This action was the first in a national and international Occupy movement that sprang up in parks and elsewhere, and lasted for months. I visited Zuccotti Park, as well as Occupy parks in Boston, Northampton (MA), and Montreal; it was clearly a powerful movement. It sparked global awareness that a lot of people, especially young people and people of color, felt pretty marginalized. It popularized “99 percent vs. 1 percent” organizing slogans. And it forced US President Barack Obama to move his rhetoric leftward, and to at least verbally champion the dispossessed.
That action continues to reverberate through American and world politics, four and a half years later. The movement around a $15 minimum hourly wage is just one of its legacies. Another is the amazingly strong presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken progressive. Sanders, with no ties to the power structure and no reliance on conventional political funding, was given no chance of even having an impact; now, he’s ranked as the contender likely to most easily beat either Trump or Cruz in the general election.
Two Bernie Sanders volunteers decided to set up a short-notice phone bank for Bernie…right in Zuccotti Park! The symbolism of raising money to fight Wall Street in Wall Street’s own shadow—and at the very scene where a bunch of “riff-raff” took on the power structure—is clear…and beautiful.
A friend and I were discussing the presidential election, and he brought up the tired old shibboleth that the Democrats got so badly burned on George McGovern’s 1972 campaign that they don’t feel any progressive candidate is electable.
I will concede some surface similarities: both are/were genuine progressives who can ignite the youth vote, neither had the support of the party elite, both were critical of the war machine.
But if anything, I’d say McGovern is more accurately compared to the failed campaigns of Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry—and even John McCain.
All three of the later Democratic candidates were ashamed to be tagged as liberal, probably because they were afraid of a McGovern-style backlash.
All four of the Democrats were inept campaigners (I actually attended a Mc Govern rally in 1972; he was a terrible speaker).
Both McGovern and McCain massively undermined public confidence in their candidacies by picking poorly vetted vice presidential running mates and then behaving scarily once it was obvious they had picked badly. When a history of mental illness emerged, McGovern threw Thomas Eagleton under the bus just days after saying he was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton.” McCain stuck with Sarah Palin as her competence issues became increasingly obvious. Neither man’s candidacy was helped by the way they handled it.
Both Gore and Kerry conceded before the controversy was settled; Kerry actually conceded the morning after the election. McGovern’s loss was indisputable, as was McCain’s; conceding was not an issue.
Now—why is Bernie’s campaign different?
Unlike the Dukakis disaster, the Republicans can’t make “liberal” sound like a curse word. Bernie is more than liberal. He’s progressive. He is an open socialist, so calling him a socialist has no traction; we all know that already, and it doesn’t seem to be hurting his performance.
He has a track record of coalition building and getting things done both as an executive (as Mayor of Vermont’s largest city, where he served multiple terms and continues to be enormously popular) and as a legislator.
His fundraising prowess is astounding, and has been outside the mainstream Democratic party channels. It’s new money coming into the party. While Trump can claim he’s not beholden because he’s funding his own campaign, he is closely allied with his fellow billionaires. Bernie is a candidate of the people and supported financially by the people.
Bernie has enormous integrity—and that makes him unique in the current crop of candidates. Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio have all been accused of various shady dealings (as was Gore).
Bernie’s strength on the left and Trump’s on the right shows clearly that the old style of politics-as-usual is out of favor. About the only thing they have in common (other than their NYC roots) is that their campaigns have been fueled by enormous voter disaffection with politics-as-usual.
He uses social media better than anyone else in the race—and this is one of several reasons he polls so well with Millennials.
Unlike McGovern, Dukakis, Kerry, or McCain, Sanders is a skilled orator who really knows how to work a crowd.
Ambitious agendas are always more popular than treading water. Clinton urges us to tread water—to protect Obamacare, to accept the economic crumbs falling off the silk tablecloths of the 1%—to keep things as they are. Bernie urges us to think big. It’s the same message of hope and change that inspired millions of first-time voters to come out for Obama. But Obama was a centrist running as if he were a progressive, and he let a lot of those people down. Sanders has been putting his beliefs into action for decades. And he can show consistency over time, unlike the flip-flopping Clinton and Trump.
His positions would actually help the majority of voters if they became policy.
He’s attacking an enemy that is disliked (Wall Street). And he’s reaching out to all the constituencies Trump (and to a lesser extent the other GOP candidates) has attacked.
