[The following is a blog post summary as a courtesy to the readers of MyDD]

Obama Campaign & Democrats,

The ultimate outcome of McCain's VP pick is an unknown, despite the fact that pundits are having a field day prognosticating, and partisans are earning their pay framing and reframing McCain/Palin. In dealing with the Palin wild card, the Obama campaign and Democrats will be best served by seeing through the noise, focusing on the most fertile issues that this VP pick raises, and framing the issues in a way that makes McCain's brand less impressive to the general public.

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The April issue of Fast Company® has a cover story on the Branding of Obama.  I thought now would be a good time to explore the marketing and polishing of the Brand.

The Fast Company article is favorable for Obama, please read it.

I've been somehow involved with marketing for most of my life and I love to step back from my Hillary supporter self and look at the marketing aspects of  this campaign.  From John Edwards as the people's champion to Hillary as the stable mother figure, I've been intrigued at the approaches taken by the various marketeers.  

No campaign strategy in my memory comes close to the total control of message and outright branding of the persona of Senator Barack Obama.  And make no mistake, this is classic product branding executed as well as any major corporation would in launching their newest flagship product.  

My marketer's cap must be tipped to David Axelrod.  What a job he has done.  We sometimes grumble about the millions people like Joe Trippi get for helping Howard Dean and John Edwards lose but Axelrod has earned every penny.  

From Fast Company

The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing -- about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace -- and, potentially, the global one -- is moving.

They go on to say

"Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand," says Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. "New, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets." Obama has his greatest strength among the young, roughly 18 to 29 years old, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as millennials -- who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. They are black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, but what they share -- new media, online social networks, a distaste for top-down sales pitches -- connects them more than traditional barriers, such as ethnicity, divide them.

Let's try and explore what David Axelrod has acomplished to create this brand.

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My title is kind of a joke.

Anyway - according to NBC News/McClatchey, the following has occurred over the last two weeks:

Hillary's brand has deteriorated drastically while Obama has remained fairly steady in the face of his worst press of the cycle (the Wright flap).

Here's the data:

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Chris Bowers found some interesting results in the latest Zogby poll yesterday. The poll is titled a Report Card On Prejudice In America and judges not only people's own prejudices but also their impression of the prejudices of their fellow Americans. One of the hilarious conclusions of the poll:

[Respondents] think most Americans believe...Republicans are most responsible for many of the world's ills.

The breakdown of the ills and the extent to which people believe Americans hold the different parties accountable for them are as follows:

War: 62% blamed Republicans vs. 14% Democrats
Global Warming: 56% blamed Republicans vs. 10% Democrats
Prejudice: 52% blamed Republicans vs. 22% for Democrats
Poverty: 49% held Republicans accountable; 29% Democrats
Corruption: 47% blamed Republicans vs. 31% Democrats
Crime: On this issue, respondents reversed the trend, with 42% blaming Democrats vs. 23% Republicans

I doubt we can draw from this that people actually blame the Republican Party for problems such as global warming and prejudice (although some might beg to differ) but rather I think it reflects people's general sense that the Democratic Party represents the solution to the biggest crises facing our country and the Republican Party, part of the problem.  

This finding is echoed in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, which finds:

when it comes to judging the president versus congressional Democrats on the issue of Iraq, the public stands with Congress. Fifty-five percent said they trust congressional Democrats on the war, compared with 32 percent who said they trust Bush. (Eleven percent of all respondents and 17 percent of independents said they trust "neither.")

This in a poll in which congressional Democrats get just 35% approval on Iraq. As with most polls, this one reveals great disappointment with the Democrats but relative to Bush and the Republicans, it's no contest.

Which brings me to a larger question: does this sound like an electorate clamoring for bi-partisanship? If anything, these results show a decided partisan bias and would certainly contradict those that have for months maintained that November's election was a vote not for Democrats but for bi-partisanship. Well, people may want the partisan bickering to stop but it's not because they want Democrats to work WITH Republicans. They've seen what that's gotten us. No, these results point to an electorate that wants Republicans out of the way. Or as Bowers says:

Bush has destroyed the Republican brand, and so we are going to win a lot of elections in the next few years. As such, progressives have to start thinking a lot more about how Democrats can govern in a progressive fashion, and work to make that happen. The short-term crisis of stopping conservative Republican governance has already been partially averted, and will soon be averted entirely. Progressive focus needs to turn towards governance.

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A friend of mine, a local (Frederick, MD) entrepreneur and Democratic
activist, runs a startup company called In Pictures. They just launched
their new website, which provides free online computer how-to tutorials.
They sent out a press release to promote it; blogger response, he said, was
really good, but the print media have pretty much ignored it.

Except for one case. And this is where it gets interesting.

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