Do Tea Partiers Wear Seatbelts?

The last time I saw my Dad was the weekend of 9/11.  We had breakfast at a place near his then-home in Redmond, Washington.  My Dad and I always hugged goodbye but I’ll never forget the hug in the parking lot that day as flights resumed back to Durham.

Eleven days later I got word he had died suddenly, on his way home from breakfast at age 77.  Dad is my insight into a lot of things that are hard for me to understand like the Tea Party movement and lock-step Republicans demanding no more benefits for the unemployed unless they are paid for with budget cuts while holding out so people who make more than a million dollars a year are included in temporary tax cut extensions that will run up the deficit by $700 billion.

In many ways he lived the inconsistencies of the elected official who ran on repeal of health insurance reform but then whined over the one month waiting period before his generous federal healthcare plan took effect or the tea party activists online who demand COLA increases even though there has been no inflation.

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Dad hated any form of regulation and “just because.”  His children and grown grandchildren fondly remember his adamant refusal to wear seatbelts even after they became law or his subversion of the 55 mile per hour speed limits during the ‘70s energy crisis.   He would have turned 87 during my late October, 6,000 mile cross country road trip to scout a similar venture next year by motorcycle.  The speed limits were almost always 70 or 75 and it was surprising if not alarming how many of the states I crossed obviously didn’t require helmets.  I suspect though he would have nodded approval.

I owe a lot of my career success to my Dad, such as learning to understand and discuss issues from several viewpoints and the most valuable career gift of all, critical thinking.    When the video embedded to the right was brought to my attention by my friend Bill Geist and Steve Hall’s post on Adgrabber, it made me wonder just how much of what appears as stubbornness is really about the message.   Maybe this message vs. “the law” would have made helped my Dad get over his civil disobedience toward seatbelts?  Nah, probably not.  My Idaho-rancher Dad never was the the sentimental type.

The Secret To Durham’s Image Turn-Around

Twenty years ago Durham clearly had an image problem.    New in town, I asked around to learn 1) the source and 2) who was in charge of remedying it.  The answers I got were 1) no one knows, maybe its “us” and 2) it is your job to address it,  welcome to Durham!

I had just been appointed the CEO of Durham’s newly-minted community or destination marketing organization, a position from which I’ve now been retired nearly a year.  Prior to coming to Durham, I had produced a Clio-winning “pride” campaign for another community where I’d worked previously but really I didn’t have a clue about community image.  Turns out no one else did either.

So for inspiration we rolled up our sleeves and started to examine and learn from some other models taking any lessons that could be applied to unwrapping, benchmarking and ultimately improving community image.  Finding no relevant texts or primers or white papers on the subject,  we zeroed in on two movements for inspiration: political campaigns and civil rights. No claims of clairvoyance or strokes of brilliance, just adaptive innovation.

However, before I summarize what we learned, I must admit that I received a ton of unsolicited advice from a handful of people down in Raleigh, some with Durham interests, just not Durham’s best interests.

On several occasions the advisories were directed to me via news quotes and editorials published there.  I was even amused on several occasions to be called out during public remarks at events at which I happened to be present.  Can you say awkward?  Sadly, no matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t possible to engage these folks about their concerns in face to face dialogue let alone secure their support.

Here are four groupings of this Raleigh-sourced advice about how to turn Durham’s image around:

• White Flag Advice – “Surrender and turn Durham marketing over to Raleigh or better yet, pretend Durham doesn’t exist and get on Raleigh’s bandwagon; we’ll even refer to it as the Triangle, on occasion. You know like the airport.” I may be from Idaho but I didn’t just fall off a spud truck and I know hegemony when I smell it…

 

• Bobby McFarrin Advice – “Don’t worry, be happy!”  “Pretend there isn’t an image issue, sweep it under the rug,  smile incessantly, don’t step on Raleigh’s toes and watch a lot of Pollyanna reruns.”  Maybe I didn’t know much about image issues at the time but I knew that negative information trumps positive information by several times squared and you can’t just outrun it.

