There is no TV so we need a War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Why were Democrats hammered so bad, after doing so much? Is my own "thesis" dead?

Much of the explanation lies in Jon Stewart's speech above, where he complains about cable TV yakkers not acting more like, say, Walter Cronkite.

TV is dead.

TV, as a medium, has been dying for decades. It's been dying since Ted Turner first saw the opportunity in bouncing a signal from his WTCG off a satellite with re-runs of "The Andy Griffith Show" in the mid-1970s.

What killed TV is the same force that made Jon Stewart possible. It was the disappearance of the mass media market created by cable.

Back in Cronkite's day a show needed a 30 share to be considered a success. Now "Mad Men" is a big hit even though it gets a rating of less than 1.

The right business strategy is to niche. You do what magazines do. You find people who are passionate about something and serve them, only them. Whether the passion is for food or comedy, sci-fi or romance, right or left, cable networks aren't newspapers.

They're magazines.

This is what Fox learned in the 1990s, what MSNBC learned in the last decade, what CNN still doesn't understand. There is no such thing as mass media on TV. There is only niche media.

That doesn't mean there isn't a mass market. There is. WalMart proves it. Coca-Cola proves it. Visa proves it. We come together in the marketplace even if we don't come together for entertainment.

Instead, from our couches, bedrooms or offices, we each go our own way. That's the message of the Internet medium.

What this means for politics is that our media mix has gone back in time over 150 years, to the days before Hearst and Pulitzer, before Mark Twain, even before Abraham Lincoln. We're talking way back, to the days when every ethnic, political and religious community had its own media, and when journalism's "leaders" were just small entrepreneurs trying to get ahead.

This is the business environment that gave birth to "The New York Times," the 1850s. Success then meant having a point of view. The Times sent young Frederick Law Olmsted (right) into the South, where he reported that white southerners were as enslaved by slavery as black ones, because such labor had made them lazy.

It was a caricature. Olmsted was being Rachel Maddow or Shepherd Smith, not Walter Cronkite or Ralph McGill. He wasn't speaking for the whole community, just to a specific community, and by organizing as well as advocating for that community the Times grew.

Later, of course, Olmsted himself became a mass market brand. After the Civil War he became a famous designer of parks and green city centers. Asked why he was designing things that could never be fully formed in his lifetime, he told the future "We did this for you."

This is the Olmsted we remember, but it's important to know both men.

TV today is like the magazine business was when I went into journalism school. There is no single center, no single source. It's like "Car & Driver" (Speed TV) and "Gourmet" (Food Network).

What Stewart's rally was, in a way, was a call to an America that no longer exists, which has moved on.

Question is, what does that mean for our politics, what does that mean for this President, and for Presidents yet to come?

It means they're brands.

Brands stand for something in the marketplace. In the mass market they say, "if you want this then I'm the only choice." You can have regional and local brands, not just national ones. And you don't just become a brand through advertising.

As Rob Frankel (left) has written for over a decade now, you become a big name brand by finding your strength and delivering on its promise. If you're a store ask, is my strength my knowledge, my breadth of stock, my price, my service, or something specific I have that no one else has?

Like good shoes for big feet. Every NBA star knows about Friedman's Shoes in Atlanta. Never mind that it's on Mitchell Street, in a dicey part of downtown. When they come here they make a beeline for the place, because it's the only choice.

That's what a brand is, the only choice for those it targets.

This is why Barack Obama is President. His campaign saw this coming and they made him a brand. They had a unified image, they had a scaled server, they had a single message from which they did not deviate.

But the laws as they are don't let you maintain that infrastructure in the absence of a campaign. Obama went to Washington, sought to govern, and found himself dealing with 535 brands, each engaged in a permanent campaign, each with its own image to maintain, each with its own market to serve. He let his infrastructure collapse, in part because the campaign laws told him he was supposed to do that, and so he was easily overwhelmed Tuesday.

What he's faced with now is the need to rebuild that brand. He has to decide what it means, today. He has to create an agenda based on abundance, which is what America most wants. He has to have consistent messaging, a specific image conveying that message, and he has to go on a permanent campaign.

The good news in this week's election is that, with the opposition now dominating Capitol Hill, he has the opportunity to create a national brand in contrast to that. And, given the calendar, he has the deadline of the 2012 election giving impetus to that effort.

But it has to be a national brand. It has to be based on his strengths, with a consistent message of hope, and with specific steps he's willing to risk his office for in order to deliver on that promise.

The War Against Oil offers that message. He ignored it in this campaign. He just said, "we did our best and we're better than the other guys." That's a lousy branding message. Imagine if your car or your soft drink came to the market with that message — would you still buy it? (I wouldn't.) So he was rightly hammered.

The War Against Oil is the promise of abundance. Energy from devices can go down in price, as devices improve with Moore's Law, with research, with mass production,with simple conservation. Energy from resources will never do that. Its price will always rise with demand, never fall. It will always have us fighting one another within an economics of scarcity, and with politics as a zero-sum game.

Al Gore was right on the merits of his argument. Our planet is boiling itself in oil. But his messaging was all wrong. People don't buy what might happen in 20 years. They buy what will work for them right now.

A War Against Oil, energy from devices whose prices decline with time and knowledge, offers that promise of abundance. Simply put Republicans in the box they made for themselves, defending the interest of the oilagarchs and the other resource billionaires, and you have a branding message that can not only win an election in the cable TV era, but deliver policy that works for all of us.