Tag: mitt romney

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Copywriting, Environment, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Some marketers are engaged in a vigorous debate between people who identify as “thought leaders” and those whose skins crawl when they hear the term.

Whether you love or hate the term, “thought leader”, marketing by showing leadership through content and letting people meaningfully engage with those ideas is undeniably powerful. 

That type of marketing hooked me when I first tried it, as a 15-year-old 3rd-year high school student, and I’ve been using it ever since. First, I used it only to spread my ideas. Later, I also marketed products and services based on those ideas. And those ideas built me a decent following (and, eventually, a decent consulting practice)—sharing them through my books, articles, presentations, interviews, media coverage, etc.

This takes time and energy, and I know many people who do it better than me. But it certainly can be done. One of my book launches garnered over 1,000,000 short-term Google hits (for the book title, an exact-match four word string that wouldn’t show up in any other context). It’s the only time anything I’ve done got a million hits on Google.

I’ve even managed to help shift several mindsets at the international or national or local level.

My biggest success was changing the attitude about a proposed local mountaintop housing development from “this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “of course we’ll win! The question is how.” This campaign took just over a year and used everything I knew in 1999-2000 about marketing AND community organizing (and the knowledge/labor of many others)—but the mindset shift took only four or five months. And that mindset shift created the conditions for our victory.

Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)
Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)

I also like to think I helped change the idea that business has to be evil. Of the five books I’ve published since 2003 (and the 10 since my first book came out in 1980), four show how business can profitably address issues ranging from business ethics to ending poverty—while reversing environmental destruction. I’ve given dozens of “Making Green Sexy”, “Impossible is a Dare,” and other talks on how business can be heroes.) And it’s been years since I’ve heard “business ethics? That’s an oxymoron!” When I first started talking about business ethics as a success strategy, I heard that false “wisdom” constantly.

I like to think my activity is part of WHY I no longer hear that horrible sentence.

Leading with ideas means finding others who will amplify those ideas. It’s not a coincidence that I actively seek out media coverage, endorsements, and more. 

My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a blurb from Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield on the front cover, another from Seth Godin on the back, and some 50 endorsements on the front pages. It has 4 guest essays from best-selling authors. These are some of the ways I’ve built credibility and gotten people interested, even though the book no longer has a current-year copyright.

One review of that book didn’t appear until 17 months after publication—and I’ve gotten reviews on books that were up to eight years old at the time. When you write about issues and do so with substance, your book can attract interest for years.

Of course, events can shift the relevance. If you try to repurpose articles on how to survive the coming Y2K crisis or books on the presidencies of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, or Al Gore, thought leadership is not the image you’ll project. 😉

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Triple Pundit speculates that Romney, newly reinstalled on Marriott’s Board of directors, may become much greener again, as he was in the old days before he went out looking for the Neanderthal/climate denier vote.

As a Massachusetts resident, I didn’t find him all that green as governor but lightyears ahead of the positions he took as presidential candidate.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

The amazing thing to me is that 18 to 24 months ago, it looked like if the Republicans put up a candidate who could breathe and talk, the White House would be theirs. We don’t know exactly what combination of factors created Obama’s near-sweep of battleground states and overwhelming Electoral College mandate yesterday. So that allows the luxury of putting forth a list, and people can make their own choices about which ones were significant.

Here’s my list:

