I keep saying this, but I say it because it's true. The Republicans have an echo chamber, and the Democrats don't. The ambient political position of the voters who get their opinions from free media is center-right to far-right. A high proportion of voters never hear a liberal opinion expressed at all -- not just the hard-core, cocooned right-wingers, but a lot of lazy people who don't have strong political opinions of their own.

For the last 18 years or so the Democratic strategy has been to accept public opinion passively and move continually to the right in order to pick up swing votes. (The people promoting this not-very-successful strategy have been, oddly enough, rightwing Democrats).

No energy has been put into getting a Democratic message out there, except every four years, and even then all that's done is to deliver piles of money to the major media in order to get them to deliver a weak, one-time election message which does nothing to build for the future.

We don't have our own message machine and we can't trust the major media. Under those conditions, trying to win by tweaking our position on this issue or that is a losing proposition.

Isn't it nice that even to mention health care is "evading the security debate"? Something in EJD's article, however good at reading Rove, is way off the mark when it comes to fighting Rove. That is, it's off the mark except to confirm how nicely the media, when pretending to be objective and even skeptical, end up parotting GOP spin.

I agree with the gist of what Matt and Dionne are saying but there is a more fundamental problem which applies to domestic issues as well: the Democrats lack coherence,stamina and message discipline. They seem to lack the ability to sustain broad themes over a period of years and instead flit from one issue to another presumably on the advice of pollsters and consultants.

Part of the problem is the absence of an echo chamber that John Emerson mentions since this makes it difficult to control the message but my guess is that it's a problem with the overall strategy as well.

For example in early 2002 the Democrats had a good line about the Enron economy: tying the corporate scandals to the Bush economic policies: the general idea being that both were based on fake numbers and false assumptions. This idea of Bush fudging the facts would have been a great overarching theme which could have encompassed many policy criticisms including in Iraq. They should have tied all those criticisms together into a broader theme like "trust", and sustained them all the way to 2004. Instead they seemed to move from one attack to another depending on the headlines.

As I said, some people are politically thoughtless and pick up their opinions from the air (i.e., free media). People like that are reflexive rightwingers these days, because that's all they hear.

Yes, the Republicans can trust the media to go to bat for them at key points. The media magnified the Wellstone funeral scandal in 2002, for example, couldn't have been better done if it had been orchestrated by Karl Rove, and maybe it was. They had a few hours to put something together, and they did a great job. Novak  and Noona played a role, and they are, in fact, Republican loyalists and operatives in the national media (the way Stephanopolous and Estrich are NOT Democratic loyalists).

Well, in the category of "gotta crawl before you can walk," can we at least get some Democratic talking heads to capably parrot some variation of this message:

"The Medicare prescription drug program is a mess.  This is what happens when Congress does what is best for the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies instead of the men and women in Medicare."

If the talking heads can handle that one, then maybe we can teach them to say things like, "there needs to be a warrant for a domestic wiretap" and "what, you want another Iraq?  Already?"

Have faith, Matt.  One of these days, the Republicans' fear-and-culture-war campaigns will fail to convince America to overlook their corruption and ineptitude.

Look at Canada, for instance-- Our very own Bizarro-America-- where the Conservatives lost the 2004 election to a corrupt Liberal Party because the conservative was painted as a scary anti-gay, anti-abortion, foreign policy hawk.

But after 2 additional years of corruption scandals and a lack of reform, the culture war rhetoric and fear-mongering wore thin.

Democrats need better standard bearers and better rhetoric on foreign policy issues, to be sure.  But you can't fool Americans indefinitely.  "Cry Wolf" politics bring diminishing returns, and with every passing election cycle more and more voters are going to be put off by the continuing inability of Republicans to do anything to justify their continued governance except to cynically flog 9/11.

Democrats should hammer Medicare Part D for all they're worth.  Put the bastards on the defensive for a change.

How about Katrina?  New Orleans is still a horror. THAT is national security.  Why not try something really radical like talking common sense to Americans for a change.  You aren't going to be killed by a terrorist.  You are going to die from all the normal stuff: natural disasters and disease that always kill people.  WWII killed 50 million people.  Some say 50 million people died within 12 weeks in 1918 of the flu.

Look I am one of those old folks who has many health issues!
and I now live on just a small SS disability check.  My medical costs are rising faster than the rockets fired at terrorists hiding in caves in Afghanistan!
I'm going in for second heart test the test will cost a min. of 40,000.00 dollars yes Medicare will pay 80%  The other 9, to 14,000.00 will come out of my 1,000.00 dollar monthly income. 
Yes it must come out of my other living expenses the costs for food, housing, utilities, transportation, and other medical costs for other problems.  Yes I am on the part D program it will help but getting control on big industry profits that cause these high costs may help too that part was not allowed in the drug program by the President and the GOP!  I worked all my life to end up in this mess that I did not create or even help to create and I sure didn't want it or expect it.  Human greed did cause it and the GOP feeds big money greed by taking it away from the disabilied and elderly like me and giving it to them who have more than enough to survive!  Come on working middle class before you end up like me!  And yep I'm mad as Hell! 
David

Remember, mid-terms always feel more local. And local media loves health coverage. The Medicare Part D-isaster will have Grandma Millies in every city and small town, local pharmacists who are paying for customers' drugs, state governments that are being burdened, and local representatives who either voted for or against the bill.

It's not the main plank in a platform, by any means, but it's a way of localising campaigns and showing that the decisions made by the lobby-fed Republicans in DC have direct effects on their constituents -- perhaps even more so than the pork that's shovelled their way.

It's a way to break the cliché that voters think all representatives are corrupt and useless except for their own.

And heck, you can do some fear-mongering too, without much of the mongering. Seniors will die because of this.

But I, at least, feel a noteworthy churning in my stomach when I hear liberals getting psyched up about running a midterm campaign on the issue of prescription drugs. Some of us remember the distant past of the . . . 2002 election, when this didn't work out so well.

Just what the Democrat Party needs. Another guy with a queasy stomach.

Medicare is a huge issue. Fight it. Even more important is the incompetence issue. Medicare Part D was brought to you by the same party who brought you FEMA, a $500 billion quagmire in Iraq, and Jack Abramoff. Start tying these things together. Fight on multiple fronts. Don't back down. Folks with queasy stomachs need not apply--get into the fray or get out of the way.