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"A Play for Power"
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Remember New Coke? Say Hello to the New America!
In 1983, times were tough for Coca-Cola, the hometown brand. While sales of rival Pepsi were growing, Coke’s market share had shrunk to less than 24%. Experts said that future growth for the company’s flagship beverage would come from younger drinkers who seemed to favor Pepsi and its sweetness by overwhelming margins.
In a bold move overshadowed only by its stupidity, Coke CEO Robert Goizueta decided to shake things up. From then on, there would be no sacred cows in how the company did its business – including how it formulated its drinks. Desperate to regain the lead in cola sales, Goizueta initiated his own program of “change” that at least he could believe in.
Amidst much fanfare, New Coke was introduced on April 23, 1985. Speaking on National TV, Chairman Goizueta thumped his chest and proclaimed New Coke “smoother, rounder yet bolder.” He made it sound more like a fine wine than a carbonated soft drink.
In an equally bold and even more stupid move, we’ve seen a similar roll out of the “New America” by President Obama.
Much like Goizueta and the challenge to Coke by Pepsi, Obama and his cronies see the current economic crisis as an opportunity – something that high ranking members of Team Obama have openly repeated. It’s the view of many that just as the Great Depression allowed Franklin Roosevelt to initiate a number of programs that changed the society, the current economic crisis has given Obama his opportunity to change America. Change it from the minor league welfare state he inherited, to a full-fledged, European-style social democracy.
Now let me make this point clear: I no longer care who runs America. But I do care deeply how America is run and where we are heading. Charles Krauthammer, columnist for the Washington Post does too. This morning, he had this to say:
“(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons. In America, you can't get there from here directly.
“Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will probably not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.
“(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education – another way station to another universal federal entitlement. He lauded the country for establishing free high school education during the Industrial Revolution; he wants to put us on the road to doing the same for college during the Information Age.
“(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.
“But just picking winners and losers is hardly sufficient for a president who sees himself as world-historical. Hence the carbon cap-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night that will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.
“These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama's plan for remaking the American social contract.”
Since 2001, government spending in the United States has shot up from $450 billion to over $1.5 trillion now. Commenting on the latest in a series of spending sprees, a late night comedian observed that the Obama administration has effectively turned out the light at the end of the tunnel.
But here’s some good news: what goes around sometimes comes around.
Coca-Cola executives announced the return of the Coke Classic in the original formula on July 10, 1985, less than three months after the introduction of New Coke. According to archived news reports, “On that night, ABC News' Peter Jennings interrupted regular programming to share the news with viewers. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, David Pryor called the reintroduction "a meaningful moment in U.S. history”.
New Coke had the spotlight for only three months, but it cast a long shadow. Business folklore tells a cautionary tale and still today warns against tampering too extensively with a well-established and successful brand. I don’t know about you, but I still prefer classic America -- what she once was and what she can be.
If we survive this out-of-control mess – and there are those who wonder if we will – I predict the errant programs of the long, lanky, well-spoken dude that took over the White House in January will cast an even longer shadow than the tale of New Coke. History will long remember the $800 billion price tag of nine-hundred pages of pig food that no one in Congress or on Pennsylvania Avenue even bothered to read.
Back on North Avenue, no one at Coca-Cola was fired or otherwise held responsible for the huge misstep that was “New Coke”. Come the next election I pray that those that are now thumping their chests and rolling out NEW AMERICA won’t be so lucky.
Here’s some more good news: Volume for the classic brand of Coke has risen twenty-four percent since that fateful day in 1985. It’s been the number one soft drink in the land since 1987 and consumers have become even more loyal to the brand after it was temporarily taken away from them.
I wonder if Americans will react the same way if and when we get back our country from the hands of the left-wing, socialist do-gooders.