Title: "Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech
1/3 that hate him??
So now he won by 66/33?? That sure has gone up since the November 2008
elections.
David
"Free
speech is meant to
protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no
protection."—Neal Boortz
Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Hi Billy,
On Nov 30, 2009, at 11:54 AM, [email protected] wrote:
I'm not convinced by that argument. But it raises a question.
If a marketing firm was hired by the WH, what could it do
to help an Admin "sell" its policies ?
This is not intended to be cynical. What is the legitimate role of
marketing in governance ? How can it be optimized without
straying beyond lines that should not be crossed ?
How much good could it do ?
The key is to realize that marketing is mostly about creating the right *product*.
The marketing challenge Obama faced (and faces) is multi-fold:
a) fulfilling his promise of bipartisanship and bridge-building with the outside world
b) satisfying a liberal base who's been in the wilderness for eight years
c) dealing with hostile Republicans eager to capitalize on any misstep
>From a marketing perspective -- using 20/20 hindsight -- it seems clear he should either have:
a) Given up on Republicans and bipartisanship, and pushed a strong left agenda that would energize half the country while alienating the other (right now he's only energized the one-third that hates him :-).
b) Pursued a smaller set of goals targeted at pragmatists, and made sure to deliver on them.
The problem -- as it usually is -- is that Obama is by nature i) a conciliator, and ii) audacious. That's what got him elected after all, but -- also as usual -- those are also his great weaknesses/risks.
What he arguably needed was someone on his staff who was i) pugnacious and ii) conservative (in the general, not political sense), to provide balance and creative tension. That would've forced him to make hard decisions about whom to fight with, and what to defer.
Ah, where's George Will now that we need him...
-- Ernie P.
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