TEAM OBAMA Campaign Stategy

I read about it everywhere, but still I was going around in circles trying to figure President Obama’s campaign strategy, until it hit me.  His campaign strategy is going around in circles – in a clever way.   Let me explain…

To put things into perspective, consider the three D’s, Distract, Divert, Divide.  The three (and others)  D’s have been used in many ways over many years, but recently to describe the overall strategy of Team Obama (TO).  There is an excellent article by Bradley Blakeman which codifies the TO strategy in this way.   However, the 3D’s leaves little room for more positive aspects.  To my mind it is a little severe, a little harsh, a little cynical, and not quite accurate.   Think of the three D’s as a wrapper for containing, classifying, and categorizing the campaign activities.   We could bump it up to seven D’s by adding Distrust, Disrespect, Demonize, and Deceive, but the seven D’s would have the same issues. 

The wrapper, or model, proposed here is as easy as ABCDE – only one D.  These are Achievements, Blame, Class Warfare, Distrust, and Excellent me.  It does show how the campaign can be contained, classified, categorized, understood, and interpreted.   With an accompanying short list of clarifying examples, the TO strategy can be viewed as follows.

A – Achievements of the first term.  Creation of jobs,  Green initiative,  Affordable Care Act, stringent banking regulations, save the country by bring  to a standstill the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

B – Blame.  Usually it’s former President Bush, but depending on the issue at hand it could be the Republicans, even the Supreme Court.

C – Class warfare, rich vs. poor, down-and-out vs. fat cats.  This is the central campaign theme; it lies at the heart of the three D’s analysis.  To divide and conquer is an age old and very powerful strategy that has brought down empires – not just opposing election year candidates.  This theme is highlighted almost weekly in the President’s and his surrogates’ speeches.   However, don’t overlook the reports of the vast number of Americans on some sort of federal funding.  Most notably and obviously is the increasing number of people on Food Stamps, including folks with lots of money in the bank.  What happens to someone who applies for and accepts food stamps is that consciously or not such folks begin to regard themselves in a type class enmity against the rich.  It’s a great campaign strategy, and the government pays for it.

D – Distrust, in this case of Romney.  Most of the campaign rhetoric directed against Governor Romney has its roots in distrust.  Killing companies as a venture capitalist, reducing employment and job creation in Massachusetts, outsourcing of jobs, and being out of touch with the common American are just four examples.  One issue to come is Romney’s Mormon religion.  It is not quite clear that TO knows how to play this one, but they are probing, listening, and testing ideas. 

E – Excellent me.  TO will highlight what a likable fellow the President is.  He likes sports, family vacations, joking with the press, beer with the boys, singing, and more.  He’s a tough guy who won’t let us down.  (This one we didn’t quite know until the floodgate of WH leaks in recent weeks.)   He has a lovely wife and beautiful children.  Michelle is working tirelessly trying to help Americans eat more nutritiously.  

In the graphic below, the TO strategy/campaign wheel is shown with percentages, the weights.  Each percentage estimates time to be focused on the respective A, B, C, D, or E. 

The TO strategy is nimble, willing to jump from one spoke of the wheel to another as needed, ready for example, to respond to any bad economic news with a solid appeal to a “B,”  ready to deal with any spike or jump in the polls for Romney with a “D” – a rostrum for every malady.  With A, E being positive and the others negative, the TO campaign strategy clocks in at 80% negative.  

Through all of this, TO is probing for resonance – just like Hope and Change resonated perfectly in the last cycle.  They are trying all of these points multiple times trying to find which issue resonates best with the voters they need.  They do use focus groups, but their value is temporal, and the exercise must be repeated frequently.    Their current motto, Forward, is a little blurry in what it means, but TO has limited options.  My personal view is that TO decided sometime back to look for single issues that will resonate with single constituencies, and multiply that across all the constituencies they are targeting.   Thus they need this entire wheel, or circle, of jump-off points. 

Put in the ABCDE context, it would seem the TO must prepare a spectrum of responses to every event that comes along, while still messaging principle campaign themes.

What is important in most games, and this political game has enormous stakes, is to notice what’s not there.  Here’s what does not seems apparent in TO’s master plan.  Each should fit in one of the ABCDE slots, but none are present.

