Back right after the Dean campaign imploded, I felt like the most important thing I'd learned in my brief foray into politics was that the Democrats needed to do two things: 1) get a coherent message, styled along the lines suggested by George Lakoff, and 2) set up a network to distribute talking points with this message among liberal pundits and supporters, to hammer those points into the media stream.

To my great surprise and delight, number (1) has happened. The speeches were just brimming with Lakoff-ian inspired bits. Lakoff's ideas have caught on in the Kerry campaign, and it shows.

Sadly, we may blow it for lack of number (2). Where are all the Democrats repeatedly endlessly that Kerry will "restore trust and credibility" to the White House, that "help is on the way," that Kerry knows that "we're all in the same boat?" Why do I feel like Kerry and Edwards are out there flying solo with their message?

And while we're at it, why isn't the Kerry campaign instructing all their prominent supporters how to shoot down the Republican talking point that "Kerry and Edwards are number one and number four most liberal Senators?"

This raises an important question, one that has future ramifications as well as immediate ones.

Solid steps have been taken to start the creation of a center-left infrastructure of various kinds of institutions (527s, foundations, think-tanks) to counter that built by the right in the past 30+ years, and that's good, but very little has been done to try to even things out in the media, with the exception of Air America -- and the jury's still out on how much influence it will have. Without some sort of progressive media establishment to do battle with the one currently dominated by the right-wing, that Great Wurlitzer can continue to make sure that the only tune we hear is the one that it plays.

(The effect is so strong, and the reach so pervasive, that even mainstream media purveys only watered-down versions of the radical-conservative play list, embodied not so much in the content offered -- although it's certainly there as well -- as in the assumptions under which they make their choices and present their wares. In that environment, it's always liberal and progessive ideas that are forced to run the gantlet before being considered or presented, and conservative ideas -- some of them quite antithetical to true American values -- which are presumed to be normal or usual.)

So that's the big program, the long-term need, to create some version of a Wurlitzer of our own. Blogs help, the big ones anyway, but they're not sufficient, they cannot carry the weight that mass media can carry. In the end, someone with resources similar to Murdoch's -- like Soros, for instance -- is going to have to bite the bullet and buy into the media marketplace in a big way to create what is needed. The big media we have now are just too skewed to be nudged back into place, and must instead be supplemented or replaced.

In the meantime, however, why isn't Kerry using the DNC in the way that Bush uses the RNC, as the central headquarters for the distribution of talking points and scripted messages? And while we're on the subject of keeping on message, why hasn't someone strongarmed Joe Lieberman yet? Obviously, his conscience isn't going to reign him in, so somebody else will have to be his Jiminy Cricket and get the bastard to shut up.