Five minutes writing about green

Backstory: at my last Jaycees meeting, we spent some time prepping for an upcoming essay competition against Jaycees all over the state (and then the country, and then… world, I guess?). Anyway, to whet our appetite and encourage us to enter, our president gave us a prompt that we’ve have about five minutes to write about. Our topic: what is your favorite color, and why?

I get “you think too much” from a lot of people in my life, and they’re right. But one consequence of spending way too much time thinking through pretty much everything in my life is that, when someone asks me what I think about X, I can usually tell them. At length. With sources.

I could get on my soapbox about the disparity of reaction when people see, say, a 13-year-old softball phenom who pitches 200 balls a day (“Wow, she’s so dedicated!) vs. an adult who reads a lot (“Nerd.”). But that’s for another time.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote. Paper, pen, five minutes, what’s your favorite color and why? Go:

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once wrote [You can groan, it’s okay. I groaned a little myself. I had five minutes, what do you want?] that green was the “color of hope.” I wish I could say that I picked green as my favorite color because of this quote… but the truth is that a few years ago I decided that it just looked good on me. Maybe it’s my eyes, I don’t know.

I love green in all its many shades. Forest, emerald, Kelly (which are TOTALLY not the same, by the way), lime, celery. Green can be sophisticated or funky, refined or “street.” My 14-year-old nephew would remind me that green is also the color worn by our favorite driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr., which makes it even more awesome.

But it’s more than aesthetic. Which brings me back to Pablo Neruda. He wrote in green ink because, as I said, it was the “color of hope.” I think looking at green just made him happy. I had a dream once where I got married wearing green shoes. In my dream, they were pretty – but mostly, looking at them just made me happy.

…

So, if I could find a job where I got paid to write about random things for five minutes at a time, I’d be a bazillionaire.

Baby steps and a phone call

President Obama made his first visit to Israel this week, and the timing couldn’t have been more important. (Yes, I think it’s weird that Obama didn’t visit one of the U.S.’s most important allies in the region during his first term.) His remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict got the most attention, but a short meeting and phone call right before the president left might turn out to be more impactful in the long run.

In 2010, a group of Turkish boats carrying supplies to Gaza tried to break Israel’s blockade, and the Israeli military raided it; eight Turkish civilians were killed. Ever since, Israel’s government has refused to apologize. The two countries called back their envoys in 2011, which is basically the diplomatic equivalent of yelling “I AM NOW GIVING YOU THE SILENT TREATMENT.”

This was awful for the U.S. because our other most important ally in the Middle East is Turkey. It’s a large, strategically located country with a secular government that, until recently, had gotten along with Israel. Their current administrations weren’t aligned philosophically even before the 2010 raid. It would be a tense situation regardless, but when you factor in the fact that our other other most important ally in the Middle East, Jordan, is dealing with a Syrian civil war on its doorstep, you can understand why the U.S. position has been that we REALLY need you guys to work out your stuff and get along.

I’m not sure what Jedi mind meld Obama worked on BenjaminNetanyahu, but the Israeli prime minister called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologized for the raid, offered compensation for the victims and agreed to restore diplomatic relations. They’re not holding hands and signing kumbaya, but at least they’re talking, and that’s more than they were doing last week.

Right now the conflict in Syria is a mess, with refugees spilling into Jordan. Iran is, well, still Iran. Who knows what’s going on in Egypt. It’s an enormous development for the region that two of its most stable democracies are now back on speaking terms. Both Netanyahu and Erdogan are going to get a lot of criticism from their own citizens – especially Netanyahu, who’ll probably be accused of “caving.” (Well, that didn’t take long.)

It’s also important for the U.S. During the last election there was a lot of speculation about America’s “standing” in the world, which I guess means how much other countries respect us. President Obama asked Netanyahu to apologize to Turkey. It would’ve been very easy for Netanyahu to wait until the president had left before making that phone call, just to prove a point (like Iran releasing the hostages the day of President Reagan’s inauguration, just as a “screw you” to Jimmy Carter). But he didn’t. In fact, Erdogan asked to speak to Obama before Netanyahu got on the phone. Yes, diplomacy is 90 percent symbolism, but I think it matters that this unfolded the way it did. For instance, Erdogan called Palestinian officials to give them a heads-up about the apology – before Netanyahu called. It seems to have been very scheduled… which means that it all could’ve been scheduled differently.

Both sides wanted the president there. Both sides wanted America at the table. And that still means something.

Lipstick on a pig

CPAC was this weekend – don’t feel bad, Chris Christie, I wasn’t invited either. CPAC is the annual convention/pep rally held by conservatives, and it gets a lot of attention from the media because it’s an early opportunity to identify the rising stars in the Republican Party. And there’s not much a media talking head loves more than being able to say “I TOTALLY called the Rand Paul ascendency back in 2009 when you all were still on Bobby Jindal.”

CPAC is fascinating because it’s so focused on the die-hard party faithful. By contrast, the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions – while still pep rallies – have to function as an introduction of candidates and policy ideas to voters who aren’t hyper-partisan. They have to smooth the extremes.

Not CPAC. NOTHING gets moderated here. It’s just pure unadulterated conservative id for three days, and on camera. It’s like Almost Famous for people who’ve never seen marijuana in person. Sarah Palin mean-girling the mayor of New York City? A panel on why we’re not racists turning into a discussion about how slaverywasn’t really that bad? Mitt Romney? It’s all happening!