Top of a Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice creamFarther down the page, showing the whole container
If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you already know I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. And if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m both a long-time student of marketing and a long-time advocate of marketing with honesty and integrity.
In light of this, I received a mailing from one of the groups allied with the Sanders campaign, and immediately noticed some things I wanted to share.
The product is totally in keeping with Bernie’s message, talking about the “1%” chocolate layer on top of the ice cream
Most marketers, when faced with the opportunity to offer a single unique item, set a stratospheric price—but even with a total production run of just fifty, and only one being given to this organization, the price is only $50 (once again reinforcing the brand messaging)
However, it’s something of a lottery; only one person gets the prize, but anyone who contributes $50 or more by the deadline gets to play
There are also a number of less exclusive rewards—democratizing the lottery somewhat.
Disclaimer and disclosures: I am not involved in any way with organizing this promotion and don’t benefit financially. I have given money to the Sanders campaign and I’ve probably also given money to Progressive Democrats of America, the sponsoring organization.
A friend of mine, a very successful author and marketer, a deep student of the human psyche, asked on Facebook, “Why do you love/hate Trump? (Disclaimer: I’m indifferent.)”
It was the disclaimer that got me worried. This is part of my response to him:
I have enormous respect for your analytical skills, M.______, but I question deeply your indifference…
M.______, I hope you’re pulling our legs. You of all people understand human motivations and psychology. Trump is a master marketer and manipulator. I don’t know if he’s studied NLP [Neurolinguistic Programming] (or maybe you) or if he’s actually a natural.
I do know that if he wins, I will be looking seriously at what other country I might live in for the next 4 to 8 years. I have family who died in Nazi concentration camps. I don’t want to be part of an America where ordinary citizens are rounded up because they’re Muslim or Mexican, just as my parents’ cousins were for being Jewish.
I don’t say this lightly. I consider him extremely dangerous, and it scares me that enough people in the US take him seriously enough that he’s doing well in the polls (we’ll see if this translates to actual votes).
The pattern of favors exchanges continues to the present. Does anyone really think it was in any way a coincidence that within hours of receiving Sarah Palin’s endorsement, he named her as his running mate?
This man has a “teflon coating” so powerful it makes Reagan’s look vulnerable. He’s not only attacked whole classes of people, he attacked John McCain for being captured, and by proxy insulted every veteran and all those who respect their service—and then he turns around and repeats the biggest mistake of McCain’s career: running with Palin (I think he might have won in 2008 if he had a running mate people trusted). How is it that the mainstream media hasn’t torn him to ribbons? Howard Dean was forced out of the race for a yell of enthusiasm at a gathering of his supporters (and watching it again, I still don’t see anything inappropriate). In 1972, Edmund Muskie was forced to drop out after shedding a few tears in the wake of an attack on his wife—what’s wrong with showing emotion, pray tell? (We seem to have moved past that, finally. We’ve seen establishment political figures from John Boehner to Barack Obama crying in public recently, and appropriately, it’s no big deal). Yet here we have a demagogue who attacks entire ethnic groups, who makes blatantly false statements, who has even been attacked during the Republican response to the State of the Union, and he’s still out there attracting support. What is up with that?
In the courtyard of the new Reich Chancellery, the Fuhrer partakes of the “one-pot” communal stew meal in the company of invited fellow citizens. Photo by Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy New York Public Library
But my deep message to my friend is that we cannot afford indifference. Let’s remember that Hitler was democratically elected, and that Berlin in the 20s was a liberal, arts-centered city. We must not get complacent. We must not think “it can’t happen here.” And we must not be swallowed by indifference.
“What does he mean by ‘attacks on our democratic society?'” you ask. I’ll answer with a couple of excerpts from the article:
The trucking industry wants to allow longer tandem trucks and block rules requiring added rest for drivers.
If you don’t think that’s an attack on our democracy, consider the consequences if the driver of a supersize truck falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a school bus. There’s the human cost of an avoidable tragedy, of course, but also the financial burden on cities and counties already squeezed to the bone. It will be the safety net that gets shredded.
Financial companies want to ease tighter regulations imposed by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
Have we learned nothing from the debacle of 2007-08?
And there are efforts to repeal a law requiring that meat be labeled with its country of origin…and to block mandatory labels for genetically modified foods
Whatever happened to consumers’ right to know?
