Skilluminati Research

Harry Truman, Great Architect of the Universe

Posted Oct 01, 2010 9 comments

Harry Truman occupies a strange purgatory space in United States History. He is best known today because of the Chicago Daily Tribune getting a headline dead wrong, but that was before he even took office. He was the key player in the creation of the National Security State, a central figure in the mutual histories of the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Defense itself. From NSC-68 to Sandia National Laboratories, Truman built the foundation for modern Supreme Executive Power. He was a one man Bipartisan Consensus, and also the 97th Grand Master of the Masons of Missouri.

Time Magazine, March 24th, 1952 "Truman is very proud of his record as a devoted Mason (now 33rd degree), and proud that his Masonic connection helped him in politics."

Although it's perfectly fair to call Barack Obama an empty suit and a manufactured product, that's what Presidents have always been. The Truman Doctrine was entirely the work of George Kennan, and Truman introduced it with a famous speech he didn't write. Once the Doctrine was actually implemented, George Kennan immediately disowned it and became a vocal critic. (Fast forward two terms and you've got Eisenhower warning about a Military Industrial Complex. Kennedy later delivered a strange speech about Secret Societies that's also essential reading.)

The Great Architect of the Universe always had his doubts, too. On December 21st, 1963, Harry Truman publicly voiced his reservations about the CIA. What follows is a complete transcript of his statement...

"I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it."

The Outroduction

"The CIA is the President's secret army." --Philip Agee

Conspiracy theory occupies a strange purgatory space in United States history. Truman spent a lifetime making important decisions in back room meetings. Men in suits, secret locations, and domestic propaganda: this is how History gets written.

Truman was keen student of political science, recognizing the importance of Narrative and the need to control it. He was tutored by Tom Pendergast, worked closely with Walter Lippman, and enabled Allan Dulles to build an invisible empire. He especially thrived off the war environment of the political campaign, touring tirelessly with Charlie Ross in 1948 to pull off the century's greatest electoral upset. Harry Truman, throughout his career, was very much a team player and a company man.

1945 was a long series of initiations for Harry S. Truman. On April 12th he was sworn in as a formality, an accident of history, the day Roosevelt died. (When he was re-elected in 1948, it was the first televised Inauguration spectacle.) 13 days later, Henry Stimson and Leslie Groves sat down in the oval office and informed him about a secret city in Tennessee, a billion dollar black budget, and a vast super-science project that Truman, like most Americans, knew nothing about.

Truman would use the atomic bomb twice that year: "The Greatest Achievement of Organized Science," he called it. Oppenheimer caught a conscience at Trinity, Edward Teller was a true believer his whole life, but Truman himself never came to witness an actual test. Yet it was Truman who concluded the real lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the pressing need to expand the Manhattan Project into the quest for the Hydrogen Bomb.

So the air must have been heavy with ritual gravity on October 19th, 1945, when the 33rd President of the United States became a 33° Freemason. The True Man: after he left office, he was so broke that Congress passed a law to put him, and all subsequent Presidents, on welfare with a $25,000 annual "pension."

The Great Architect of the Universe is just another job title. Harry S. Truman did his job and after he walked offstage, all he valued was free time and privacy. He had no interest in holding onto power, and even less inclination to second-guess the Work he'd been doing. Oppenheimer, he concluded, was "a cry-baby scientist...he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it."

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Filed in: Social Control

Dreaming 5GW: Invisible War

Posted May 03, 2009 17 comments

"Whoever finds me will kill me." --Gen. 4:14

5GW and marketing have a great deal in common. The one similarity I'd like to emphasize here: effective techniques are constantly mutating so fast that written theory is basically an autopsy. By the time we can recognize a pattern or strategy, it will be useless to actual 5GW operatives. It's hard to overstate the speed of the turnover here -- basically, what worked in 2011 will not work in 2011.

My Personal Dream of 5GW

The core tenet of Invisible Warfare is this: circumstances dictate. This is not a cop-out, but a rigorous challenge to expand your personal power, because most of the time, what circumstances dictate will involve skills you don't currently have.

That core tenet contains the first imperative: situation awareness. Circumstances can change in a second and you need to maintain focus and awareness. This more complicated than merely "paying attention" -- our human brains have built-in biases and design flaws that are hard to counteract, even after we've become aware of them. What you see is seldom what you're looking at.

"Thanks to telegraphs and modern communications, commanders are flooded with a tsunami of almost meaningless facts."

--Naval manual from 1949

It's impossible to achieve situation awareness when we're constantly distracted, and unable to isolate the important details from the meaningless noise. There are several aspects of warfare and power projection, all taken for granted as nescessary, that I believe are counter-productive although not useless: secrecy, violence, and intelligence.

