Here is the new Obama ad.

Will it do any good?
The Republicans just say the “liberal media” are biased, so you shouldn’t believe anything bad about them that you hea in the news. And Obama is a “liberal” and you don’t want that.
Here is the difference in this race: Conservatives have been bombarding the public for forty years with propaganda and lies about “liberals” and “the liberal media.” Liberals and progressive have been letting them get away with it. So after forty years much of the public has never heard the other side of the story and BELIEVES the propaganda.
Now, two months before the election, the Obama campaign is trying to put up ads in the face of forty years of unanswered propaganda. Good luck with that.
The real answer is to start TODAY building organizations to do the intellectual work, and channels to take that work to the general public. The far right has Fox and Rush etc. And the corporatists have the major TV networks. And they have Cato, Heritage, etc. doing the intellectual work, and there are all the pundits, etc. that these funded organizations employ. (And they pay very well.)

We haven’t built progressive infrastructure organizations that make the intellectual case. In just the last few years we have built up a very few like Media Matters. And we saw how one funded person, Paul Waldman, just destroyed jerome Corsi and his smear book on Larry King the other day. Look at how effective that was. That was just ONE funded person, but we can’t muster the support to employ hardly any more than that. We seem to be able to muster the money to run TV ads in the few weeks before an election, but not to employ people BETWEEN elections. Yet building progressive infrastructure costs so much less, and accmoplishes so much more.
Progressives still just focus on short-term election cycle work like Get Out The Vote efforts, TV ads. And they put all the effort into the short time just before the election. As if one candidate is going to come along and save us, so we don’t have to do the work of reaching the public… All that effort just goes away after the election, leaving nothing behind. The tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of TV ads just literally go up in the air. They don’t make a lasting case for supporting progressive policies, only the one candidate they are for and a few days later no one remembers. The campaign workers are left struggling to find jobs. The voters are left with no change.
Meanwhile the right and corporatists are working on the public year round, year in year out. Forty years of unanswered propaganda saying we have a “liberal media” that people shouldn’t listen to and guess what – the public believes it.