Back in August, when the Republican Party decided to "embrace the war" as their November victory strategy, a newspaper reporter asked an "anonymous high-ranking" Rethuglican official why the party was adopting this seemingly suicidal tactic.
Mr. Anonymous replied, "It's all we've got."
Indeed, every other cornerstone of the Republican brand had disappeared. Fiscal responsibility? Hardly. Even without the Iraq War, our financial health would be, well, unhealthy. Small government? Sorry, but illegal wiretapping (among other things) craps all over that idea. Smart management? Nope, try again.
For those of you not in the marketing world (I'm jealous), just replace the word
"brand" with the word
"promise." A brand is essentially your promise -- what you can be counted on to deliver, time and again, without fail.
The GOP has dismantled its own brand by obsessing over Iraq, and the implications of that are farther-reaching than any of us can predict here. I suspect, as do others in my profession, that the real effect of this will be seen in 2008.
(Let me stop you before you beat me to the obvious. Clearly, we don't have a brand either -- and that, I believe, is the only thing standing between a very tight, down-to-the-wire November and a 1994-style anti-incumbent smackdown. But that's another diary.)
So back to the GOP. As we've known instinctively for years, and now implicitly for a month, the "embrace the war" strategy was really more about embracing the war on terror. Confuse the two, Rove thought, and let Bush's terror approval rating (not awful) associatively boost Bush's Iraq approval rating (God-awful) so that Democrats couldn't nationalize the election on the basis of the Iraq War.
Ooops.
The National Intelligence Estimate has just completed the backfire on that strategy. Because it, too, links the war in Iraq to the war on terror -- but in a way completely different than BushCo had envisioned.
And so now, the single remaining piece of the Republican brand -- "we will protect you" -- has gone by the wayside. According to 16 intelligence agencies, Iraq has, as we all suspected, actually made us less safe.
No promise -- no brand -- remains. If history is any guide, it takes a minimum of half a generation to rebuild a brand gone AWOL. What a shame, huh?
Read everything you can about the NIE. It's bigger than it appears. It is the final nail in the coffin holding the Republican brand.