And then, of course, there’s the usual run of Islamophobic racism in our land built by immigrants, many of them refugees:
Republicans want to include a House-passed bill restricting Syrian refugees trying to enter the U.S. Faced with an Obama veto threat, that may be replaced by a measure, approved with bipartisan support by the House, restricting visa-free entry into the U.S. by many foreigners.
These Republican politicians forget that they are also descended from people who came here seeking a better life.
It happens that I sent a birthday greeting on Facebook to a Muslim (Pakistani immigrant) friend yesterday (I happened to sit next to him at a Bruce Springsteen concert several years ago, and we’ve stayed in touch). His response and the dialog we’ve had is relevant to the conversation. I reprint with his permission:
Him:
Thank you Shell….. It’s been an awesome few weeks. Finally became an American citizen and celebrated my birthday the same week.
Me:
Wow, congrats. We’ll have to change that Springsteen song (did he sing it the night we met? I don’t remember) to “CHOSE the USA!” It’s a powerful time to make that choice, with anti-Islamic crazies running high-poling campaigns for president.
Him:
Lol…. The same day I received my naturalization, Trump opened his mouth …. Lol…. It was funny…. However, the support has been wonderful from friends and coworkers.
Me:
All I can do is shake my head in wonder. He is sounding more like a Nazi. It shakes my faith in America that he has measurable support. My best hope is that he doesn’t get the nomination but gets close enough that he runs as an independent. And Hillary (more likely) or Bernie (my preferred choice) leads a Dem sweep that gets not just the WH but both houses of Congress and we can actually get some stuff done around here. Of course, US media has been playing up anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bigotry since at least the 1970s oil crisis–even though other than 9/11, Fort Hood, and this recent tragedy in California, most of the gun violence is at the hands of people who self-identify as Christian (I don’t think Christ would agree with their claim).
It just occurred to me as I hit send that this might make a good blog post. May I have your permission to reprint your comments–you can be an anonymous “Muslim friend” or I can name you.
Him:
Sure. Trump is just an attention seeking idiot. Amazing that a reality star, upstart millionaire can received so much attention …. Lol.
I’m glad he’s not deterred by recent xenophobia. Like my ancestors and yours, he will help us build a better country in the US.
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)
After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.
Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.
Why? Because:
We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.
I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!
Screenshot of KPMG’s internal “higher purpose” video
This Harvard Business Review article and accompanying video are too good not to share. The video is less than two minutes and well-worth watching. Watch it with your marketer hat on. Pay attention both to the direct message and to the outcomes.
KPMG is positioning itself as an agent of social change, a social entrepreneurship giant involved in everything from keeping the Nazis at bay during World War II to certifying the election results that allowed Nelson Mandela to become the first president of a free South Africa.
I’m not passing judgment on the accuracy of the claim that the wonderful, world-changing projects highlighted in the video represent KPMG’s (and predecessor Peat Marwick’s) overall corporate culture over many decades. I haven’t done the due diligence on that, and frankly, I’m pretty skeptical of the claim. Big Four accounting firms don’t tend to be known as cauldrons of world-changing social entrepreneurship.
But clearly, the company decided to spotlight its role as a changemaker and to foster an employee culture of empowered action—and that’s terrific. Not at all surprised to see the excellent results. Every manager should look at the amazing engagement this campaign created, with over 42,000 stories submitted by employees and 76 percent agreement that their jobs had deeper meaning.
Be sure to note the graph at the bottom, contrasting several employee satisfaction metrics under managers who emphasized or didn’t emphasize a higher purpose.
If one of the largest accounting firms in the world can take this on, your probably much simpler business can do it too. Every person who supervises others should take that data to heart and make sharing their own organization’s higher purpose a consistent part of their own employee motivation (if you get stuck on this, contact me; I can help).
In part 1 of this post, I referred to the “story-behind-the-story” news releases I learned to write after reading Jeffrey Lant’s Cash Copy. So here’s the story behind the story of Part 1: the lessons I hope you come away with.
First, of course, are the obvious messages: John Corcoran and his readers prepared a good resource, and reading those books can provide you with new skills and insights. And the two books I added to the list provided ME with important skills and insights.
