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.