 

• Be Like Mike Advice – “Just go along to get along.  Slick up a bit, be less funky, ignore slights.  Durham’s always been a black town, be more white (they actually used those words) and when they shake out Raleigh’s table cloth, some crumbs will always fall Durham’s way.”  That’s when I realized it may not all be about racism but racism is alive and well.

 

• Bless Your Heart Advice – “This image thing is all in your head.  Individuals, communities and institutions aren’t trashing Durham, you’re just paranoid. Take a happy pill.  Take a chill pill.” That’s when I knew that condescension rests at the heart of an image issue.

One may still hear echoes of these advisories from time to time as though they are new, often issued by someone trying to imply or take credit for any progress and, as we have experienced once or twice, while trying to surreptitiously undermine or impede legitimate efforts.

While I poke a little fun with the groupings above, I’ve always preferred to believe that these advisories while seeming self-serving, were and are generally sincere if not a  bit odd and misguided.  I also must credit several people in Raleigh, such as Harvey Schmitt, for always being supportive of the efforts needed to turn Durham’s image around and helping me to see through obstacles.

Before I summarize the sources upon which Durham’s image turn-around was modeled, it may be helpful to  understand that research documented from the beginning that Durham never had a “self-image” problem or lack of community pride, quite the opposite.  Durham’s off the chart in these areas, especially compared to other communities.

Durham’s image problem turned out to be centered in nearby communities.   The job isn’t finished by any means but it is in excellent hands.  With focused consistency, it is to Durham’s credit that in less than two decades it has reversed a (minus) –53% negative image in nearby communities to a (plus) + 70 positive image today.  In positive to negative terms, that’s a swing from  4 to 1 negative about Durham  to an almost 9 to 1 positive.

For comparison only, Raleigh, which doesn’t acknowledge or address any image issues of its own, has a just under a +3 favorability rating statewide with nearly a third uncertain, compared to Durham’s now + 64 favorability statewide with only 12% uncertain.   Every community can benefit from acknowledging, monitoring and addressing community image.

Along the way, the improved Durham image contributed significantly to the feasibility for some huge brick and mortar projects and improvements which in turn must have also had some impact.  I know because one of my roles was to help inform those studies along the way and to overcome concerns that were typically a result of the image issue.

However, even though Durham draws significant visitation from the other counties and metro areas where the community’s image has improved, these visitors, many of them repeat, still represent a fairly small proportion of those populations overall.  Measures of “personal experience” among those that do visit here suggest that personal experience is driven more by broad factors such as signage than by isolated developments or enclaves, regardless of how spectacular they may be.  With the perceptual image issue increasingly at bay, improving personal experience remains a significant challenge.

Now, let me summarize what we successfully adapted from political campaign and civil rights models and translated into strategies to  turn Durham’s image problem around.

What we learned from political campaigns:

1. Use scientific polls to isolate sources of negativity, benchmark progress and mine other data to put things in perspective.
2. Reinforce Durham’s brand at every touch point, e.g. datelines, airport references, signage, postal addresses etc.
3. Vehemently stand up for Durham whenever the community is wrongfully dissed or wronged but never over-reach.
4. Be true to Durham’s genuine and authentic personality, never give up, reach out to critics.
5. Build “both/and” alliances and partnerships, eschew either/or people, organizations and communities.
6. Favorability is not about the people who know you but the people who form impressions second and third hand.

What we learned from the civil rights movement:

1. Be assertive but never be zero sum or fight fire with fire.
2. Be win/win, not either/or.  Don’t expect everyone to show courage.
3. Keep the faith, be persistent and always be resilient.
4. Isolate the negativists, convert those who are uncertain to positivists.
5. Don’t sell out for isolated monuments, focus on wide-spread curb appeal. Cathedrals come after image improves.
6. Be yourself and celebrate diversity – discrimination and persecution are perception not reality-based.

For any success I had before retiring and the continuing and remarkable success of those that succeeded me, we’ll be forever indebted to those who pioneered these two areas from which we were able to adapt strategies that have truly turned Durham’s image problem around. 

The Voracious 24/7 News Media Has A New Diet

For years now the 24/7 news media has sated itself on periodic, fear-fueled, dog-pile feeding frenzies.    Now it has a new diet that involves trolling for opinions from small groups of people (20% more or less of the adult population) of so-called angry adults and then piling on their story like only 24/7 news media can to amplify it out of proportion and give it legs for as long as possible.

