It is important to understand that "our image" isn't ours at all but the image that capitalist institutions and mass media have created about us, as they once created demonized images of ablitionists, woman's rights advocates(they still do that in many instances) and earlier advocates of capitalism itself when it was transforming the feudal system. We have got to fight first of all for greater visibility and for our rights as we fight for the rights of the working class and for socialism. We have got to fight for the right to access to media to give people a chance to hear us, realizing that they will bring with them the baggage of anti-Communism. On the difference between Democrats and Republicans, it is a little more complicated for us and for the broad left. The Democrats get most of their votes from lower income people, working people, and people in the salaried professions who are generally progressive in their viewpoints. These are their "customers," so to speak. Their "investors"are the same class of capitalists which also invest in the Republicans, the first being, as one Communist said in the 1930s like "preferred stock"(the Republicans) the second like "common stock"(the Democrats). Politics like everything else is a dialectical process. For the capitalists as a class(not the various segments) the Republicans are almost always preferred over the Democrats but the Democrats, particularly the machine types in the North and the Clinton types in the South are more than acceptable because they can be easily bought and always have been. Non socialist progressive Democrats are another story in that they are preferred only when compared to advocates of socialism, nationalizers of capitalist industry, etc., but these progressive or liberal-labor Democrats have the political system stacked against them so they can't get the funding to get the media to get nominations(like Kucinich) or if they do, like John Kerry, who qualified in Massachusetts as a labor-liberal Democrat, have to move significantly to the right as Kerry did to make themselves "acceptable" to the capitalist class. Our role as a vanguard party is to confront these and other real political problems for the the advance of the working class and come forward with solutions which the working class will respect. If we do that we will make great headway in overcoming the capitalist propaganda against us.
By the way, whatever happened in the Soviet Union or other socialist countries, the capitalist propaganda against us would have continued to be savage and unrelenting, and any attempt by us to compromise with it would have put us in a worse situation. As a student of history, I can tell all comrades young and old that even during World War II, when support for the Soviet Union was never greater and even Republican politicians were praising the Red Army and conservative newspapers were saying nice things about "Uncle Joe" Stalin, conservatives in Congress were regularly saying that Communists in America were still no good un-American subversive agitators even though the Soviets were our "heroic allies" and Stalin was a pretty good guy!

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“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” —Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois