Fired up, ready to go

Another memorable event from the 2012 presidential campaign was President Obama’s final speech in Des Moines, Iowa on November 5th, the evening before the election. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. He told a wonderful story about getting inspired by Edith Childs, a woman from the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina, whose call and response chant became part of his 2008 campaign.



That story begins at about 21 minutes in. Here’s a transcript of it: 

“...Don’t let anybody tell you your voice can’t make a difference. It makes a difference.

I got a powerful reminder of this myself on our last campaign. Folks in Iowa, I know you may have heard this story, but it was early in the primaries, and we were still way down in the polls, and I think this office had just finally gotten the heat turned on.

And, at the time I was still competing in South Carolina. It was one of the early primary states, and I really wanted the endorsement of a state representative down there. I’d met her at some function where I was, nobody knew me, nobody could pronounce my name, they’re wondering what’s he thinking. So, I asked her for her endorsement. And she said, I tell you what, Obama, I will give you my endorsement if you come to my hometown of Greenwood, South Carolina. And I think I had a little bit of wine during  dinner because right away I said OK.

So, it’s about a month later, and I’m traveling back to South Carolina, and we flew in late at night. I think we were coming from Iowa. We’d been campaigning nonstop, you know traveling all through towns, and having town hall meetings, and shaking hands. And, in between I’m making phone calls asking people for support. So, we land in Greenville, South Carolina, at around midnight, we get to the hotel at about one o’clock in the morning. I am wiped out, I’m exhausted. And I’m dragging my bags to my room. Back then we didn’t fly on Air Force One, and you know, the accommodations were a little different.

And, just as I’m about to walk into the room, one of my staff taps me on the shoulder and they say, excuse me Senator - I was a Senator back then - we’re going to have to wake up and be on the road at 6:30 in the morning. What! Why? Well, you made this promise to go to Greenwood, and it’s several hours away.

And, you know I try to keep my promises, so a few hours later I wake up and, I’m feeling terrible. I think a cold’s coming on, and I open up the curtains to try to get some light to wake me up. But, it’s pouring down rain, terrible storm. And I take a shower, get some coffee, and I open up the newspaper, and there’s a bad story about me in the New York Times. I was much more sensitive at that time to bad stories. I’ve become more accustomed to these now. And, finally I get dressed. I go downstairs, and I’m walking out to the car, and my umbrella blows open, and I’m soaked. So by the time I’m in the car I’m wet, and I’m mad, and I’m still kinda sleepy.

And it turns out that Greenwood is several hours away from every place else. So, we drive, and we drive, and we drive, and we drive. And finally, we get to Greenwood, although you don’t know you’re in Greenwood right away, cause there are not a lot of tall buildings around. And we pull up to a small field house, and I walk in, and I’m looking around, and I don’t hear a lot going on. And, the state representative said she was going to organize a little meeting for us, and we walk in and there are about twenty people there. And, they’re all kinda wet too, and they don’t look very excited to see me. But, you know, I’m running for President, so I do what I’m supposed to do. And I’m shaking hands, and I say how do you do, nice to meet you.

And, I’m making my way around the room, and suddenly I hear this voice cry out behind me: ‘Fired up!’ And, I’m startled, and I don’t know what’s going on. But, everybody in the room - this is a small room - they act like this is normal. And, when the voice says ‘Fired up!‘ they all say ‘Ready to go!‘ And so, once again I hear the voice: ‘Fired up!‘  And they say ‘Fired up!’ And say ‘Ready to go!‘, ‘Ready to go!’ I look around, I turn around me  there’s this small woman, she’s about sixty years old, looks like she just came from church - she’s got a big church hat. And she’s looking at me, kinda peering at me, and she’s grinning, smiling, looking happy.