Starting with the Tea Party and now with so-called scanner-gate, it is clearly a trend if not a newsroom model for how to build ratings and readership.  A bonus dessert with the Tea Party was millions and millions of dollars in much needed advertising at least for radio and television, thanks in part to the mistaken belief by a majority of the Supreme Court majority in a recent casew that regulations were in place to prevent such a flood of anonymous campaign ads.

I expect the pendulum will ultimately swing back far enough on the scanner story for a few more outlets to finally reveal that John Tyner has explained that his “touch my junk” comment on video was intended to make light of the issue.   Obviously TSA on the ground didn’t get his humor and that made him angry.   But “making light” or the real issue wouldn’t have been enough to satisfy 24/7 news coverage.

Over-amped repetition at a superficial level may further incite but it isn’t insightful and it is ultimately distracting us from the real issue involved which is the far more widely held frustration we all feel about security delays since 2001, just as we are with anything where misguided attempts at so-called “fairness” leads to “main-frame” solutions v.s. targeted solutions.

Local news is typically much less addicted to exaggerating the “angry” angle but not entirely immune.  I still can’t believe journalists milk the “why do people hate Duke” angle, even here in the university’s home town and nearby.  The real story isn’t that a very small cohort of envious bloggers harangue about Duke, the story is that the Duke men’s basketball team has ranked #1 in popularity nationwide for 7 of the 13 years since the poll has been taken and 2nd most popular in five other years for an average of #1.5 over that span.

Why a small minority loves to hate Duke couldn’t be more obvious (IT’S BECAUSE IT IS THE MOST POPULAR TEAM, STUPID! – to paraphrase a famous campaign slogan from the ‘90s) and doesn’t warrant comment (even tongue-in-cheek) unless also accompanied by how popular overall the team is…but as late as last week a local reporter used the “hate Duke” slant in a story.  It would be equally stupid of me to suggest that failure to do so is because local journalists are often drawn from UNC’s journalism program (Duke’s rival for the half of the US that doesn’t follow college athletics.)

Life is complex enough without exaggerating the size and influence of small groups.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with many news journalists, local and national as well as many in news management as well as overall news media management both as colleagues and friends as well as a source.  I know this 24/7 stuff makes their skin crawl but there is nothing they can do.  Or is there?

Maybe it is time for the news media to do a better job of covering the news media, a la what managing editor Brooke Gladstone and co-host Bob Garfield do with On The Media, a radio program produced by WNYC and carried by more than 200 public radio stations around the country like Chapel Hill-based WUNC does throughout most of North Carolina including where I live in Durham.

Maybe it is time for the news media to admit and come to terms with the fact that “assembly-line” journalism has resulted in running the same 10 storyline over and over and over and over, while choking the life out of what journalism could truly be.

Maybe it is time for the news media to finally make former USC provost and now Lewis & Clark College president Barry Glassner’s book The Culture of Fear – Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things required reading and rereading for all journalists as well as everyone in news and media management.  Maybe others should be added to the reading list such as Harvard visiting professor Dominique Moisi’s The Geopolitics of Emotion – How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World.

Maybe it is finally time for the news media to wean itself from its tradition of obsessing about anecdotal comments or at the very least to refrain from giving them much more oxygen than they deserve without always putting them in context (near the point they are referenced, not back on page 37.)

Mostly, it is time for the 24/7 news media to take responsibility and to be introspective, in an effort to become more  accountable given the power and influence it has.  Even before one of America’s most notorious immigrants unleashed Fox News on us, it is due time for the news media to realize how important it is to society and how much society relies on information and perspective.

Ten Take-Aways From The Book “Scorpions”

From 1960 until 1976 I flirted with becoming a lawyer, even attending law school at night for several years before discovering that community destination marketing as my true calling. It fell to my daughter to finish law school and pass the bar in two states.

Part of what stoked my interest in law during those 16 years were the towering figures on the Supreme Court including Frankfurter, Black, Douglas, Brennan, Warren and Marshall - all contemporaries bracketing by birth both my paternal and maternal grandfathers.