  • The American public is smart enough to see that the reason why Barack Obama didn’t make as much progress as we all wanted—despite his own reluctance to make this much of a campaign issue—can be laid directly at the feet of a recalcitrant and hostile Republican Party that consistently refused to negotiate in good faith, and whose stated priority (as expressed by its own Senate leader Mitch McConnell) was  not to rescue the country but to deny Barack Obama a second term.
  • Trust in Mitt Romney is very low, because on most major issues, he’s had at least two and often more contradictory positions. He has developed a well-deserved reputation for saying what he thinks people want to hear at that moment, and conveying the impression that he has no core beliefs or principles—and because his attack ads and debate points were so blatantly based on outright lies.
  • Mitt Romney managed to alienate enough constituencies that he sabotaged his chances: women, people of color, students, people on Social Security (although, surprisingly, he apparently carried much of the elder vote in general), gays and lesbians, even veterans and dog lovers.
  • Mitt Romney’s amazing gifts for putting his foot in his mouth and for presenting himself as completely out of touch with ordinary people didn’t help him. Barack Obama’s progress on the economy despite lack of GOP cooperation helped him strongly—in the Upper Midwest, especially.
  • Citizens United and the infusion of enormous amounts of money by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS SuperPAC, Sheldon Adelson, and others may have actually created a backlash against the influence of money in politics (one that perhaps we can harness to create real and meaningful election reform). Even in Massachusetts, a state that was never in contention, we must have gotten somewhere between 30 to 50 calls and at least that many mailed fliers, to the point where we were totally sick of it. I can only imagine the barrage voters in battleground states were getting.
  • Despite massive reports of voter suppression and fraud (see for example https://www.thenation.com/blog/171079/whats-scope-voter-suppression-election, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/2012-elections-polling-places_n_2036228.html, and the truly despicable vote manipulation techniques highlighted at https://www.bradblog.com/?p=9706 (with video of a Pennsylvania touchscreen recording Barack Obama votes as Mitt Romney votes)—margins of victory were wide enough to prevent another election theft. However, this is a problem waiting to happen again, and a fix has been overdue since at least the aftermath of the 2000 election. I support electronic voting machines that use paper ballots, which can be scanned instantly for a preliminary tally, but then get safeguarded through proper chain-of-custody procedures and hand-counted over the next few days if there’s any question at all about the preliminary tabulation’s accuracy. Machines that do not keep a paper trail should be BANNED. end of story.
  • Polls can be wrong. Margins of victory were not even all that close in states like Pennsylvania and even Paul Ryan’s state of Wisconsin. Yes, Florida, Ohio, and Virgina, among others, were quite close—but overall, Barack Obama’s victory in the so-called swing states was generally decisive, with spreads in excess of five points.
  • Barack Obama was able to pull out his core constituencies to show up on voting day, even though these include groups that historically have had low voter turnouts: youth (pretty much written off by the pundits ahead of the election), people of color, women’s rights advocates, LGBT people and their supporters).
  • The US is getting more socially liberal: ballot initiatives supporting such causes as gay marriage and not just medical marijuana but even recreational marijuana passed.
  • The day of the ultra-right is drawing to a close. Even Missouri, which went for Romney, returned Claire McCaskill to the Senate, repelling a challenge by Todd “Legitimate Rape” Aiken. While the party has shifted so far to the right that I heard one commentator refer to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch as part of the party’s moderate wing, real moderates have nowhere to go in the Republican Party right now, so they vote Democrat. My personal belief is that if Mitt Romney had taken a consistent moderate platform—as he did when he was governor here in Massachusetts—throughout the primaries, he would have easily won the primary contest as all the other (extremist) candidates competed for the extremist vote, then gone on to win the presidency. I am glad he chose instead the “Etch-A-Sketch” approach. Trying to be first ultra-rightist then moderate was a failed strategy from the beginning, in an age of instant world-wide communication; it might have worked if there were still such a thing as private conversations from candidates to voters.
  • People saw this race as important enough not to risk anything on third-party candidates. The top six third-party candidates candidates together only got about 1.43 percent of the vote (fewer than 1.7 million votes out of a total of 116.8 million votes cast)—with just over a million of those going to Liberatrian Gary Johnson, bringing him 1 percent, and Green candidate Jill Stein (whose votes—including mine—I’m guessing were nearly entirely in non-swing states) got 0.3 percent, a whisker under 400,000.  votes. None of the others, not even comedienne Roseanne Barr, got even one-tenth of one percent. (all stats from https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results with “display all candidates” enabled)
  • Other than during the first debate, Barack Obama outmarketed Mitt Romney, by presenting a better and more believable picture of the next four years to average Americans, and by at least making some sideways attempts to take credit for some of the substantial list he actually accomplished in his first term—and inspiring, once again, a horde of volunteers to get involved. While he was effective in this only compared to Mitt Romney (remember the 47 percent?), Barack Obama’s modest effort outshone Mitt Romney’s pathetic self-aggrandizing.
  • With galvanizing speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton, the Democratic Convention gave Barack Obama a significant lift that he never really lost.

There are other factors too, but I’ll stop there.

