they listen to Republicans who act like imitation Democrats?’

These are not the blacks whose votes Republicans have any realistic hope of getting. Nor do the Republicans need the votes of all blacks. If just 20 percent of blacks begin voting Republican, the Democrats are lost.

The question then is how to have a shot at getting the votes of those blacks who are not in thrall to the current black “leaders” and who on many issues may be conservative.

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