Apparently if all of your methods to woo voters don’t work, use the ones the other guys did for eight years: call the Democrats by new names.

Politico’s Roger Simon is reporting, that among other things, a conference of the Republican National Committee will vote to re-brand the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”  Apparently Steele tried to stop it but wasn’t too successful:

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”

By the way, while I attacked Democrats in my first sentence, calling the other party names to make them sound bad is a very bi-partisan thing, and is nothing new in this country.  In the past, Democrats have demonized the term “neo-conservative” while Republicans were by-and-large successful in demonizing the term “liberal” so much that liberals began to prefer calling themselves “progressives”.  The Republicans started on that one over the last eight years, but I don’t think they had too much success with it.

The trouble is that while both sides can call eachother all the names they want, it’s not going to get anything done.  And it could be a PR nightmare if the Democrats have anything to say about it.

I think Allahpundit at HotAir puts it best:

More than anything, this reeks of impotence, operating almost as a concession that the right’s argument on the merits that the left is evolving towards socialism isn’t working to shift public opinion. So now they’re going to up the ante by trying the hard sell: Just repeat “socialism” as much as possible to try to drive it into people’s skulls, never minding the fact that that term’s already lost some of its taboo and might well lose more as it goes further mainstream. Or at least, I hope that’s the GOP strategy here. The alternative, that they’re simply sticking their fingers in their ears and repeating “socialist” over and over out of spite like a five-year-old, is too depressing to contemplate.

As I said before, the Republicans have had some prior success in doing this type of thing.  So it could work, but also perhaps it won’t.  After all, the Republicans had the entire ’50s, and at one time, the power of a majority in Congress to try and demonize (and indeed, investigate) liberals as socialists.  It didn’t work out so well in the end, besides perhaps some residual fear over using the label ‘liberal’.  I’m not sure why they think it will work now.  I guess they think that fighting fire with fire is the only way to go, even though they all regularly denounced being called neo-cons by the Dems.

Worse, the Democrats are sure to use it as “yet another reason Republicans are out of touch with America.”  They’ve already had quite a bit of success in manipulating the news cycles to do this, so do Republicans really want to play with this fire?  Guess so.

Maybe instead of spending time making up new names with which to to demonize Democrats, they should try and work to get their chances in shape for the elections next year.  Even better, with an impending 60 vote majority in the Senate, they should try making some alliances with the Blue Dogs so that not every dream bill in the liberal play book is a success.  Not that it would be, anyway, but trying to impede an overwhelming success by the liberals can only be a good thing.

P.S. Michael, if you’re wondering why most Americans don’t know the difference between real socialism and the stuff promoted by the Democrats these days, decades of this kind of thing is at least part of the reason why.