About a month ago I proposed that, in light of the Republican sweep to the south, the left needed to get its act together to re-assert its control of the centre. I started a list of topics that needed discussion as part of the over-all plan and this is the first of those discussions. In relation to communication, I wrote:

Communication - the right has spent over twenty five years creating shock-talk radio, evangelical TV and dumbed down newscasts as cornerstones of the new normal. The centre and left have to create something comparable. Air America is a great start as it is just shock talk reversed but that is not enough. The message has to be made pervasive. Low cost radio repeater transmitters should be George Soros's next big investment. Not jsut for Air America or NPR but more benign means of spreading the message, like all news stations that report the administrative and judical works of government with repect and treat "leaders" like the public servants they are and not modern royalty.

As part of this analysis we need to think about media and who uses which one - and move to focusing on where change can be made. I think that we can describe the important ones as these:

• radio
• TV news
• movies
• children's, self-help and sports TV
• the internet

Radio was probably the most important medium in years leading up to the last US election. Rush Limbaugh has done more to legitimize the concept in the USA that the conservatives have been hard done by and has done it so well that his mad hand-over-fist drug use has not been considered by conservative as...drug use. The key idea to be taken from this fact is that radio allows what is not to be. It creates a legitimate fantasy better than any other medium allowing people with personal grudges of little importance to attach that feeling to an idea claiming it to be of actual importance. By co-opting personal unhappiness as due to a leftist masterplan, Rush and the other radio commentators created an army of reds. Rather than attacking the right wing hosts, this is exactly what the left needs to do now. Air America is a start but its efforts need to drill down to the grassroots, speading the word that high spend and low tax is stealing from the poor, the schools and the future of the family. Community has to be redefined and made palatable as part of this effort. AM phone-in radio stations have to tell horror stories not of senseless control of guns and the loss of individual right but horror stories from the left - not of multi-nationals and the NRA but of thoughtless people driving over neighbour's lawns and creating road rage with SUVs and pick-ups, people dying in housefires after cutbacks to fire departments, towns shutting down after corporations move the reasonably profitable factories to insanely profitable third-world locations. In sum, the story of the left has to be retold at a level and by the radio station that the guy in the mall parking lot will listen to. This means transmitters and licenses and big money. Forget making movies to get the point across, leftie artist - buy a string of small market AM stations in a swing state.

TV news has a golden opportunity to get out of its prudish and dull rut now that everyone is jumping ship like rats. First, hire hosts that do not look that bright - that is why people like Cross-Fire and Fox News. Get these talking heads talking about the same stories being told on the new left AM dial. Plus, start telling the business news in a way that wouldn't make a industrial PR firm blush. Business news is about the manager as hero even now years after the managerial bubble burst. By pumping up the boss one gets the sense that the boss knows what is going on. An overly strong deference to executives is a strong card for the right that needs to be hit harder.

Movies are a vastly over-rated medium for conveying a message...at least messages relating to the clothed. The left has to drop the idea that movies change anything and invest their communications dollars elsewhere. This will be difficult as they are insanely profitable but, as you are only speaking to those who are already on your side, they are wasted effort. The movies that should be made are retreads of TV shows that promote collective remembrance of the eras of great democratic strength like the early 60s and the 90s - rocking good times about building public infrastructure and the information super-highway with soundtracks by Motown and Weezer.

Children's, self-help and sports TV are where the real break-through can be made, the day to day brain candy of all. Anyone who has watched any amount of children's and fix it up TV has witnessed a two dimensional glorification of the affluent sub-urban life. To rememdy this, Bill Cosby has to be chained in a production room and order people to make TV shows about people who live in small towns and the inner-city, telling them how to deal with challenges in making ends meet or how to get together with your neighbours to build a garden or shut a crack house. Everyone one wins when we work together. That sort of thing. Sports TV has to be taken over as well to reduce the role of the coach, the quarter-back or the pitcher and raise the profile of the linemen and the bench. National League baseball is key - bunt for the team, bunt for the team. Profiles of the individual sports heroes and their actual true crimes could also be played up.

Finally, the internet has to be grappled with. Despite the yapping up of blogs, Howie Dean proved that the medium is not to be controlled centrally. Not enough swing voters in swing states use it. So it has to be made to be useful to them. Like radio, this will call for some financially questionable investment to create a blue-supporting version of America On-line. Households in the undersupplied smalltown will receive high-speed internet infrastructure which conveys the world. ISP services must be supplied by a firm that out prices the alternatives which also provides skewed news services and email with a regular supply of only moderately irritating spam with re lines like "help fund your library" and "Keeping that factory in town" from fictitious senders named "Community N Need" or "Carry UR Share".

Soon the message will seep into the brain and the good folks of smalltown America will be lobbying for visits by Howard Dean to help cut the ribbon at the opening the new stripmall Hooters and asking why their taxes are so low given all the things folks ought to have. Now, that is not too much to ask for over the next four to eight years.