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thenewgreen  ·  4246 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Life Lessons in the Culture Of Bullshit

I enjoyed this insight in to the H. Clinton/Obama nomination battle:

    But there is another side to this coin, which brings me to lesson number two: Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naïve, untested and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back? I worked for then-Senator Clinton during her campaign for president -- and I believed in her, still do. But I vividly remember feeling like things weren't right in that campaign; a lot of the young staffers felt that way -- it wasn't a secret that there were problems in how the campaign was run. The campaign pollster for example, rolled out so many slogans it was impossible to keep track. Here's a sample:

    Let the Conversation Begin

    Ready for Change, Ready to Lead

    Working for Change, Working for You

    Strength + Experience = Change. Which leads to the lesser known corollary: ( Strength + Experience ) / Change = 1.

    And then, my favorite: Big Challenges, Real Solutions: Time to Pick a President. Which he had printed on the side of a bus but it was basically too small to read.

    So, I'm putting these slogans into speeches and I look over at an Obama campaign rally on cable news and they have one slogan. It's just the word "CHANGE" in big letters. That seemed better. But I was timid; and a lot of us just assumed, or wanted to assume, that more experienced people must know what they're doing. But that wasn't true. So the campaign ended, my candidate lost, and I ended up as a presidential speechwriter anyway, which was cool. But the lesson I drew from that campaign, other than the fact that it's always a mistake to run against Barack Obama