‘New Coke’ rivals health care rollout

When it comes to colossal product launch flops, you’d be hard pressed to top the epic failure of New Coke. People perfectly content with “the real thing” had no interest whatsoever in the product despite a massive marketing and public relations campaign.

And while the jury’s still out on whether or not it’s a bigger flop than New Coke, it’s undeniable that the October rollout of the Chosen One’s health care boondoggle also has been a colossal failure of epic proportions. And I’m not just talking about the bug-plagued HealthCare.gov website.

Alas, the website catastrophe is likely to be Obamacare’s high water mark. Because there’s no way on God’s green earth to put enough lipstick on this pig. Not since “Read my lips, no new taxes” has a president been caught telling the American people a whopper as big as “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Indeed, I predict voters will be heading to the polls next November with virtual pitchforks and torches in hand.

Only Republicans, who never blow an opportunity to blow an opportunity, could possibly blow this opportunity.

Meanwhile, in what is presently the only competitive congressional race in Nevada, the Democrats’ Golden Girl, Congressional District 3 candidate Erin Bilbray-Kohn, who should have come out of the gate like Seattle Slew, instead stumbled out like Francis the Talking Mule (ask your grandma).

Bilbray-Kohn has been training Democrat candidates for years and was lining up financial support for months before officially announcing her challenge to Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nevada) back in July. Yet on Day One of her coming out party, Bilbray-Kohn slammed Heck for casting a vote that Heck never cast. Oops.

And it’s been all downhill since … including a rather anemic third-quarter fundraising total for a candidate running in a Top Five battleground race.

Then there was her first big media interview in October, after ducking the press for three months, in which she called Rep. Heck — a military surgeon in the United States Army — “un-American” while simultaneously accusing him of being anti-woman, an absurd charge completely debunked even by liberal reporters and columnists.

Now that those attacks have backfired, the campaign has switched gears and is now attacking Heck on the illegal immigration issue. But again, it’s the self-professed liberal media that has come to Heck’s defense, debunking the myth that Heck is some kind of Mexican-hating white supremacist.

I mean, things are so bad so early in the Bilbray-Kohn campaign these days that Democrats have had to trot out their Big Gun early. No less than Sen. Harry Reid himself is now fully engaged in the effort to salvage Bilbray-Kohn’s New Coke campaign.

But as with New Coke, don’t be surprised to see Congressional District 3 voters stick with the real thing next November.

Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a conservative grass-roots advocacy organization. He can be reached at www.muthstruths.com