• Vision for America – except maybe we’re just to be another country among equals or except for the recurring “fair shot – fair share” message.
• A plan for moving forward – naturally this includes actions and budgets.  Is it clear that only a few remain who would believe in the sincerity of a WH proposal for a self-paying program?
• Issues and beliefs in the broad scope – I believe this; my opponent believes that. The choice is clear.  What we get are the trivialities, derisions, and divisiveness currently machinated by TO.
• Building on what we’ve done – this is most obviously missing in all messages.
• Exceptionalism – this, the national state of mind, is what made this country great.
• World leadership – TO seems to have deferred leadership to other countries.  I don’t think the President realizes there are serious people out that that for whatever reason want what we have (power and wealth) and will not hesitate to take it from us.  Moreover, I don’t think he sees the wisdom of the old metaphor, that when you give away the keys to the castle you won’t likely get them back.

In actuality, the ABCDE container appears fit most campaign strategies of most candidates, with “C” being replaced by “Central Campaign Theme(s).”



Massive Legislation

In the past several years we have witnessed massive legislative bills passed by Congress.  Some are more than 2000 printed pages.  What are the consequences?  What does this mean?

We begin with the facts.

1.  It is most possible that the subject and content of the bill cannot be expressed in fewer pages. If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes.
2. It is probable that most congressmen cannot read the bill for content.  Could you read such a bill?  Two thousand pages?  Every bit of it is technical detail.  This means each page must be read slowly and evaluated.  Even at one page per hour, ridiculously fast, the reading would take one work-year.  Which congressman has this kind of time?  Moreover, different people reading the same page will possibly score different evaluations.
3. What congressman commands this level of knowledge on a dedicated subject?
4. The most difficult part of the bill is with understanding how the disparate parts co-mingle, and what are the implications of all this. 
5. The true contents of such legislation cannot be understood by anyone.  Period.

We come to the points. 

1. No one person can do it.  The bill must be separated into parts and teams of people read each of the parts. And this implies #4 above becomes problematic - if not impossible. 
2. No one congressman or group of same could possible put this together.  The writing of such a bill takes even more time, probably five-ten man years if any coordination is intended.
3. This means that congressmen, on both sides, have deferred to aids, to leaders or outside groups to write and evaluate the legislation, write up talking points, and recommend a decision.  There can be little oversight by leaders that simply cannot comprehend what has been written and what it implies.
4. This means that massive legislative acts are passed with only the recommended OK or not OK of third party surrogates, often not even a part of government.  Even party leaders cannot know ramifications, much less the contents.
5. This means that congressmen have passed pieces of possibly expensive and no doubt significant legislation with utterly no understanding of what they have passed. 
6. The true contents of such legislation cannot be understood by anyone.  Only newly formed agencies can make these interpretations and write the massive implementation regulations based upon the new laws.
7. News agencies select various aspects of the new or proposed law and offer up their critiques, whether positive or negative. All of them are based on partial information - and most likely a political perspective.

Conclusion.  There is little responsibility, realism, common sense, oversight, and ability in our Congress.  How can they do such things?  Do we now have a surrogate Congress creating and controlling our legislation, while the real Congress does sound bites and TV interviews?

One example: On the Affordable Care Act, it is significant to point out that when then Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her now famous remark she was not being disingenuous, dishonest, or deceitful. She actually did not know what was in the bill, and she telegraphed that no one else did either.

Imagine this analogy.  NASA wants to build a spaceship to travel to Mars.  Groups (or individuals) are created to design the components:  a. propulsion systems, b. ship design and structure, c. life support systems, d. extra and intra-ship communication, e. mission goals and control, f. Mars lander, and g. personnel selection and training.  Their reports and recommendations are bound into a very large book.  No one reads the whole thing as a single instrument.  NASA requests and approves proposals on all these parts.  The successful trip is eagerly anticipated.

Early Years-Later Years

Early Years – Later Years

Years ago my life was so certain, the path so straight, the way so clear.  Work hard. Keep on task.   Stay on the track and your heart’s dreams will be fulfilled.

Years later.  It became clear that things were getting blurry.  What actually were my heart’s dreams?   Fame, fortune, love; self-confidence, self-assurance, self-fulfillment?  It seems I was on a track to a moving target, a station that was always changing from one day or week to the next.  This explained the blurriness.

More years later.  Now I have achieved all of these dreams. I am at the station, though the station may vary day-to-day, even hour-to-hour.  I have achieved my life’s dreams.

I always said to myself when in my thirties that everything will fall into place when I’m in my fifties.  This was correct except for the time being a bit later.

