The Town Hall takeovers and Teaparty nonsense transformed the campaign for health care reform into a debate about a debate, rather than a discussion about how to care for sick folks.  Joan Walsh draws out the contrast pretty well: the debate at town halls has become more media friendly than the actual people who need health care.

For years, the Republicans kept a stranglehold on the national debate by effectively mobilizing values-laden language to frame how issues like health care were discussed.  Pro-public option folks had the opportunity to do the same thing by using the dramatic stories of Americans denied health care by for-profit insurers to force free marketeers to account for the damage wrought by a mainly private health care system.

Instead, the discussion got (intentionally) bogged down in a back and forth about ‘moving too fast’, ‘astro-turf’ and the disingenuousness of right wing claims about death-panels and the like.

The lesson?  Keep you eye on the ball, and you’ve more likely to hit a home-run.  Get distracted, and you’ll strike out.

This is not your father’s freedom rhetoric.  Gone are the soaring speeches and military pagentry – the new face of the free world features torture porn and techno.

I think NATO recognized the shifting terrain of political rhetoric, and made these ads to appeal to citizens in NATO countries that think and interract in radically different ways from 60 years ago.  Instead of talking about freedom as a clash of civilization between nation states, NATO is now talking about how and why freedom matters to individuals, in the most concrete way possible.

This is the type of messaging that progressives need to strive for: edgy, personal and concrete.  Even when working on a  campaign with sure-fire messaging (and who wouldn’t agree with freedom, right?), there’s a clear diffrence between stale appeals to principle, and the type of direct message that gets people fired up.