Excellent Michael Woolf piece in April Vanity Fair

Just caught up with this terrific, horrific, Michael Woolf piece on the Scooter trial/affair in the April Vanity Fair.

Around the corner from the trial of Scooter Libby, during a late-afternoon break, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, was telling me that the Republican Party is kaput. "The brand isn't just sick—it's dead. The G.O.P. is cracking up." (Luntz is a marketer marketing his new book, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear, about political marketing, and knows he needs a compelling message. We have a brief discussion about whether his thesis about the end of the Republicans might get him some publicity.) The Bush administration, in other words, could well have brought one of the greatest marketing and P.R. success stories of the modern era—the rise of conservatism and the Republican Party—to an end.

Scooter Libby struggled to stay afloat as Karl Rove, Tim Russert, and Dick Cheney stayed safe. Illustration by Daniel Adel.

It may be smart to analyze the Libby trial and the Republican Party in marketing rather than political terms. Effective marketing is the Republican lifeblood—developing and crafting and delivering the message. (more)