9 years ago, I was managing a City Council race for a longshot candidate in a major city (who won the election, thank you very much). I was fresh off my first big win (a congressional race) and thought I had the answers of how to win.
In one of our first meetings, I was talking about themes and message and all the things a good campaign manager does. She got a phone call in the middle of the meeting, took it, then picked up the phone again and took care of the neighbor's problem - a missing trash can.
In my righteousness, I told her she shouldn't be worried about that stuff - let a staffer handle it or send the person directly to the city department.
She looked at me and said "What matters to people is what directly affects them from the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night. Everything else is just fluff."
I wanted to relate this story because its easy to get lost in the great ideas and well thought out plans and not see that by not relating it directly to the average person's everyday life, we may as well just be talking to our pets.
Let's take the oil rig disaster and the President's speech for example, since its a hot topic right now. We can talk about BP's lack of accountability, or slow response, or the wildlife and ecology. And some of those arguments have resonance if you live in coastal Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, or Florida - or plan a vacation there.
But if you're anywhere else in the country, it means nothing. I was at the dealership yesterday when Obama held the BP press conference about the $20 billion, and he might as well have been talking about Myanmar - because it didn't matter to anyone in that room in their daily lives. Yes, people will shake their heads and say a comment or two because that's what you're supposed to do, but since it doesn't have a direct effect on their day to day life, its really background noise.
How do you put it in terms that matter to people? The prices you pay at the grocery store are going to go up. The price of gas is going to increase. People on the gulf coast will lose their jobs and have to leave to other parts of the nation in an attempt to find work - where it is already scarce.
Or localize it. Here in Maine, I mostly get the shaking head and tsk tsk when this comes up - but if you talk about it in terms of the Gulf of Maine and it ruining our entire coastal economy - people are willing to think about oil drilling policy and energy policy. But until they can see how it might matter to them, its just another bit of information that they don't need when they have a job to do and a marriage to take care of and children to raise.
To me, the biggest problem Obama faced in giving that speech was that most of America outside of the gulf coast and environmentalists and oil industry people honestly don't care. He was trying to talk to them, and they weren't listening, and in the meantime those that were listening got nothing from it - and it did nothing to move us forward.
He could have talked about energy policy, as some have advocated. He could have gotten angry, as others have advocated. But would it have mattered? Maybe to those that were paying attention, but not in the grand scheme of things. Because like it or not, to most Americans this is a regional problem.
Now we can talk all we want about why people should care, and get angry because people don't, but that doesn't really change the reality. And the reality is that we are looking at themes and message - like good campaign managers - when what people are looking for is someone to take care of the problem of the day in their daily life.
