Change the Republicans deserve

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To boost their morale and their poor prospects this fall, congressional Republicans had a little ceremony at the Capitol to roll out a new slogan for the party: "The Change You Deserve."Not only was the slogan uncomfortably close to Barack Obama's "Change You Can Believe In," it was also the trademarked ad slogan for Effexor, a prescription antidepressant whose side effects -- nausea, irritability, etc. -- the Democrats gleefully recited. It's been that kind of year, actually two years, for the Republicans.They had just come off losing their third straight special election in previously solid GOP congressional districts. The most recent, in Mississippi, in a race where the party pumped in more than a million dollars along with Vice President Cheney, wasn't even really close. The Democratic candidate took 54 percent of the vote in a district President Bush carried by 25 points.Independent political analysts see the Democrats gaining as many as seven Senate seats and 15 to 25 House seats this fall, and Republicans privately agree that's probably not far off. The House GOP's political chief remarked that right now there is no such thing as a safe Republican seat.A memo to House Republican leaders obtained by The Washington Post cited "the deep seeded(cq) antipathy to the president, the war, gas prices, the economy and, in some areas, the underlying cultural differences that continue to brand our party." That's the hand they have to play and it's their own fault.In 2000, the party was talking grandly about "a permanent Republican majority" and it didn't seem totally out of the question. But while wallowing in the perks and privileges of the majority, the party of limited government, low taxes, fiscal prudence and cautious foreign policy was running up record deficits and national debt, setting new spending records, creating the largest entitlement program since the Great Society, approving a huge new federal bureaucracy and, in the name of national security, approving broad new federal intrusions into Americans' private lives. And then there was their inability to say no to President Bush on anything. Oh, and there were the corruption scandals that sent two of their number to jail.The voters seemed to notice how far the Republicans had drifted from their principles before the Republicans themselves did. Now there is a desperate search for strategies to turn the situation around but few are forthcoming.One popular notion is the party needs to be "re-branded." A wholesale makeover would be more like it.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)