But over the last year the nature of the debate has really changed.

What changed? Well, I'm not exactly sure what caused this change but somewhere down the line Southwest Airlines decided to take a strong stand against the Wright ammendment. For a company that has existed for so long under the burden of the Wright ammendment, it is interesting to see how quickly and strongly they have made this argument a part of their culture.

Living in Dallas, the heart of the Wright ammendment controversy, makes it impossible to avoid Southwest Airlines full scale attack. There are clever ads on billboards and t.v. and there are wacky Southwest employees hanging out at the front gate of Ranger's games gathering signatures.

That is relatively impressive but living in this day in age it should not be too surprising to see corporate might and money thrown around by a good PR firm. What does impress me though is how effective Southwest has been in pushing the message via their every day employees.

Earlier this year, my wife tried to book a flight on Southwest to San Diego using a couple of tickets we had earned. She also wanted to book her parents on the same flight. Due to the Wright ammendment, you can't just fly straight there so we had to arrange a couple of hops and the whole thing got a little bit complicated to organize. In the process, her parents tickets were starting to get pretty expensive to keep them on the same flights we were taking.

Immediately, the Southwest employee on the phone steered the conversation toward the Wright ammendment and how that was to blame for our expensive tickets and complex itinerary. The tangent was brief, but somewhat surprising because it was the first time we had heard their employees openly discuss the issue without prompting.

The advertisement barrage continues and Southwest is now pushing folks to their specialized web site to lobby against the ammendment: http://www.setlovefree.com/

I must admit, as a traveller who prefers to use Southwest over American Airlines (can somebody queue the Darth Vader music?) it seems easy to support Southwest in this campaign. But the economics of the whole thing are pretty depressing. It is clear the ammendment is arbitrarily restricting business and adding inconvience to Dallas customers. It is also clear to me as a traveller that American Airlines has done nothing to earn my love due to their bad service and high prices.

Even though I live just a few minutes from DFW airport, I would almost always rather travel via Love Field and avoid the hassell of getting in, through and out of DFW. American says that Southwest should open operations in DFW and I think most customers, given no other parameters, would like to see them there too. It would increase our options, which is always what the customer wants.

But it also seems obvious that a portion of Southwest's charm is that everything at Love Field is easier than at DFW. And from a financial standpoint, it is obvious that Southwest would gain a lot more by the reversing of the Wright ammendment than they would gain by opening operations at DFW. Would they make some gains by opening operations at DFW, certainly, but the benifit for them is clearly not the same.

I have my doubts that Southwest will succeed in this battle. It seems like the forces against them are too strong and if the public is ever convinced that removing the Wright ammendment will cause DFW and American Airlines to spiral into destruction you can be sure that the public will choose the safe route and turn their support to the Wright ammendment.

I wonder just how far Southwest intends to take this battle and if they really think they can win. I assume they think the can, or else they would never have turned on the campaign in the first place. Or perhaps they knew it would fail but saw an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by fighting a losing battle and strengthening their image as the underdog that isn't afraid to do things differently.

That might be worth this whole campaign right there. I can't wait to find out how it turns out. But in the mean time, I'll keep my eyes out for their next clever billboard.