How do you plant a political message and watch it grow into an expression on the tip of everyone’s tongue? If you’re the Republican Party, you take a term like “class warfare”, get your leaders and like-minded pundits to say it over and over, and, within a couple of days, it’s stuck in voters’ brains like a successful television commercial jingle.

It doesn’t even matter that you’re fighting a real plan with a mere label. Your phrase becomes the basis for the debate. Then, President Obama has to come back first by denying that he’s guilty of the label being applied to him, and then embracing the label as a badge of honor.

Either way, it’s much better when your side controls the frame and the labels that get applied to you and your opponents.

The Republican communications machine includes a powerful echo chamber, comprised of Fox “News”, right wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh, etc.), Republican elected officials and their surrogates, and others. Almost all of them are on the same page with the same talking points on a daily basis. Thus, Republican words and phrases, carefully crafted to benefit Republicans (e.g., “job creators”, “Obamacare”, etc.), get repeated through the right wing echo chamber and get absorbed into the mainstream. As a result, these words and phrases often become the basis for our political debate, giving the Republicans a huge home field advantage.

The Democratic echo chamber, in contrast, is tiny. There is little apparent effort, from the Obama White House or elsewhere, to coordinate a daily message using simple talking points, or, if there is, it has been a miserable failure. Likewise, there isn’t much of a discernible communications machine through which to echo that message through television and radio hosts, and then through viewers and listeners themselves.

That’s why a recent example of a Democratic talking point repeated by someone in the mainstream media was a pleasant surprise. President Obama said on the Tom Joyner Morning Show radio program on August 30 regarding anticipated negative reaction to his jobs plan by Congressional Republicans:

If Congress does not act, then I’m going to be going on the road and talking to folks, and this next election very well may end up being a referendum on whose vision of America is better.

Then, just a few hours later, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said on MSNBC‘s “Hardball”, on the same subject:

Well, I think for the next 15 months, both sides can take their case to the American people and let them decide.

While Robinson’s language was not identical to Obama’s, it was very close, and the idea was exactly the same. Thus, it appears that Robinson heard President Obama on Tom Joyner a few hours earlier and sought to echo the President’s sentiment. If Democrats want to compete with Republicans, they will have to create a messaging echo chamber, and do much more of this.

Here’s an enlightening post from the Daily Kos published at the end of last year, entitled “If it’s Wednesday, it Must be an Unprecedented Power Grab”. The post highlights the Republicans’ use of the term “power grab” over the years to describe a wide variety of Democratic proposals, from Senate procedures to the auto company bailout to the Clean Water Restoration Act, with which the Republicans disagree.  As the post indicates, “it’s a standard play, like so many of their Frank Luntz focus group-tested go-to phraseology.” (emphasis added).

Note also how this is a perfect example of Messaging Maxim #2: Rinse and Repeat. Sometimes the Republicans gussie up the phrase “power grab” with alarming adjectives like “unprecedented”, “major”, and “biggest”, but at the root is always the underlying phrase “power grab”.  That phrase will now take its rightful place on the ever-expanding list of Political Phrases Used by Republicans.

You have to hand it to the Republicans: they know how to stay on message, and it can be extremely effective, especially until folks like us and the Daily Kos bring it to people’s attention.