Secrecy only matters when secrecy matters. In my own experience, it seldom does. Bear in mind that real secrecy is extremely difficult to maintain -- an intensive demand on time and resources.

Violence is only nescessary when violence is nescessary. Again, it can usually be averted or avoided, and more importantly every non-violent resolution you can create will increase your network and your strategic power. Rather than destroying your enemies, make them tools, if not allies.

Intelligence-gathering should be critical, and I'm not advocating that you run around blindfolded. I am cautioning against the downward spiral of paranoia, the disinformation hall of mirrors, and most of all, the delusion that your assumptions and information are correct. Awareness of the present moment trumps any and all models, patterns and beliefs that exist in your monkey head.

The Death Spiral of Containment and Control.

Here's one more common mistake, which is both counter-productive and useless: the strategy of containment and control. Government power is achieved through their population base: citizens generate the income, obey the laws and serve in the military, voluntarily or otherwise. Because of the extreme strategic importance of maintaining this power base, governments spend an absurd amount of resources on the containment and control of their civilians.

Fortunately for those of us on the recieving end, containment and control are both impossible goals. We're raised to imagine a grid of defined nation-states with precise borders, but in reality the entire system is riddled with tunnels, shortcuts, criminal networks, secret alliances, holes and cracks and just plain blindspots nobody's noticed yet. Perhaps you will.

Centuries after the myth of entropy first took hold, people are still catching up to the common-sense work of Ilya Prigogine, who demonstrated that "closed systems" exist nowhere in nature. By interacting freely with our environments, we free ourselves from the heat-death of entropy, but modeling our communities after a closed system is a literal death sentence. Endless books have been written about the advantages of collaboration, freedom of speech, open source development and globalization. Actually applying that logic is difficult, opposed by the powerful vested interests of those who have become wealthy and powerful protecting the sheep.

The containment and control system is dangerously stupid, and free humans have an imperative to disable that system wherever possible.

Invisible Warfare

The definition of warfare is being reconsidered, but the discussion among generals and academics is secondary to the more hands-on approach of global terrorists, field commanders, organized crime, religious cults, tech companies, and upstart corporations.

There is an evolving martial art of systems disruption that is radically skewing the power balance between individual humans and the existing control and containment system. Put bluntly, with open knowledge and legal tools, you personally can fuck shit up on a catastropic scale.

Global civilization is inevitable, and terms are being negotiated as you read this. Most of the humans on Earth are not part of these negotiations -- only a vanishingly small minority of powerful, connected and wealthy people. This is inevitable, too: why would the powerful negotiate with anyone else?

As officers Dunlap claim in their recent essay America's Greatest Weapon:

"There is really no escape...Today's captains carefully cultivate information sources among the locals as the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual teaches them to do. Schooled in the manual, such captains deliver offers the insurgents can’t refuse: be captured or be killed.

These are exactly the kinds of dilemmas the U.S. military loves to impose upon our enemies."

Systems disruption changes the containment and control game by offering a third choice: stalemate. This is somewhere between a Masada self-sacrifice and Mutually Assured Destruction. The social contract needs to be radically re-negotiated to accomodate citizens who are capable of crippling society itself.

Containment and control is no longer an option because of this precise problem of empowerment. You only need to protect citizens who are incapable of defending themselves -- the entire complex of "homeland security" and border control relies on ignorant, disempowered citizens -- helpless normal folks. This is not written for them.

Without the excuse of protection, government control and intervention become a naked power play. The choice is presented to you as "be captured or be killed." Submission equals life, resistance equals death -- the Military of a "free country" parroting science fiction monsters like the Borg. Systems disruption offers a third choice, but at great cost. Frankly, it's pretty stupid, but nescessary, because it brings us to a higher synthesis...

Invisible Warfare as Militarized Nomad TAZ Dowsing

In the interest of the proliferation of dangerous ideas, I'd like to propose a fourth alternative: organized groups of friends forming mobile TAZ units -- camouflaged as a circus, a business, or a music group if need be...but better yet, disguised as nothing at all and functionally invisible. Military manuals refer to this core discipline as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) and these TAZ units would be able to scatter into individual parts, disappear from view and recombine elsewhere.

This obviously involves a high degree of planning, training and reliable tools and technology. All of which translates into "hard work."

Barring a well-placed shot to the back, the classic rhyme is true: "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day." However, it's important to know which way to run. When you are attacked by either domestic law enforcement or foreign counter-insurgency, their approach will be the same: using a spearhead unit to chase you towards a larger ambush unit. In other words, the first agents you see are the weakest line of defense, and your exits are probably covered.

