Center For American Progress Launching Big War Room To Drive Obama Agenda
The Center for American Progress — which has emerged as perhaps Washington’s most influential idea factory in the age of Obama — is launching a major new war room, to be staffed by nearly a dozen people, that will focus on driving the White House’s message and agenda, I’m told.
The Democratic operatives running the project are already holding a daily early morning call with dozens of operatives from liberal groups — labor, health care, the environment — to coordinate messaging and to deliver usable talking points for the day, according to liberal operative Jennifer Palmieri, who’s the project’s communications director.
The new war room — which is called Progressive Media — represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars. The goal of the war room will be to do hard-hitting research that boils down complex policy questions into usable talking points and narratives that play well in the media and build public support for the White House’s policy goals.
“We’re trying to break policy down into digestible bits that mean something to people,” Palmieri says, citing as an example an analysis the group did finding that 14,000 people a day are losing health care.
The war room — a joint project of CAP Action Fund and Media Matters Action Network — will be headed by well-known liberal operative Tara McGuinness, who worked on John Kerry’s presidential campaign and was a major player in the anti-war movement during the Bush years.
The morning calls are key to the effort to present a united liberal front — something that the Obama White House had already been working to build among outside groups.
“We do a coordination call to get our content out and to coordinate people so they can fire up for the day,” Palmieri says, adding that the group will work with the White House “only informally.”
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I likes this a whole lot.
On the one hand I like this pro-active approach and CAP has been quite good on a limited scale. On the other hand, when is the progressive/liberal infrastructure going to have the funding to come up with think tanks in order to create push back on policy like the rightwing has (see, i.e., American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Manhattan Project and several others)?
And please don’t give me Brookings, with O’Hanlan and Pollack and the rest of the warmonger clowns. I mean serious progressive policy that will create framing and language to combat the insanity of the rightwing echo chamber, and combat wording and absurd phrasing like “death tax” and “pro life” and “clean skies” and the rest of the Orwellian double speak that AEI pumps out daily.
On the other hand, when is the progressive/liberal infrastructure going to have the funding to come up with think tanks in order to create push back on policy like the rightwing has
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any funding to fund anyone else right now.
Trust me there is plenty of money out there. I am sure Bill O will say it all comes from George Soros. But this is EXACTLY what we need. So many times Conservative (read wingnut or neocon) thinktanks are quoted by Republicans as justification for their wrong headed positions. Hopefully Democrats will be able to use Progressive Media in the same way.
Nor do I, however, it wasn’t the fundamentalist base that funded AEI, it was the Mellon-Scaifes, Sheldon Adelsons, Coors, Bechtels, etc. who funded it, primarily (if not solely) to provide cover for their corporate robber baron greed.
We have some billionaires on our side as well, time for them to start funding some longer lasting and larger concepts than voting irregularities.
And please, the right-wing funds ‘junk tanks’ or ‘message marketeers.’
No thought is allowed, or their little heads would ‘es-plode’!
Cal Damage | March 10th, 2009 at 03:02 pm
And please, the right-wing funds ‘junk tanks’ or ‘message marketeers.’
No thought is allowed, or their little heads would ‘es-plode’!
My head explodes at the very thought of tree huggers ruining this once great country
Tony,
Please don’t try to change the topic, this is very important stuff. Also, you know how your master hates it when you are late with his afternoon oxycontin and viagra cocktail. Do yourself a favor and run along before your master gets angry.
With Obama’s foreign policy is best summarized in this clever satire:
Swedish scientists prove Obama should not be compared to a chimp
I had the great honor of interning on a campaign that Tara McGuinness worked for—she is incredibly smart and competent. CAP’s war room should be great.
This is being run by the same group that was Progressive Media during the last election, which became Progressive Accountability. Most of the staffers fled because their entire mission changed due to lack of funding.
They changed their name and were luckily taken under Media Matters and CAP to retain some credibility due to losing most of it because they couldn’t fundraise and therefore couldn’t run their big expensive ads and then became a research group who lost their best researchers!
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