Democrats SUCK ... at Marketing

"What we have here is a failure to communicate", as the oft repeated phrase goes, precisely characterizes the messaging capabilities of the Democratic party. For the many years that I have been closely following politics, one of the many observations that I have made is that Republicans are GREAT at Marketing/Messaging/Communicating/Campaigning yet SUCK at actually governing, while Democrats SUCK at Marketing/Messaging/Communicating/Campaigning but are GREAT at governing. Republicans do an excellent job of communicating to and rallying their mostly single-minded base while the much wider tent Democrats struggle to communicate a common message and rallying cry to their more diversely thinking base.

In life, business, and politics it is often not enough to simply do a good job. You also have to be able to effectively COMMUNICATE and SAY that you've done a good job in order for people to take notice. That is a short coming of the Democratic party. They seem to think it is enough to simply do good works and the keenly aware people will notice and sing their praises. Nothing could be further from the truth. Democrats do a horrible job of communicating their accomplishments. Simply speaking, the Democrats need a new transmission on their "Messaging Machine".

In what was already expected to be a rough election cycle for  Democrats based on historical patterns of past midterm elections combined with the unacceptably high unemployment rate, the Democrats "failure to communicate" made a bad situation worse. Dems had a strong record of accomplishments to run on, but did a horrific job of emphasizing and running on that list of accomplishments. (Here's a long list ... excuse the language ...). At the time that Obama took office, there was a VERY REAL possibility of the 2nd Coming of the Great Depression. Though highly politically unpopular, most Economists agree that the bailouts of the financial institutions WORKED and prevented the entire US economic system from spiraling downwards rapidly. Incidentally, those same "bailouts" were actually a LOAN and were paid back WITH INTEREST by the at-risk major financial institutions.

Last week, the iconic General Motors Corporation had an enormously successful IPO after staring Chapter 11 Bankruptcy directly in the face merely a few months earlier. Though Republicans fought hard against a government "bailout" of GM. criticized Democrats for "getting into the car business", and were seemingly just fine with the loss of over a million jobs in the pioneering US auto industry, President Obama and the Democrats stepped in and LOANED  the necessary funds to GM, and ONCE AGAIN IT WORKED !! Democrats had this major success story of saving the US Auto Industry to run on as well but inexplicably didn't seem to make that a focal point of their 2010 "Marketing Campaign". Completely running from and hiding from a Healthcare bill that they fought for for over a year would take an entire blog post for me to rip apart the Dems on that, but that is yet another MAJOR accomplishment that Democrats failed to effectively communicate to the voting public.

With every defeat, there comes a lesson. With a defeat the size of the one that the Democrats took at the hands of the Republicans in the midterm elections, there should be a WHOLE LOT of lessons to learn from. One of the major lessons that the  Democrats should take from their "shellacking", is that if you fail to effectively communicate and tell your compelling story, your opponent will effectively tell a tall tale for you. And you won't like what they have to say.