This is an interesting read. WalMart has been stepping up their PR activities a great deal over the past year. This is their latest effort – a rapid response war room:

A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room – New York Times

BENTONVILLE, Ark., Oct. 26 – Inside a stuffy, windowless room here, veterans of the 2004 Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns sit, stand and pace around six plastic folding tables. Open containers of pistachio nuts and tropical trail mix compete for space with laptops and BlackBerries. CNN flickers on a television in the corner.

Two of the players are “Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan’s image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton’s media consultants…”