Campaign Poetry: America

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Republican candidates have been better salespeople than the Democrats.  The Republican candidates--all of them--have focused on the goal of a better America.   And the goal is attractive to Republican audiences:
   lower taxes
   stronger military
   affirmation of traditional values
   affirmation of traditional majority culture, ethnicity, and religion
   less regulation
   fiscal prudence by cutting benefits to the undeserving

Trump in particular refuses to discuss the means to get there.   He says America will win, America will be great again, I will make it happen.   His confidence is so profound that a great many people accept it as plausible.

Bush and Kasich have alluded to legislation and policy constraints and they are struggling.   Boehner and now Ryan on the House side, and McConnell on the Senate side are forced to deal with governance and therefore get boos--yes, literally, derisive angry boos--when their names are mentioned.

But focusing on the goal, not the means, is the right way to present things.   In my work as a financial advisor my first effort was to get clarity of the client's goals and to describe to the client a plausible future outcome along with the impediments.   I would never start out a client meeting by  saying that I have some really good investments to recommend.   The investments are a tool to get to a goal.  The Advisor is able to describe the investment tools if the client actually wants details, but only after getting clarity and buy-in on the goal.

Republicans are doing it right.   The Democrats, especially Hillary, are making what would be the classic rookie error for a Financial Advisor trainee:  describing the investments or tools first.  She is acting like a legislator, not a leader.  Her stump speeches describe the fixes to Obamacare and the enhanced child care tax credit and the mechanism for giving school loan relief to college graduates with debt.   As I have posted before, her speeches are lists of policy planks.  They are interesting to people like me, but have a CSPAN feel to them.  

I summarize the difference between the Republican candidate approach and the Democratic approach as Poetry versus Prose.    

The Republicans are doing effective campaign poetry and the Democrats, being the party of good-government, are describing the tools,  in prose.   In sales management it would be the difference between the Benefits and the Features.   

Sales trainers--correctly--explain to rookies that one sells Benefits.

But Bernie has broken through with something beautiful.  His ad is poetry, beautiful poetry, set to musical poetry, and it shows a benefit.   It is a collage of photos and video to the sentimental ballad of Simon and Garfunkel "America."   Boomers know this from the late 1960s.  The ad has just gone up in Iowa. There are no verifiable claims or policy "content", but it sends a powerful and very effective message:  Bernie is happy and at ease and linked with a good, happy, better America, full of happy people living their lives.   Bernie is hope.  Things will be good with Bernie.  "We all come to look for America.   We all come to look for America."

Good, happy, better, and hope are benefits.

Hillary should have done this ad.   If she does not understand this then Hillary, for all her skill and experience and all her advisors,  is failing at a significant piece of the job of being president: to show a picture of a better world possible under her leadership.

Here is the ad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/us/politics/bernie-sanders-and-simon-and-garfunkel-put-focus-on-voters.html