That's just a single, specific example of the counter-intuitive logic of...well, reality. All power plays and confidence tricks are designed to distort your situation awareness, and you need to discipline your mind to remain calm. If a stance mentality leads to failure, can constant mobility (and invisibility) prevent that -- or does "no stance" just become a stance of it's own?

I'm advocating mobility through national borders, as well. Randomly swinging through small asian nations and undermining the containment and control machine with an unpredictable broadside will do a great favor to the natives. In the aftermath you will create large avenues of escape, and resources previously devoted to domestic repression and genocide will be turned towards a paranoid quest to defend against a threat that will never return.

9. Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them! this is the Law of the Battle of Conquest: thus shall my worship be about my secret house.

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Filed in: 5GW Project

Newt Gingrich on Using Language for Social Control

Posted May 02, 2009 16 comments

NOTE: this is all verbatim from GOP documents

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We Are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

That takes years of practice. But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used....

...third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

--source link

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... "compassion" is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow... traitors... sensationalists...

endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant...

stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish (poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it."

-- Edward Bernays

Optimistic Positive Governing Words

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

share... change... opportunity... legacy... challenge... control... truth... moral... courage... reform... prosperity... crusade... movement... children... family... debate... compete... active(ly)... we/us/our... candid(ly)... humane... pristine... provide...

liberty... commitment... principle(d)... unique... duty... precious... premise... care(ing)... tough... listen... learn... help... lead... vision... success... empower(ment)... citizen... activist... mobilize... conflict... light... dream... freedom...

peace... rights... pioneer... proud/pride... building... preserve... pro-(issue): flag, children, environment... reform... workfare... eliminate good-time in prison... strength... choice/choose... fair... protect... confident... incentive... hard work... initiative... common sense... passionate

Editor's note: this could easily be re-titled "A Guide to Sarah Palin's Entire Working Vocabulary." It's worth sitting down with Wordle and a couple of her speech transcripts. For example...

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Filed in: Political Science

Edward R. Murrow on Television, Entertainment and our Doomed Culture

Posted May 01, 2009 6 comments

50 years ago on this very day, Edward Murrow gave a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Murrow was simultaneously ahead of his time, and far too old-fashioned for television. Although he won many awards in his lifetime, journalists and television executives were always wary of Murrow, because his primary allegiance was to Truth, not his employers, not his profession. In this speech, he passes a sadly accurate warning to the current and future newsmen of 1958 about the real effects of entertainment journalism on American culture. It's unfortunate that he was proven so totally right.

What follows is the most insightful and prescient highlights from his rather long speech -- the full text of which is available here.

Edward Murrow, October 15th, 1958

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry's program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is--an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation. Heywood Broun once said, "No body politic is healthy until it begins to itch." I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers. It can be done. Maybe it won't be, but it could. Let us not shoot the wrong piano player. Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste. All are responsible to stockholders, and in my experience all are honorable men. But they must schedule what they can sell in the public market.

And this brings us to the nub of the question. In one sense it rather revolves around the phrase heard frequently along Madison Avenue: The Corporate Image. I am not precisely sure what this phrase means, but I would imagine that it reflects a desire on the part of the corporations who pay the advertising bills to have the public image, or believe that they are not merely bodies with no souls, panting in pursuit of elusive dollars. They would like us to believe that they can distinguish between the public good and the private or corporate gain. So the question is this: Are the big corporations who pay the freight for radio and television programs wise to use that time exclusively for the sale of goods and services? Is it in their own interest and that of the stockholders so to do? The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or "letting the public decide."

It may be that the present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent the media of mass communications in a given country reflect the political, economic and social climate in which they flourish. That is the reason ours differ from the British and French, or the Russian and Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

The 2008 US Election is Not About the Issues.

Posted Apr 30, 2009 18 comments

political ritual staged spectacle

The title of this piece is not an original statement, it's actually a direct, and verifiably real, quotation from Rick Davis. Rick Davis, believe it or not, is a (currently still employed) campaign manager for John McCain. The response I've seen has mostly alternated between disbelief and cheering victory -- my Democratic friends took that quote as a tacit admission of failure on behalf of the McBush campaign. I'm here to say that it's not: Rick Davis was telling the truth.

Welcome to post-reality. I don't expect anyone to get used to this anytime soon. Even CBS News is reporting on how most of the military footage from the Republican National Convention was paid actors in a stadium somewhere -- this is the real 2008 Election:

The soldiers were actors and the funeral scene was from a one-day film shoot, produced in June. No real soldiers were used during production.

