Wal-Mart’s recent travails may be reverberating in the business world, but they’re having just as big an impact on the political world. The Wal-Mart Wars, fought by two savvy sides armed with sophisticated arsenals of public relations weapons, offer a glimpse of how companies and their critics will duke it out for years to come. And politicians are taking note.

On one side you have Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart – the former received start-up cash from the Service Employees International Union, the latter is a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Both unions aim to organize Wal-Mart’s employees. On the other side is the new “War Room” operation of Wal-Mart itself, run out of Bentonville, Arkansas and utilizing the public relation skills of political veterans including Ronald Reagan’s communications guru Michael K. Deaver, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton’s media consultants.

Unlike other union organizing efforts, the campaign against Wal-Mart comes from the Michael Moore/MoveOn.org school: it has featured an anti-Wal-Mart documentary, anti-Wal-Mart blogs, campaign-style attack ads, even an automated phone system that called 10,000 people in Arkansas in June seeking potential whistle-blowers willing to share secrets about the retailer. Wal-Mart’s effort, too, is coordinated in the style of a presidential campaign, utilizing extensive outreach to reporters, rapid response to new attacks, spotlighting research on Wal-Mart’s positive economic impact on poor consumers, showcasing the company’s help for Katrina victims, and even a counter-documentary.

A recent controversy surrounding a pollster, John Zogby, illustrates the new style of public relations warfare. WakeUpWalMart commissioned Mr. Zogby to do some polling, and his results allegedly showed that the public has a low opinion of Wal-Mart.(Never mind that people are still shopping there like mad.) The poll was widely reported on CNN.com, Reuters, UPI, and the BBC. Unfortunately, when Mr. Zogby released the poll results December 1, he neglected to mention that he had been paid roughly $90,000 to serve as an expert witness for individuals suing Wal-Mart.

On Friday morning, Joel Mowbray reported in the Washington Times that Mr. Zogby had failed to disclose his previous financial ties to Wal-Mart critics. The Drudge Report quickly picked up the item. From there, more than 40 bloggers wrote about it. National talk radio hosts such as Cam Edwards discussed about Mr. Zogby’s failure to disclose his ties.

The natural initial reaction to this is, “Good for Wal-Mart.” An extraordinary political-style attack on one’s reputation warrants an extraordinary political-style counterattack. In fact, one can imagine a lot of companies that find themselves under fire using the “war room” tactic of rapid response and counterattack. Halliburton, Microsoft, pharmaceutical companies, the oil industry – any company that finds itself demonized has a right to defend its good name and remind consumers of why it and companies like it became so successful in the first place.

Especially interesting is that the same breed – politicians and their advisers – who first invented this kind of war room strategy are now relearning it themselves. When asked why Mr. Bush had refused to respond to Democratic attacks on his Iraq policy for much of the year, a senior administration official told Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard for the December 12 issue, “The strategic decision was to be forward-looking. The public was more interested in the future and not the past, since it was just hashed over during the election.”

We now see how the “forward looking” approach failed. After nearly a year of declining poll numbers, it’s as if someone recently flicked a switch in the White House. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the Republican National Committee are on offense again, taking their case to the American people with vigor and taking on their critics head-on. And Mr. Bush’s poll numbers are beginning to turn around. The clear lesson for the White House? If you let up, you concede the microphone to your opponents. There is nothing to be gained by speaking softly and counting on the American people to see through your opponents’ half-truths.

Our new war room culture is good for those in the public relations business, and it’s not bad for those of us in the news business, as we now have surrogate “campaigns” to cover in non-election years. The odd thing is, these campaigns have no election days. They have metrics, but no deadline. They just keep going, repeating cycles of attack and counterattack.

Last week, WakeUpWalMart released a commercial running in six states featuring a picture of a Bible-like tome and an off-screen narrator who says, “Our faith teaches us ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ If these are our values, then ask yourself: Should people of faith shop at Wal-Mart this holiday season?” Maybe this is a side effect of the 24-hour news cycle, or the blogosphere, or the hyper-politicization of America. We have now reached a point where the act of shopping at the world’s largest retailer can be deemed not merely wrong, but sinful and un-Christian.

This is America at the end of 2005: If you’re not on offense in a war room, you’re under attack.

Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor to National Review, is writing a book on how the September 11 attacks affected American politics, to be published by Simon & Schuster in August of 2006.