Category Archives: Politics

House of worship

Premier Christy Clark, speaking to a Christian audience earlier this month:

“I really do think the tragedy of our society is actually not there are so many atheists — because atheists often express themselves as generously as non-atheists — it’s the fact people don’t go to a place of worship every week and get reminded anymore of how important it is that we care.”

You know, maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if some British Columbians, especially in leadership positions, could go to a special place more often and get reminded of how important it is that we care. But for that to happen, it would have to be open a little more than 19 full days in nearly a year.

Election night sketchbook

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My election night doodling. Just click for full-size images in glorious grey!

From 2010, good advice on joke-writing in speeches

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From How political speechwriters do comedy. – Slate Magazine:

Which brings us to the third rule: Use jokes as damage control. Clinton never made light of the Lewinsky scandal directly. But in 1999, he started off his WHCD speech by somberly noting that had the Senate’s impeachment vote gone another way, he wouldn’t be standing here today. Pause. “I demand a recount.” The quip not only defused the tension surrounding the Lewinsky affair. It also captured Clinton’s messy relationship with the press.

Vital Speeches of the Day’s newsletter reminded me of this 2010 piece on Slate. Author Christopher Beam offers four rules for joke-writing by political speechwriters that work well for anyone trying to bring the ha-ha to their next speaking gig: Be self-deprecating; Singe, don’t burn; Use jokes as damage control; and Delivery matters.

When I was working with BC Premier Glen Clark, he noted in one speech that his leadership style had gained a reputation for erring on the side of command-and-control and micromanagement. “And I was thinking yesterday, as I mowed the lawn at the legislature, there might be some truth to that.”

That touches every base: his delivery was impeccable, the joke was self-deprecating, it didn’t cross the line into self-mocking, and it defused one of the knocks against his government.

Filed under: Speechwriting Tagged: Glen Clark, humor, humour, jokes, politicians, politics

Just because you have numbers doesn’t mean you have insight

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One of the most seductive things about social media is the way it allows us to quantify things. I have more friends than she does – I must be more popular. That blog post got more hits than this one, so that one’s more effective. We have more Twitter followers this month than last month, so we’re on the right track.

Numbers are lovely that way. In a world where everything seems open to interpretation, numbers offer certainty. Five is bigger than three: end of argument.

Problem is, a beautiful number can hide an ugly bunch of oversimplification. Trying to quantify the complexities of human interaction in a multidimensional matrix of influence and activity in a few simple numbers is next to impossible (although potentially very attractive to venture capitalists).

Which is why, despite a valiant effort, social-media-analysts-turned-political-prognosticators fell so heavily on their virtual fannies in trying to use online metrics to predict last Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucus.

The good folks at Trilogy Interactive summed up how woefully short those predictions fell in a handy infographic. (Only one prognostication came close – eerily so – until a glitch in the data it was based on got corrected, and then it fell into line with the others.)

So why are retweets, likes, mentions and follows such poor predictors of electoral success? As Trilogy points out, it’s partly because of the difficulty of focusing that information geographically. And it’s partly the way those numbers confuse conversational buzz and notoriety with support. Micah Sifry puts it well:

Saying simple, stupid things that lots of people want to tell their peers about can get you tons of followers and retweets. But it doesn’t mean anything definitive about grass-roots support. Otherwise, right now we’d be talking about Herman Cain’s amazing victory in Iowa.

More fundamentally, the information that Twitter, Facebook and other platforms can offer us about our relationships to brands, candidates, ideas and each other is still pretty crude. And it would take a far more subtle, sophisticated and complex reading of the things we say to each other to infer anything very meaningful from those blunt-instrument statistics.

Which is worth remembering the next time you find yourself or your organization getting hung up on the number of followers, fans and subscribers you have. Those numbers can be useful… but they couldn’t predict Newt Gingrich’s future, and they shouldn’t dictate yours.