The footage, sold by stock-film house Getty Images was produced by a commercial filmmaker in Chicago. Both Getty and the production company, Mr. Big Films, confirmed that the footage was shot on spec and sold to the Republican National Committee.

One of the actors, Perry Denton of Chicago, IL also confirmed that he was hired on a day-rate as an actor for the shoot and told CBS News he was surprised to learn the footage was shown at the convention.

Remember the Last Post?

Bush Obama Convention Stages

Previously on Skilluminati, I did a simple post juxtaposing the podium for the 2004 Republican Nation Convention with the podium for the 2008 Democratic Nation Convention. I also posted this a number of times as a myspace bulletin. In both experiments, I got some highly entertaining and insightful responses. Specifically, I found out that people were responding to something that only existed in their own heads. I provided no commentary, yet people had created -- confabulated, really -- a whole explanation for why I would post the photographs, and they responded to that.

So why did I post the photographs?

Of course, as one commentator noted, the design is hardly original. Not only that, the design is actually done by the same company in both instances. They're the same company that pulled off the 2008 Olympics Games ceremonies, and this reflects a long-standing interest of mine in the business of staged ritual and mass spectacle. The power of mass spectacle is well known, and it's dangerous. No matter what the cause, it's a clear-cut form of deliberate manipulation.

Bob's First Rule of Power

We live on a planet with 6 billion humans, and most of them are uninformed and ignorant. Here in the United States, despite high standards of living and abundant material wealth, the situation is no different. In 2006, during coverage of the manufactured debate over "Intelligent Design," Newsweek conducted a national poll about scientific literacy. All of the participants were adult residents of the United States. The results were astonishing:

Fewer than a third of those polled know that DNA is the molecule of heredity

Only 10 percent know what radiation is

20 percent think the Sun revolves around Earth.

But of course, that was from 2006, and Bush's educational reform program has probably improved things considerably since then. I truly hope so, since that same year an even more disturbing poll was conducted by the Washington Post:

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer. Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

I'm Not Pointing Fingers and Laughing

Don't mistake this for crowing about how dumb people are. This is a serious and intractable problem. The vast majority of voters in the United States are dangerously ignorant and easily manipulated.

Here's the moral quandary: is it ethical to use deception in order to control these people? If you don't do it, guess who will? Karl Rove. Rick "not about the issues" Davis. The same paid operatives who have been running the real power structure of the United States since John Rockefeller and Edward Bernays were alive.

Here's the logistical problem: how can you and I compete against multi-million dollar budgets? The business of spectacles, like any other, is a business that runs on money. Those who have money shape the spectacle, and the rest of us are consigned to...well, meaningless critiques on obscure websites.

Our national political dialogue is fundamentally metaphorical, with family values at the center of our discourse. There is a reason why Obama and Biden spoke so much about the family, the nurturant family, with caring fathers and the family values that Obama put front and center in his Father's day speech: empathy, responsibility and aspiration. Obama's reference in the nomination speech to "The American Family" was hardly accidental, nor were the references to the Obama and Biden families as living and fulfilling the American Dream. Real nurturance requires strength and toughness, which Obama displayed in body language and voice in his responses to McCain. The strength of the Obama campaign has been the seamless marriage of reality and symbolic thought.

The Republican strength has been mostly symbolic. The McCain campaign is well aware of how Reagan and W won: running on character: values, communication, (apparent) authenticity, trust, and identity - not issues and policies. That is how campaigns work, and symbolism is central.

One of the best articles I read about the 2008 election -- being a human that's primarily interested in the mechanics of actual power, which seldom play out onstage in front of TV cameras -- is the Fast Company cover piece from April, "The Brand Called Obama." Of course, FC is a business magazine, so this is a look at the image shaping that went on early in his campaign, and for me, it's fascinating stuff.

The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news. What has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well. Politics, after all, is about marketing -- about projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume. The promotion of the brand called Obama is a case study of where the American marketplace -- and, potentially, the global one -- is moving. His openness to the way consumers today communicate with one another, his recognition of their desire for authentic "products," and his understanding of the need for a new global image -- all are valuable signals for marketers everywhere.

"Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand," says Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. "New, different, and attractive. That's as good as it gets." Obama has his greatest strength among the young, roughly 18 to 29 years old, that advertisers covet, the cohort known as millennials -- who will outnumber the baby boomers by 2010. They are black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, but what they share -- new media, online social networks, a distaste for top-down sales pitches -- connects them more than traditional barriers, such as ethnicity, divide them.

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The United States is the Least Free Nation in the World

The Rosetta Stone of US History: Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope”

The Language of Power II

Filed in: Political Science

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