If you want to know in advance what messages the Republicans are planning to send to voters, you could join a GOP mailing list and get regular GOP insider updates. Or you could just read the first third of any Adam Nagourney story in the New York Times, like this one, and get the party's spin points presented in almost identical language (if cleverly disguised as objective reporting):

President Bush will present what aides say will be a detailed second-term agenda when he is nominated in New York in 10 days, part of an ambitious convention program built on invocations of Sept. 11 and efforts to paint Senator John Kerry as untrustworthy and out of the mainstream.

Mr. Bush's advisers said they were girding for the most extensive street demonstrations at any political convention since the Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey in Chicago in 1968. But in contrast to that convention, which was severely undermined by televised displays of street rioting, Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

And after months in which Mr. Bush stressed issues of concern to conservative supporters - from restrictions on stem cell research to a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage - the convention will offer its national television audience a decidedly more moderate face for the president and his party. If "strength" was the leitmotif of the Democratic convention in Boston, "compassion" will be the theme in New York, marking the return of a mainstay of Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign, party leaders said.

...Most of all, Mr. Bush's aides said that after five months in which they have focused almost exclusively on attacking Mr. Kerry, the president will use his speech to offer what they asserted would be expansive plans for a second term, in an effort to underline what they argued was Mr. Kerry's failure to talk about the future at his own convention.

"This speech has to lay out a forward-looking, positive prospective agenda," said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior political adviser. "It has to show - and to defend in a way the American people want to hear - his policies on the war on terror."

... Ed Gillespie, the national Republican chairman and a senior Bush campaign adviser, argued that Mr. Kerry had missed an opportunity at his convention by spending too much time talking about his biography and Mr. Bush, reflecting Mr. Kerry's effort to use his convention to present himself as strong enough to carry the nation through a time of war.

"They left people feeling hungry for substance," Mr. Gillespie said. "We will not make that mistake in New York. We will come out of there with specific proposals for the future for a new term."

Does Nagourney ever lie awake at night and wonder if his life is a waste? I know the answer to that is no, and I know why he thinks he's a newsman rather than a useful idiot and a hack -- he coats this stuff in a (very) thin layer of skepticism, and most of his stories strive for some sort of balance after he's spent the first eight or nine paragraphs summarizinfg the GOP spin. He reads what he's written all the way to end and thinks he's been fair. And he probably thinks the wee bit of skepticism up front proves his objectivity.

But it doesn't. It's just what the GOP wants -- spin that seems like objective reporting. The thin layer of skepticism is a nice little delivery system; casual readers don't think they're being spun. And many casual readers won't read Nagourney's stories all the way through, so putting all the spin points up front is a gift to the GOP as well.

UPDATE: Someone else who read this article has told me she disagrees with my take on it -- she finds it essentially objective. I accept that. She does, however, sense something fishy in this passage:

Republicans said they would seek to turn any [convention] disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

What's with that "even independent activists"? All the demonstrators are "independent activists." None of the demonstrations are Democratic Party activities; the Democratic Party undoubtedly wants New York to be as quiet and disruption-free as possible, knowing that any unrest plays into Bush's hands. An exquisitely subtle insinuation -- and Nagourney put it right up front.