How to control national discourse and win elections, courtesy of the Republican National Committee:

1. Get really good at framing the debate. Pretty soon even your enemies will be saying "tax relief", "War On Terror", and "red state". Hell, with a little practice you can probably even get them to believe "liberal" is a 4-letter word!
2. Have your billionaire friends construct a conservative media infrastructure. You'll definitely need at least one 24-hour news network, plenty of talk radio nut-cases, and an army of pundits to shower your message to the "balanced" news networks.
3. Use your new framing skills (see #1) to produce a daily talking points memo about whatever issues you feel like emphasizing, and exactly how you want them discussed. Make sure all your little helpers (see #2) get the memo and stick to it.
4. Sit back and let human nature take over. As soon as people hear the exact same message from a few different sources, presto, it becomes "conventional wisdom". And lucky for you the "balanced" news networks, desperate for inexpensive relevance, wrote actual journalism off years ago, so odds are they'll pick up your finely-tooled propaganda and run with it like it's the gospel.

You watched the media coverage during this campaign, right? It was a painful lesson that we should have learned long ago, but better have learned now. Clearly, our good ideas just aren't enough. Do you really think there's something else Kerry could have said or some group he could have "targeted more" that would have made a difference once the media was finished with him? I really doubt it.

In a sane world this campaign should have been a cakewalk for the Democrats. Instead, the right took a lemon like George W. Bush, complete with reality crashing in around him, and transformed him in the public's mind into a frosty pitcher of lemonade, all the while dressing Kerry up in a rhetorical clown suit. Just imagine next time if they have a candidate that can actually talk!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to minimize just how close we've managed to keep it despite everything... but they've made this an extremely cut-throat game, and we have to start playing to win. We can't count on the media to just "be fair", it's not their job. Until we take it upon ourselves to build message discipline and a media infrastructure of our own to balance this out, we'd better just get used to losing elections.