“They’ve kept this pretty tightly under wraps for a while, but tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. the House Democrats are going to unveil a big splashy new position package, along the lines of the old GOP revolutionaries’ Contract With America (only, you know, without all the horrible ideas). I heard that the Dems were originally thinking about actually calling this thing the Democratic Contract With America, but they appear to have thought better of the idea and are now calling it the New Partnership for America’s Future.

This, just like Newt Gingrich’s old Contract, seems primarily to be a marketing gimmick, but here’s why you might want to get excited about it: The Dems who’ve been working on this for months are apparently very, very interested in improving the party’s effectiveness in framing issues and packaging positions in ways that resonate with voters. They’ve studied a lot of what Republicans have done over the last two decades and are making a conscious initial effort here to present a coherent, simple, bold agenda — just six points, I hear — that the caucus can get behind and promote and try to hammer into voters’ minds (it’s also a handy platform for congressional candidates to run on in November, just as Gingrich’s army of GOP freshmen did with the Contract in 1994). The folks in Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic leadership office who’ve been working on this apparently did lots of sophisticated polling and even enlisted the help of the Berkeley linguist and writer George Lakoff, author of this Prospect piece and this new book on the GOP’s effectiveness in framing issues. So whatever comes of this it’s at least heartening to see some real effort and attention to these issues on the Democratic side.”