Afghanistan - Let's get outta there

Afghanistan - Let's get outta there

The US has been involved in Afghanistan for more than a decade.  The original goal was to root out the Al Qaeda.  This somewhat worked.  Now the goal is to create democratic processes there with the hope they will be just like us, two cars in the garage, pot roast on Sunday, cell phones, golfing on Saturday, cable TV, ...
Well, maybe cell phones.  People everywhere do like to talk and gossip.  Estimates put the number of cell phones at more than 17 million in 2009 out of a 33 million population.

But, down the stretch, no matter how much money and how many lives we expend, the US can never turn Afghanistan into a democracy.  Why?  You might say it is the Islamic religion.  Not quite.  What is the case is that it is a combination of the culture and the religion*. To the average, everyday, Afghan, the raison d'être is to settle the score for each affront.  Any affront whatever.

In my experience with Afghans, I view them willing to bring their world down around them to settle a score with a neighbor.   They can't resist.  The tribalism in this country encourage strong-man leaders at a local level, with the maintenance of a high compliance populace and an eye-for-an-eye adjudication of every offense.

I was amazed when President Obama went there.  Doesn't he have intelligent people that know these people, that have read at least a little history?  Ask their neighbors,  the Indians, the Iranians, the Pakistanis, what they think of Afghans.  There is no love at all.   Disrespect, distrust, and dislike are the three D's of their long-standing interactions.

USA: Give it up!  Declare victory and get out.  Don't waste another nickel, or another life!

* Just like there are varying sects of Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews, there is the same for Muslims.  The Afghans seem to have the most disreputable of them all.

The Immortality Paradox

Bulletin: Scientists at the Ajax Medical Research Institute have discovered a drug whereby if taken cells will not age, cell division is always perfect, brain cells will not die.  The researchers predict anyone can live forever.  Immortality - at last!!  Of course, death is still possible through physical trauma (you're hit by a speeding train) or chemically (you take a massive overdose of something), etc.

Want to sign up and get this ?  Are you ready for immortality?

Of course, the bulletin is ficticious, but here we'll just suppose it is so and consider what this means for you to be living 200, 500, 1000, 10,000 years and more.  Herein lies the nifty little paradox. 

First of all, you are designed, whether you believe it by evolution, by intelligent design, or even by stork delivery. Doesn't  matter.  This means you have specifications, and therefore you have capacities and limits.  For a simple example, if you tried to lift 2500 pounds (= 1134kg), even with years of training and countless protein shakes, you couldn't do it.  The weight would shatter your bones, tear your ligaments, and  ruin your muscles.  You just can't do it.  It's the design!

The main example we consider here is about your marvelous brain.  It also has capacities.  In particular your memory most assuredly does.  There is only so much stuff you can remember, not just facts but everything about you.  As you go through life, you take things in and you forget other things.  How many can remember April 15 of ten years ago like they can remember yesterday?   I cannot.  By the time you finish life, you are in many ways a different person than the kid that graduated high school so many years ago. Childhood memorys have substantially faded.

Now you take this new elixir.  Immortality has arrived.

Look again at the memory of that marvelous brain.  Suppose you have a memory capacity of the equivalent of 10,000 extra difficult books - like 400 encyclopedias.  This amount of information is quantifiable.  Let's suppose that is your former maximum of a long life of 100 years.  At this point, if you continue on you and put more information in, you must loose other information.  So, what happens in the second hundred years.  You grow in ways, you learn more, and then you forget more. Nonetheless by year 200, you have replaced much of what you had at year 100.  You are now a different person in some respects.

Fast-forward to 1000 years.  You have gone through these learning and forgetting cycles 9 times.  There is now even less of the original you.  Fast-forward to 10,000 years.  Just how much of the original you remains?  The point is that your body may be immortal, but those attributes of the original you have long vanished.  You are a different person completely.  You probably cannot  remember your childhood, your children, your first bicycle, your first job, and much more.    You, my friend, are no longer you.

This is the Immortality Paradox

P.S.  You could make lots of exceptions to the argument.  Suppose to handle all the information, increasing by 400 encyclopedias every hundred years, this researchers devised their elixir to allow the brain to expand. More capacity = more information.  Suppose your brain increases in size only 5% per century. The by the time you are 1000 your brain will be half again larger.  At 10,000 your brain will be five times larger.  Now you won't even look like you. :)

The Mona Lisa

June 22, 2012

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci is arguably the most famous painting of all time.  And many regard it as the best painting of all time.  No doubt more has been written about this painting than any other.  (Google away...)