I smiled when just retired Justice John Paul Stevens, who was appointed to replace Douglas near the end of my 16 year flirtation with law, had to correct the news media by stating that he was not a “liberal” while illustrating how far the Court has shifted to the right.

Looking back, along with President John F. Kennedy, these men were part of my introduction to the deep and powerful roots of progressive/liberalism in this country’s history and in many ways part of the reason I transformed from the politics of my parents and grandparents to those of my maternal great grandfather.

So as you can imagine, when it was recently released, I devoured the new book by Noah Feldman titled Scorpions, The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices. I first became aware of Feldman, whose background is Orthodox Judaism, from a speech he made at Princeton about Mitt Romney, closely related to a prior speech I had heard of his on TED where he treated religion and politics as technologies.

The title comes from a quote by a Frankfurter clerk characterizing the Supreme Court as “nine scorpions in a bottle.”

As was another book, published last year (this year in paperback) by Adam Cohen, titled Nothing To Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America Feldman’s new book not only puts a lot of our current events into perspective but it illustrates the ridiculous nature of today’s polarized sound bites.

Here are 10 of my take-aways from this excellent book:

• While the four Justices at the center of the book, Black, Douglas, Frankfurter and Jackson (who died right after the unanimous Brown vs. Board of Education decision broke the back of segregation,) were progressives steeped in liberalism and they each evolved during their lifetimes and their terms on the Supreme Court.

• Frankfurter became one of the Court’s most conservative justices. Black, elected to the Senate through a brief membership in the Ku Klux Klan became an ardent champion of free speech and civil rights. Douglas became a libertarian on issues of privacy and individual freedom. Jackson, a back-country lawyer, the last appointed to the Court without a formal law degree conducted the most important International trial ever, Nuremburg.

• While they each rose from very humble beginnings, they ardently believed in capitalism but that to be saved it needed to be regulated. Douglas who headed the SEC was first to demand that Wall Street be much more transparent and that independent audits be required.

• While today’s court is more conservative, ironically that wing relies on the constitutional philosophies of two of these great liberal predecessors: Frankfurter’s Judicial Restraint, Black’s Original Intent; and the Court as a whole is informed by Douglas’s emphasis on individual privacy and civil liberty and environmentalism as well as Jackson’s pragmatism.

• The book interweaves the stories of many others preceding, during and following that era and related issues including how Justice Warren, who had supported “internment” of Japanese Americans during WWII but was then nominated for governor of California by all three major parties, Republican, Democrat and Progressive and was then later appointed Chief Justice by President Eisenhower, spearheaded the belief that the Constitution embodied natural rights as well as the belief that the Court had a role in actively protecting them.

• In late October, traveling across country, I heard an interview on Satellite radio during which an expert demonstrated that the Supreme Court made the mistake in an opinion that opened the flood gates to unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns that led to copious, anonymous campaign advertising because the majority mistakenly believed regulations were in place to prevent that outcome. As the book illustrates, even great Supreme Court justices make mistakes.

• Feldman also details the medical treatment and philosophy that empowered FDR to overcome his mid-career paralysis from polio and the transformation of his politics prior to becoming President of the United States during 12 years of economic and wartime crisis.

• Eras such as FDR’s illustrate that regardless of ideology, things are never as tidy as history or the all-to-often dualistic bent of today’s news coverage make them out to be and that the polarized, hearing-driven, “safe” approach for appointments to the Court today may not result in the greatness of the past.

• One of my favorite Justices on the Supreme Court today is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is ironic that her application to clerk was rejected by Justice Frankfurter because she was a woman but her pragmatism would make Justice Jackson proud. She doesn’t fit a “mold” and nor did the Scorpions in this book.

• Labels such as Liberal, Libertarian and Conservative are all honorable and the polarizing and demonizing rhetoric of today’s talk-show fueled hyperbole and distortions are of no service to true Americans or our Founding Fathers. It recalls a humorous idiom I learned in law school – “When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, rant and rave and call the other side names.”

Somewhere to clear my head, Somewhere that I can feel free….

I can’t believe I only discovered riding 19 months ago