Turns out she’s a city councilwoman from Greenwood who also moonlights as a private detective. I’m not making this up, this is true. And, it turns out she’s famous throughout the area, when she goes to football games, and when she goes to rallies, and she goes to community events, she does this chant of hers. She does it wherever she goes. So, for the next few minutes, she just keeps on saying ‘Fired up!’ and everybody says “Fired up!’ And she says ‘Ready to go!’, and everybody says ‘Ready to go!‘

And, I’m thinking, you know, this woman is showing me up. This is my meeting, I’m running for President, and she’s dominating the room. And, I look at my staff, and they just shrug their shoulders. They don’t know what to do, so this goes on for a few minutes. Now, here’s the thing, Iowa. After a few minutes, I’m feeling kind of fired up. I’m feeling like I’m ready to go. So, I start joining in the chant, and my staff starts joining in the chant. Suddenly I feel pretty good. And, we go on to talk about the lives of the people in the room, and their families, and their struggles, and their hopes for their kids and their grandkids.

And we drive out, and it’s still raining, but it doesn’t seem so bad and we go to our next stop. For the rest of the day, even after we left Greenwood, even though we still weren’t getting any big crowds anyplace, even though people still couldn’t pronounce my name,  I felt good. And, I’d see my staff, and I’d say ‘are you fired up?’ and they’d say ‘we’re fired up!’ I’d say ‘are you ready to go?’ and they’d say ‘we’re ready to go!’ And we brought that to Iowa. And during our rallies this became a chant, and we’d have signs saying ‘Fired up!‘ ‘Ready to go!‘

The woman, her name was Edith Childs, she became a celebrity and she was written up in the Wall Street Journal. And folks did news stories on her. And this became one of the anthems of our campaign back in 2008. Now, here’s the end of the story though. We knew we were coming back to Des Moines for the last campaign rally I’ll ever do for me.  And so we were getting kind of sentimental and we called up Edith Childs. And we said, why don’t you come on up? No, no, listen to this. We said, why don’t you come on up? We’ll fly you up from South Carolina, and you can do this chant one more time just for for old good times sake. It’s like getting the band together again.

And, you know what Edith said? She said I’d love to see you, but I think we can still win North Carolina, so I’m taking a crew into North Carolina to knock on doors on election day. I don’t have time just to be talking about it - I’ve got to knock on some doors. I’ve got to turn out the vote. I’m still fired up, but I’ve got work to do.

And that shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room. And, if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

There’s also a shorter video about Edith Childs here.

The audience is on your side, and they want you to succeed

One of the most memorable speeches of the 2012 presidential campaign was when Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introduced Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention.



But, when you watch the video above you’ll see very near the end, at 17:22,  he accidentally flipped over a comparison and said that:

“We chose more government instead of more freedom.”

USA Today, who had a copy of his text, and was blogging live, noted:

“10:31 p.m. ET: Rubio flubs a key line in his speech, saying ‘We chose more government instead of more freedom.’ Someone in the crowd says no. Line in the text says, ‘We chose more freedom instead of more government.’ “

I caught it too. But, if you didn’t have the text in front of you, you probably missed that minor mistake. Most of the audience didn’t care at all because the rest of his speech was so compelling. And, on the following morning the  headline for the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog said:

“Marco Rubio Delivers Rousing speech at RNC.”

Nobody’s perfect. On April 25, 2012 Brad Phillips blogged about when Mr. Rubio lost the last page of his speech. In an interview with GQ magazine he was asked how old the earth is, and gave a long answer instead of just saying I don’t know. He was criticized by Phil Plait and others, and later corrected himself.

Blue Astroturfing and stealth raisins

On November 5, 2010 I blogged about how I didn’t like unknown advocacy groups pouring money into political campaigns. I called that lack of transparency stealth raisins. They were like some oatmeal cookies where there was raisin paste you couldn’t see, instead of them being labeled as oatmeal-raisin cookies.

Astroturfing happens when a political, advertising, or public relations campaign is  organized to appear being from the grassroots and mask the actual sponsors. Since 1986 the playing surface at Boise State University’s Bronco Stadium has been covered with blue artificial turf. So, the local color for astroturfing would be blue rather than the usual green. In the 2012 election in Idaho we had a good example. It was from a group that favored three referendums for education reform that asked voters to approve what the state legislature had passed in 2011 (widely known as the Luna laws).

Last October 22nd the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington and the Idaho Statesman here in Boise printed a sanctimonious opinion piece titled Education Voters of Idaho: Parents must have final say in how schools are run. Part of it said:

“There are too few groups advocating for the rights of parents with school-age children and for the smart approach demanded by taxpayers who fund our system.

That’s why we started Education Voters of Idaho (EVI). Over the last two years we have watched the debate over education reform with increasing frustration, even disdain. Like most Idahoans, we were tired of education reform getting caught up in politics and being focused on personalities. We decided to do something about it, and founded EVI to push sound policies on behalf of parents and taxpayers throughout the state. Our voices and the voices of thousands of others like us need to be heard.”

Then Ben Ysursa, the Idaho Secretary of State, asked EVI to reveal who its donors were since they were a political committee subject to the Sunshine Initiative. They claimed they were a nonprofit and didn’t, so he sued them. EVI lost the suit in the 4th Judicial District (Case CV-OC-2012-19280), and then revealed where their  $640,000 really came from.

Albertson’s supermarket heir Joe Scott  gave $250,000 (or 39%), and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City gave $200,000 (or 31%). So, 70% of the money came from just two very wealthy donors. That’s not very grassroots, and was a public relations disaster.

Voters in Idaho conclusively rejected all three referendums. Two of them lost in all 44 counties in the state, and the third only lost in 37 of 44 counties.

The close-up view of artificial turf was recolored from this one.

Predicting the 2012 presidential election - the boys who cried elephant

One of the stranger things which happened last year just before the presidential election was watching five conservative pundits (Michael Barone, Dean Chambers, Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and George Will) predict that Mitt Romney would win by a big margin in the Electoral College. (Mr. Chambers lowered his margin from 311 vs 227 on November 1st to 275 vs 263 on November 5th). That wasn’t how things turned out though. Here is what happened versus their predictions:

Look at what Karl Rove did. He said that without twelve toss-up states the two candidates were tied at 191 each. Then he predicted that Romney would win seven of those states (for another 94) and Obama would win five (for 62), even though several states really were too close to call.

The map shown above has states Obama won in blue, states Romney won in red, and states Rove predicted Romey would win (but Obama actually won) in purple. Karl was right about North Carolina, but wrong about the other six states and who would be president.

In the movie Forrest Gump, the main character proclaimed:

“My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get’."

Forrest might have flipped a coin to predict how those dozen states would come out, and he might well have done better than Karl Rove did. 

Would you rather get a reputation for being wrong, or for being cautious and saying it’s too close to call? If you’re a pundit, then you feel compelled to make that prediction and risk losing your credibility. But, when the next election comes, people may remind you that you had behaved like the Aesop's Fable of the boy who cried wolf.

The Halloween image of an elephant was adapted from a 1912 Puck cartoon.   

Do you like stealth raisins?

I like oatmeal-raisin cookies, but my significant other doesn’t like raisins. She leaves them out when she bakes oatmeal cookies. However, the last time I bought plain oatmeal cookies for us at the supermarket I was surprised to find that they tasted almost exactly like oatmeal-raisin cookies.

I found out why when I read the list of ingredients on the package. Raisin paste was on the list. It is made by pushing raisins through a fine mesh screen (extrusion). When you look up some popular brands of oatmeal cookies at LabelWatch you will find raisin paste on the list of ingredients for:

Archway Classic Oatmeal Cookies
Mother’s Iced Oatmeal Cookies
Pepperidge Farm Oatmeal Soft Baked Cookies












Those raisins are there, but you can’t see them. They’re little purple ninjas, like a strange cross between the California Raisins and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

I like to clearly see what I’m getting, so I don’t like stealth raisins. Similarly I don’t like that the new rules for the election game lets unknown advocacy groups with curious names like Americans for Prosperity, Apple Pie, and Pickup Trucks pour mass quantities of money into campaigns.