But I’m a marketer. There’s a deeper psychology here. I believe in transparency, so I’ll step you through the goals I had in posting this, and the action steps I took to meet those goals—so perhaps it may influence the way you craft your own messages:
To introduce myself to—and build and nurture a relationship with—John Corcoran. I build relationships with many people who have a network I want to be part of, and who I’d like to see me as a colleague whose expertise complements theirs. This is my first communication to him. I got on his list a few weeks ago after listening to a webinar he did with one of his marketing partners. As far as I know, he doesn’t subscribe to my newsletter, doesn’t know me from any of the discussion lists I participate in, hasn’t heard me speak or read any of my books. Thus, I’m assuming it’s a cold contact.
To introduce myself to his community in ways that may spark interest in my books and/or consulting and copywriting services
Notice how I work toward those goals as I:
Complement him on the resource he put together, right in the very first paragraph
Mention that I’m a business book writer—thus positioning myself as someone it makes sense to pay attention to, since he pays attention to all these other business book writers—and an addicted reader who consumes business books, and thus a natural member of his community
Show that I’ve taken the next action step: listening to his podcasts and naming the first one I played; I’m engaging with his material and psychologically rewarding him for making the resource available
Add two new books that no one has mentioned, along with the reasons why I recommend them—and in those reasons why, I begin to reinforce, not just to John but to anyone else reading this page, the idea that I’m a creative, problem-solving marketing guy that people could turn to for new approaches to marketing (notice how I mention that the example was from work I did for a client)
By citing the year I first read Lant’s book, show that I’ve been in this world for decades
By using the “we we we all the way home” reference, show that I have a sense of humor and a knowledge of cultural references
Provide direct value in the post, by suggesting (without selling and without hype) and giving an example of story-behind-the-story copywriting and mentioning that going green/solving the world’s biggest problems can be a formula for profitable, successful business
Reference the relevant book I have out, and the one that’s coming out soon
Make a direct offer to John: the gift of an advance copy (of course, I’m hoping he will recommend it to others)
Tell him to expect a private email from me, so when he sees it, he’ll open it
Finish with the most relevant of my website URLs, so anyone else whose attention I caught can easily track me down without having to do a search
Incidentally, this transparency extends to my outreach to John. When I send my private note, I will include the links to these two posts so he can see how I used my post on his site as a case study for you. 😉
What surprised me about Seth Godin’s blog post today on cars vs bicycles was the way he based his pro-bike arguments in classic liberal altruism: protect the underdog, ensure the safety of the less powerful. This is even more remarkable because he lives in New York City, whre bikes have clear superiority over cars for many purposes. (His tounge-in-cheek pro-car arguments, on the other hand, were like the modern Republican Party: I have more power than you, so get out of my way.)
I’m a big believer in convincing by harnessing the reader/listener/viewer’s enlightened self-interest. So I’d rewrite his pro-bike list with these eight positive reasons:
In dense urban areas, you’ll get there much faster on a bike than in a car, for trips of up to five and maybe as much as seven miles, especially in rush hour
You can park within a few feet of your destination (in big cities, I often start looking for a parking space half a mile/one kilometer ahead, and sometimes don’t find a space until a mile/2KM on the other side)
In less populated areas, the bike provides a healthy, fun workout
You notice more on a bike: stores and restaurants to check out, architectural details, big scenic vista, some ripe and yummy fruit to pick on a wild raspberry vine, that gorgeous hawk soaring above you
You enjoy that wonderful feeling of being outside with the breeze and sun
Your carbon footprint during your trip is reduced by orders of magnitude
You get to smile and be smiled upon by other people; positive human connection, no matter how fleeting, is a good thing, and hard to achieve encased in a ton or two of steel and plastic
Bikes are waaay cheaper—bike economics: outright purchase of something between $200 for a decent used street bike on up to, say, $600 for a new one of better quality, maintenance costs of $50-$100 per year, fuel cost of zero; car economics: at minimum, $5000 plus hundreds or thousands in annual maintenance for a functional used car with a remaining lifespan of three years or more, plus costs of fuel and insurance, on up to several tens of thousands for a new one.
Of course, Seth is using the bike vs. car argument as a metaphor for the caring vs. selfish economy. But as an avid biker (going back to commuting to high school in New York City, and continuing through my current rural lifestyle)—and a benefit-focused marketer, I had to point out that bikes do actually offer a number of real advantages.
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
