Center For American Progress Launching Big War Room To Drive Obama AgendaThe 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.”
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/labor/center-for-american-progress-launching-big-war-room-to-drive-obama-agenda/ :woohoo: