So where's the Democratic Party unified message?
Why aren't all of them saying everywhere "We want Donald Trump to resign. We do not feel he can be this country's leader."
ONE unified, consistent message. One single, devastating talking point for one week solid, everywhere, every time, every show, every guest.
Why aren't they doing that?
Republicans do this exact thing.
Why can't Democrats manage this?
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They could have said the same thing about Bush - he didn't seem qualified to be the country's leader
How they apply those tactics, yes- THAT'S reprehensible, but the net effect is the same.
Let me give you an example of how a bad product can be successfully marketed and adopted by the public. Remember Olestra? Just in case you don't, Olestra was a fat substitute used in the production of high-fat snack food such as potato chips. It was FDA approved in 1996, but by the end of the '90s it was mostly gone from the market due to its unfortunate side effect of "greasy anal discharge" (I believe we call that "santorum"
. Nonetheless, it was actually on the market for a few *years* before it was pulled because the messaging that was delivered regarding the product benefits of Olestra, as well as the product differentiation messages associated with the campaign, were so powerful in the public mind. After all, who didn't want a potato chip made with ingredients that added zero fat, calories, and cholesterol? It was all the rage... for a while.
Eventually, the downsides were too much for the public to ignore and the public stopped buying products made with Olestra. But think, for a moment, about whether that might have happened had Olestra done something less obvious. Would it still be on the market, even if it were somehow detrimental in another way? What if Olestra had only given your skin an odd scent? Possibly. Aspartame is still around, after all, and many of us (including myself) avoid it like the plague even though the FDA claims it's "safe".
You'd think that the embarrassing and unfortunate side effects of consuming Olestra would have been uncovered during product testing. Perhaps those side effects were uncovered and, like the GOP saying they want to cut Meals on Wheels, it was thought the public maybe wouldn't notice. My point here is that good messaging can deliver a bad product, and yes, that's what the GOP uses it for in many, many cases. That said, good messaging doesn't *have to* deliver a bad product! We know that Democrats' positions are more beneficial to the public than those of Republicans.
We should leverage Republicans' strategies and tactics as they apply to delivering consistent and repeated messaging to differentiate our "product" from theirs, to extoll the benefits/virtues and condemn the losses, and to do so over and over and over using the same coordinated points until *our* message is the topic of conversation.
Democrats are in the legislative minority pretty much across the board right now. We have the time and the opportunity to focus on the messaging right now, more than ever before. I'm saying that our legislative leaders need to take advantage of that in the same ways Republicans have always done.
It's marketing, and yes it can seem cynical and cold and calculating, but it *works*. All our household name brands- Betty Crocker, Jif, Smucker's, Gold Medal, Chef Boyardee, and so on- are proof positive that marketing messages work. Democrats should be using those same strategies to get the messaging to the public.
The more republicons will remind you that he use to be a Democrat! lol
I knew it!
member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." 
I recall a while back- a year or two ago, I think, but maybe it was longer than that- when the Daily Show pointed out Republicans actually doing what I'm suggesting. Stewart did a montage of clips of the Sunday Fox talking head shows, a montage that took one-liner talking points from something like twelve of them and played them all in sequence.
All of those talking heads were repeating the exact same phrase, across multiple shows, all day long, over and over again. And what was the net effect? That phrase was being repeated in the media the following week. We noticed here on DU; the folks at Kos also commented on it as I recall. By then, of course, it was far too late to change the course of that particular river,and whatever message was intended had been delivered and became the conversation du jour.
I get that Democrats don't have a whole news network in their pockets! That said, our elected officials- at the state and federal level, on both sides of the aisle- already go on camera, either at the Capitol Building or on shows "live from their district" or calling in to radio stations or whatever. They have spokesmen, too, and people in their offices. That's also part of doing their jobs, and that's especially true when the other side has complete control of the legislative bodies in Washington *and* control of most of the state legislatures. For all that bleak landscape, however, they can still give an opposing message, and that's what I'm saying needs to be leveraged intelligently; they all need to be saying and repeating the same things at the same times, together, to get through America's hamster-sized attention span.
Again, this is marketing. Marketing and perception management, and those things *never* come from the bottom up if they're to be successful. A slogan, in the end, is nothing more than what's known in marketing as a "call to action" ("Buy now!", "Get a free quote today!", and "Click here to order" are also calls to action), and by themselves they do nothing. Those calls to action are created, tested, and carefully chosen every single time they're deployed- and I use that word "deployed" very precisely- to hook the customer in and create a conversion (aka a "sale" .
In the case of politics, that conversion is the vote. The messaging plays a critical key role in creating the conversion, but it tends to get lost in the background unless it is carefully timed, coordinated, repetitive, and laser-focused on delivering and reinforcing the desired perception.
I'm explicitly not saying that we need to ditch activism in any way whatever. What I'm saying is that if the messaging is delivered and reinforced from the top, the activists' messages will (if the messaging is successful) be more in line with the top-down goals.
What we don't want is something that's blurred and confused like the "free Mumia" group did to the MoveOn marches, or what Occupy's "organic" but fractured and finally unsuccessful and eventually reviled efforts toward whatever it was Occupy was trying to accomplish became in the end. That last is actually a very good example of a failed effort at messaging that ended up being entirely counterproductive, both at Kos on here on DU, and it's why coordinated messaging needs to come from the top down.
I think it needs to be clearly understood that the sort of messaging campaign I'm talking about is necessarily autocratic. It has to be in order to be a success; all marketing campaigns are like that and people get fired for altering them without authorization. There's one authority in charge (in the case of politics, the party's leadership) because that's how tightly coordinated ad campaigns function.
Again, remember what the Daily Show pointed out. That works for Republicans because they- or their surrogates- have the discipline and top-down structure in place to deliver their consistent messages repeatedly, all day, all week, until their message is what the media is talking about (because their message is what the media, all over the media, is being told). Democrats need to take that time-tested and proven strategy and run with it.
