Richard Viguerie: Democrats Have Officially Become a Minority Party
In my book Takeover, I discussed how I apply to politics the marketing knowledge and experience I’ve gained over my 55 years in direct marketing. Over those many years, I developed what I call “Viguerie’s Four Horsemen of Marketing,” which are:
- Position (a hole in the marketplace)
- Differentiation
- Benefit
- Brand (what makes you singular or unique)
Brand is really defined by a combination of the other three elements; in politics, it is what makes Republicans unique and stand apart from Democrats.
Although I prefer to use that hard-earned experience to help conservatives raise money and win elections, the same concepts apply to Democrats as well.
So, it was with great interest and pleasure that I observed how this past weekend—by electing former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez as Chairman and runner-up Congressman Keith Ellison as Deputy Chairman—the Democratic Party officially and publicly abandoned its 85-year-old brand as the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to become the party of George Soros, pink kitty hats, Muslim extremism and the hardcore far left.
This radical (pun intended) rebranding has been coming for a long time, but the election signaled with finality the Democrats’ end as the party of FDR, JFK, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, to become the party of the anti-American left.
Perez and Ellison are among the most hard-core leftists in today’s Democratic Party. NBC’s Chuck Todd, certainly no conservative, said on Sunday, “If Tom Perez is considered establishment today, that tells you how much the [Democratic] party has moved to the left.”
Clearly, the “hole in the marketplace” Democrats were seeking to fill was not someone to sell the party to the center-right majority of Americans, but to the Far Left of liberal activists.
Perez, the so-called establishment Democrat candidate, barely beat out Ellison, an African-American Muslim who was supported by a Who’s Who of the far left including Chris Shelton, president of Communications Workers of America; Richard Trumka, president, AFL-CIO and Alex Soros, son of far-left financier George Soros.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s ideological ratings that look at congressional voting records, donors and public statements, both Perez and Ellison are well to the left of center on the spectrum of beliefs within the Democratic Party, though Ellison’s views are more deeply left. In fact, he’s more liberal than 90 percent of House Democrats (and that’s saying a lot).
Ellison was so bad on national defense and Israel that prominent Democratic donor Haim Saban, who gave millions to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, took Ellison to task publicly during a question-and-answer portion of a Brookings Institute seminar with Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual,” the Israeli-American said about Rep. Ellison. “Words matter and actions matter more. Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”
However, Perez supporters were quick to emphasize that, as “the most liberal member of Obama’s cabinet,” he is just as progressive as Ellison.
And Tom Perez is also closely connected to George Soros and other anti-American figures.
As Monica Showalter documented in an article for The American Thinker, CASA de Maryland, a Soros-funded group dedicated to helping illegal immigrants flout U.S. immigration law, that Perez once headed up, took a $1.5 million donation in 2008 from the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Showalter says Perez seems to have taken Chavez’s philosophy along with it, which isn’t that surprising: His dad was a well-known henchman for Rafael Trujillo, the bemedaled, mirrored-sunglassed Idi-Amin-style thug dictator of the Dominican Republic who used to throw his opponents literally into the shark pools over his 30-plus years’ rule. One cannot control who one’s relatives are, of course, but Perez is notable for lying about it, wrote Showalter, not just in denying the relationship, but in saying it was the opposite of what it was.
While at the Department of Justice as an assistant attorney general, Perez initiated junk lawsuits against peaceful anti-abortion protestors in Florida and filed race-baiting lawsuits against municipalities to force them to scrap written tests for police and firefighters to ensure affirmative action hiring.
My friend Quin Hillyer, in an article for The American Spectator, documented how Perez argued that black firefighter applicants who flunked 70 percent of their entrance exams should get a free pass to the New York firefighters academy.
When, according to Gallup, almost two-thirds of Americans disagree with race-based affirmative action, it would seem that choosing Perez as chairman would position the Democrats well outside the mainstream of America’s center-right majority.
And even the Department of Justice Inspector General seemed to see it that way. A 250-page internal DOJ Inspector General’s report blasted Perez’s division for its hothouse atmosphere of racial grievance mongering, “with several incidents in which deep ideological polarization fueled disputes and mistrust that harmed the functioning of the Voting Section.”
By electing “racial grievance mongering” Tom Perez as Chair and making Rep. Keith Ellison Deputy Chair, Democrats have differentiated themselves quite clearly from Republicans, President Trump and from the Democratic Party of FDR, JFK, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
Perez and Ellison ran on a platform of refining the Democratic Party’s techniques and organization, but that’s not what makes a political brand. The brand choice decision facing voters in coming elections won’t be about organization, it will be “what’s the benefit of embracing a party that makes racial polarization and illegal immigration core brand values?”
When Coke changed the formula of its iconic brand and called it New Coke, millions of consumers rebelled, and the soft drink giant was forced to bring back the old Coke consumers love.
For millions of independent voters concerned about making their families safe again and making their country great again the brand choice in future elections will be easy—and it won’t be voting for the newly rebranded radical Left Democrats.
However, once abandoned, it won’t be so easy for Democrats to bring back the old Democratic Party that they have now killed-off in favor of the radical Soros-backed social justice warrior elitism they’ve adopted, and their Far Left radical new brand is likely to remain a permanent minority for many years to come. {eoa}
Richard Viguerie transformed American politics in the 1960s and ’70s by pioneering the use of direct mail fundraising in the political and ideological spheres. He used computerized direct mail fundraising to help build the conservative movement, which then elected Ronald Reagan as the first conservative president of the modern era. As the “Funding Father of the conservative movement,” Viguerie motivated millions of Americans to participate in politics for the first time, greatly expanding the base of active citizenship. He is our era’s equivalent of Tom Paine, using a direct mail letter rather than a pamphlet to deliver his call to arms. George magazine credited this as one of the defining political moments of the 20th century.
This article was originally published at ConservativeHQ.com. Used with permission.
