I don't want to hear about branding, I want to hear about authenticity

susang over at daily kos has a review of the following book...

The Political Brain
The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
By Drew Westen
Public Affairs
New York, 2007

here's one of the excerpts she quotes...

... the left has no brand, no counterbrand, no master narrative, no counternarrative. It has no shared terms or "talking points" for its leaders to repeat until they are part of our political lexicon. Instead, every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no history.

If this is how Coke marketed itself, we would all be drinking Pepsi.

and, while i agree with her analysis and also with a good chunk of westin's thesis...

Westin is fierce in his criticism of past Democratic presidential campaigns and cites many examples of the kind of dead, vague, safe language and symbolism so beloved of establishment strategists and party leaders. Overreliance on focus groups and polls have turned our candidates into cardboard caricatures who appear pandering and lifeless to any voter who manages to tune in.

i have to confess, when i hear about meta-messages, counterbrands, master narratives, counternarratives, shared terms, talking points, and coke vs. pepsi, i want to run screaming in the opposite direction... if indeed progressives and liberals, long under the thumb of a risk-averse democratic leadership, have been "pandering and lifeless" (an observation with which i completely agree by the way), i also have no desire to try to turn the tables, a tactic which westin, thankfully, does not advocate...

My goal in this book is not to advocate that Democrats emulate the ethics of Karl Rove.

my single most important take-away from susan's post is this westin excerpt...

[T]he reality is that the best way to elicit enthusiasm in the marketplace of emotions is to tell the truth. There is nothing more compelling in politics than a candidate who is genuine. And the issues that most tempt politicians to spin and parse are precisely the ones on which they should tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

now, THAT i can get behind...

the one thing i stress above all else in my seminars on leadership is that nothing - NOTHING - substitutes for authenticity, what westin calls "genuine..." in my presentations, i often say that i categorize people i meet for the first time into two types, opaque and transparent... an opaque person is one who has an imago that doesn't allow you to see the person inside... what you see instead is only that imago, and you're left to wonder what's behind it... there is no leaping to a conclusion that what's behind it is either bad or good, just that what you see is not the full and complete, genuine person, and that, for me at least, means i should be wary...

with a transparent person, on the other hand, basically what you see is what you get... you can see the real person inside because there is no carefully constructed image blocking the view... you may like or you may dislike what you see, but that's not the point... at least you have some confidence that you're seeing at least a part of a person's truth, which, for me, is a prerequisite to granting any level of trust...

we all know and work with opaque people, and some of them we find engaging, sociable, and responsible friends and colleagues... sometimes, as the relationship builds, the opacity drops away and we are given the opportunity to really know the person inside... for some, however, the imago is never dropped, and, while those may be people with whom i am required to work, they will never be my friends...

imago
Pronunciation: i-'mä-(")gO, -'mA-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural imagoes or ima·gi·nes /-'mA-g&-"nEz, -'mä-; -'mA-j&-, -'ma-/
Etymology: New Latin, from Latin, image
1 : an insect in its final, adult, sexually mature, and typically winged state
2 : an idealized mental image of another person or the self

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