Damaged Brand.

Watching Meet the Press. The Republican brand is damaged? Is that all?

Brand Republican is now poison. The "conservative" brand is deeply damaged. The coattails of national Republican leaders are whatever the opposite of coattails are. Ground Zero of the rot is George Bush, and the stink has spread to everything associated with him: the party, the ideology, his policies, his associates. No one knows exactly what made him so bad, but anything he touched bears the stigma that it might be the carrier of the infection.

The government's conservative policies have demonstrably failed. The very basis of being able to enact and continue those policies is crumbling: the army is unready for war; the economy is already wrecked in many areas and bled dry. The administrators of these polices and their spokespersons have destroyed their own credibility not just by unmet promises but by blatant lies. The bubble of drawing investment because the party and the ideology were assured victors in everything has burst hard, leaving a scramble to get out. The ideology has never been that popular and Republican candidates have always run on distractions anyway. Now even the distractions appear in a different light. Those bad habits of the shortening attention span and blind conformity that worked to amplify the noise of Republican talking points now amplify the noise of conservative failure and humiliation.

If it were just the Republican brand, you could change the logo and go on from there. It's everything about that half of the politcal spectrum that has problems, and the problems are more than some superficial matter of where the brand is positioned.

But 50% of reality is just appearance, and if you can persuade people that it's just the brand, then the brand will recover, and it will really just be everything else.