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By Posted on Posted in language, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Dear Mitt Romney:

A few months ago, we heard that you participated in beating up a gay kid when you were a high school student. Watching you at the debate tonight, I can easily believe that you were a high school bully. You’re still a bully!

Do you think you’re going to score points by jumping in repeatedly when it wasn’t your turn, monopolizing the time to make the same three or four tired points over and over again instead of following the rules of the debate? Do you think the rules don’t apply to the 1%? Just because president Obama was too polite and Jim Lehrer too ineffectual to stop you from grabbing far more than your share does not mean it sits well with those of us who were paying attention.

And neither does your latest round of flip-flopping–or should I call it by its more accurate name: hypocrisy? How, all of a sudden, are we supposed to believe that you’re a great friend of the middle class, that you will not cut taxes for the wealthy, and that you’re happy about government regulation? That’s not what you said all the way through the primary debates. It’s not what you said in a campaign stop when you told that poor shnook, “Corporations are people, my friend.” And it’s not what you said when you dismissed 47 percent of the American people, at a private fundraiser when you thought the world wasn’t listening.

And then there are the lies: You know the $716 billion claim is nonsense. And where did you get the absurd statement that half of the green energy companies the government invested in have failed? If I counted right, this ABC news story cites eight separate false statements from Mitt Romney, and they didn’t even pick up on the energy gaffe. In fact, there’s a spate of Twitter activity using the hashtag #MittLies.

Yet again, the question must be asked, which is the real Mitt Romney? And can somebody please give Jim Lehrer the hook before the next debate and put in a moderator who can set limits on this out-of-control man?

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By Posted on Posted in Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

GOP VP pick Paul Ryan’s attacks on the poor and the middle class are well-known. His opposition to women’s rights and gay rights includes cosponsoring a bill that would force women to carry a baby to term even in cases of rape or incest , and is not a big surprise. He gets an actual zero from NARAL, after all.

But even I didn’t know that he scored a truly dismal three percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters—meaning he has voted the wrong way on almost every significant piece of environmental legislation. Or that he has investments in oil and extractive mining companies that would benefit under his tax plan. His wife’s father owns and operates four of the companies, and the Ryans have ownership percentages up to 10 percent, according to Newsweek.

He has made it clear he will be a friend to oil and coal, and an enemy to renewables and conservation. He is also a climate change denier, which means the US government would fall even farther behind the rest of the world in dealing with catastrophic climate change.

Right-wingers used to try to insult environmentalists by calling us “tree-huggers.” Personally, I think that’s a badge of honor. But let’s spread it widely that Paul Ryan is a tree-hater, and that a vote for Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan is a vote AGAINST the Earth.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, language, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

Either Mitt Romney is trying to add comedy to his repertoire or he’s gone delusional on us.

At least twice last week, he made off-the-wall statements accusing Obama of Romney’s own much-indulged-in behaviors and attitudes.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s report on Romney calling Obama “out of touch.”

Let’s see…Romney is the man who revels in being in the One Percent, talks about the Cadillacs, plural, that his wife drives, brags about firing people, jokes about factory closings, and thinks that corporations are actually people (to name a few of his bizarre statements). Not since Dan Quayle have we had a probably major-party nominee for national office so good at cramming his foot into his mouth..

And then a day or two later, Romney said Obama repeatedly undergoes “a series of election-year conversions” on his issue positions. It’s true, Obama has a disturbing tendency to back off anything remotely controversial once a little heat is applied by the opposition, and this is a continual disappointment to progressives. But retreating under fire is not the same as shifting with the wind. Romney changes positions so often, his own campaign strategist Eric Fehrnstrom created the wonderfully apt metaphor of the Etch-A-Sketch campaign: shake it to reset.

I live in Massachusetts and I lived here under the Romney  administration. He was very much in favor of the healthcare plan that was passed during his time at the helm, despite its strong resemblance to the Obamacare he claims to hate. I remember when he was at least somewhat protective of women’s reproductive rights. I remember a lot of positions he has abandoned and then turned around and actively trashed. People keep talking about his integrity; I see a candidate who will sacrifice any principle for votes.

So, Mitt–do you actually believe this stuff you’re spouting, or are you just trying to bring some humor into the campaign trail?

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