But for me the most interesting development of the weekend was the unveiling of RNC Chair Reince Priebus’s plan to rebrand the GOP and focus on outreach to minorities. Since this is part of what I do for a living, and since marketing is one of those things everyone thinks they know how to do, I have a great deal of experience with people who throw around words like “brand” without totally understanding them. So I’m always a little skeptical… But I actually agree with Priebus that the GOP needs to do a much better job of presenting itself. And it seems that they’re going about it the way one should. They’re not just coming up with a new logo and calling it a day. (For the last time – branding =/= logo.)

For the moment, I don’t buy the narrative that the GOP is foundering. Here in North Carolina we just elected exactly the second Republican governor in my lifetime, and Republicans won the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in a century. While Romney lost, and a few Senate races didn’t go the GOP’s way, they still control the House and a majority of governerships. They still got to oversee the last round of redistricting. But Priebus is looking at what his party will face 20 years from now, which is a good thing.

In a nutshell… Marketing is essentially about differentiation. Why do I buy this widget and not that widget? A lot of factors go into making that decision, and their weight varies depending on the product you’re talking about. For instance, if you’re buying window cleaner, price might be the most important thing you consider – the cheaper the better. But when you’re buying a car seat for your newborn, you’re probably going to focus less on price and more on the safety rating.

“Brand” is more about how buying this widget makes you feel. I tend to use the term “positioning” because it’s a word people can actually understand (unlike “brand,” the meaning of which no two marketing people can agree on). What’s your widget’s position in the market of all similar widgets? Is it the Best Widget (According to Consumer Reports)? The Yuppie Widget? The Quirky Widget? The Who Cares, it was the Cheapest Widget? And the best way to find out how people feel about your product – and therefore why they decide to buy or not buy it – is to ask them.

So I was pleased to see that the RNC had conducted focus groups. I’ve done focus groups, and it can be pretty humbling to hear what people truly think of you – sometimes negative, sometimes even based on inaccurate information. But you need to hear it. Today Priebus said that it was “painful” to learn from focus groups that they thought of the GOP as being the party of “stuffy old guys.” I’m sure that it was, and I’m sure that he was at least a little tempted to run into the focus group session screaming “MARCO RUBIO! NIKKI HALEY! PAUL RYAN IS ONLY 42!!!” (Oh wait! He did – only on national television.)

But here’s where Priebus and I disagree… or at least where I’m hoping he was merely spinning his heart out this morning. Romney didn’t lose last November because he didn’t communicate well enough. Women didn’t turn practically wholesale against Republicans because of Todd Akin’s one little bad interview. Latino voters didn’t stand in line to vote against Romney because they didn’t “get” the GOP policies on immigration – it’s because they DID.

Here’s the thing about brand. It may be nebulous or hard to articulate or intensely individual, but it also needs to be accurate. In other words, marketing that emphasizes brand needs to match the experience of actually using that product. There’s a reason no one markets full-sized pickup trucks to Brooklyn hipsters. There’s a reason you’ll never hear a Taylor Swift song in an Apple ad.

Remember the “Mad Men” episode where a dog food company’s sales plummeted when it came out that they used horse meat in their recipe? The solution was to change the name of the company to wipe away all the bad publicity and start fresh. Well, yeah… but also stop putting horse meat in your dog food.

If the RNC wants to appeal to minority voters and younger voters of any race, communication isn’t the problem. Substance is the problem. As long as Priebus represents a party that is hostile to people who aren’t white and/or have vaginas, and doesn’t acknowledge basic truths about economics, foreign policy, history and how science works, all the outreach in the world means nothing. Successful rebranding is about informing the public that you’ve changed – which means you actually need to change. And no, slapping a trendier shade of lipstick on your pig doesn’t count.

Reince – I know as a Democrat that I should be rooting for y’all to keep doing exactly what you’re doing. But as an American I can’t do that. This country needs functioning parties to refine policy ideas, because it’s only through competition of philosophies that we’ll develop something that actually works. We need gun-owning farmers and loft-dwelling freelance graphic designers, Pentacostal ministers and atheists, oligarchs and welfare moms to talk to each other and find what works for all of us, even if none of us get our way 100 percent. That’s how our system is supposed to function, and it only can do so if both sides are bringing serious ideas to the table.

So, Reince – don’t take from this process of self-examination that what you really need to do is spend more money manipulating voters more effectively. Maybe shift a little – not the message, but the substance. Stop putting horse meat in your dog food and see what happens.

Two things

Today, the NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre gave a speech in which he framed gun ownership rights as a women's issue, saying that women deserved the right to protect themselves from sexual assault with guns.

Well, yeah. But where LaPierre went way off base was appearing to suggest that a "good woman with a gun" would prevent rape from happening in many cases. I'm using vague terms because I don't want to put words in his mouth. But it's clear from looking at what he said that LaPierre wanted to use rhetoric to imply that "woman with gun" equals "no rape ever."

And that's bullshit. For starters, the majority of rapes and sexual assaults happen between a victim and perpetrator who already know each other. They happen between intimate partners. They happen when adults molest children in their own families. Anyone who wants to talk about rape prevention needs to start from a point of understanding that rape is always a scary-looking man jumping out from a shadow is a myth.

And then there's this. Also this week, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel finally spent some time on the very real issue of sexual assault in the military. According to the Pentagon, there are 19,000 sexual assaults per year in the U.S. military. 19,000. Almost all of which go unreported and unprosecuted.

These are women (and men) with extensive professional training in how to defend themselves with and without firearms. And they're still raped and sexually assaulted. What does the NRA have to say about that? Actually, never mind - I'm not sure I want to know.