The history of the painting is interesting.  In this note I highlight that Leonardo kept the painting through his lifetime, though the sitter has traditionally been identified as Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany in Italy.  He never delivered it.  Why might that be?

Any of us who are involved in creative endeavors of any kind understand that some of our "creations" are not so good, others are good,  and some are outstanding - at least by our own personal standards.  I am a painter, not by profession, and I understand this full well.  Even in my professional life, I see the same.   When it comes to Leonardo, of course, the scale of quality is immeasurably greater.  He was beyond the normal scale of human intelligence and artistic talent.   But that's not the point today.  What is the point is that in my own creative endeavors sometimes I go beyond outstanding.  I get lucky.  In my painting, this has happened twice.  I still have those paintings, and from time-to-time I look at them and ask, "How did I ever do that?"

I feel confident that many poets, authors, physicists, and others have had entirely similar experiences.

This is what I posit about the Mona Lisa.  The painting so absolutely transfixed Leonardo, he just could not deliver it to his client.  He got lucky.  I can certainly imagine him asking himself the same question, or however geniuses do such things. 
P.S. Believe me, I am so humbled by the works of great artists, I cannot bring myself to do any kind of analysis on the works themselves.  I don't know why others do.

Underemployed Lawyers

 Shakespere has suggested "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78  How unfair!

From the Washington times we learn that "Once the surest path to a six-figure salary and a life of luxury, a law degree in the aftermath of the Great Recession comes with far fewer guarantees, leaving many graduates with mountains of debt while confronted by a rapidly changing legal landscape."   Only 86% of new law grads have jobs.  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/17/unemployed-lawyers-sue-schools-over-promises-of-jo/

Oh, what a shame. What a great bunch of folks can't practice their chosen profession of extracting from poor people from all they have left, and billing rich people more than is just.

These people, with their (legal) license to steal have an average annual earning of about $110,000.  Considering the numbers making really big salaries, there must be quite a group just scratching out a living. Oh, my.

From the SunTimes, we learn that 75 law school graduates across the country have sued more than a dozen law schools saying they were misled about prospects for employment and salaries after they graduated.  See http://www.thesuntimes.com/newsnow/x1915458423/Productivity-of-attorneys  Delightful.  The turn of the screw?

I am so devastated.  What a fine crowd of freshly polished, newly minted, people's advocates ready to bilk their neighbors, are unhappy.  Oh, my oh my!  Mind you, I'm not hostile in the least.  I really believe they should join they should join the OCR (Occupy the Court Room) movement, protest, and seek redress.  No doubt, both Democrats and Republicans would champion their plight.

The Diary or Journal

Some years ago I began writing my thoughts in small notebooks. They were entered as I considered them.  It was not daily, weekly or anything on a time schedule.  When I returned to them months or years afterwards I was amazed.  I came to understand my thoughts, how my mind worked, and how my thinking had changed. 

Working definitions:  A diary is a record of events, indications, and particularly feelings made daily or at least regularly.  A journal is more like an account of events, thoughts, or ideas made intermittently.


Have I created a diary?  Not quite.  My notes were more like a journal.  There are lots of these: Travel journals, Diet journals, Workout diaries, Sleep diaries, Tagebuch, War diaries, Fictional diaries, and Unusual diaries.  Naturally, many if not most politicians keep diaries and/or journals of their encounters with other politicians, in person or by phone.

People make them for a variety of reasons.  Some are for very private purposes, some with the view to future publication, some in anticipation of lawsuits. Of the second category there are numerous published examples.  For my journal of thoughts and ideas, the goal was strictly private.  I've made entries off and on for many years. 


What I noticed first and foremost, was that I was talking to my future self.  I would reflect, "At least I could think way back then." Or I would reflect, "How could I have been that stupid?"   One thing I've learned is that maybe I'm not such a good judge of character.  Lot's of reflections occur when looking into one's past.  But you can't look there is all you have is your memory -  at least not accurately.

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With the newest form of diary/journal - aka blogs, there are lots and lots of online diaries and journals.  Though actual numbers are difficult to find, it is estimated at between 500 million and one billion worldwide.  So, folks seem to have a desire to say something.  They create their blog.  Sometimes they give a good introduction, but often there is nothing else there.  Simply pick a common word and attach link to http://your_word.blogspot.com/.  The odds are there is a blog with about nothing there. (Yes, there is a http://word.blogspot.com/; one post only - the intro.)  People want to say something, but ultimately have nothing to say - or just don't know how to say it.   I'm sure there is a phd dissertation in here somewhere. :)