What's in a Name?

Ruth Marcus explores the Republican linguistic turn in the difference between "The Democrat Party" and "The Democratic Party" as used by President Bush in the last election. For example:

The derisive use of "Democrat" in this way was a Bush staple during the recent campaign. "There are people in the Democrat Party who think they can spend your money far better than you can," he would say in his stump speech, or, "Raising taxes is a Democrat idea of growing the economy," or, "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."

It seems that the use of the word is a way for Republicans to split the elites from the people:

The president isn't alone in his adjectival aversion to "Democratic" when it comes to the party. The provenance of the sneering label "Democrat Party" stretches back to the Harding administration. William Safire traced an early usage to Harold Stassen, who was managing Wendell Willkie's 1940 campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt. A party run by political bosses, Stassen told Safire for a 1984 column, "should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat party.' "

Democrat Party was used, pardon the phrase, liberally by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. According to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English, " Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence" by McCarthy, "who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic." The word also achieved a prominent run with Bob Dole's especially ugly reference to "Democrat wars" during the 1976 vice presidential debate.

Is this important? From the article:

" 'Democrat Party' is a slur, or intended to be -- a handy way to express contempt.... At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it's an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation."

Is there another derisive term for Republicans or is it just bad ethos to use this technique in the first place?