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I'm in a football mood, so I'll bring up the Dallas Cowboys when they were last hot. They had Emmit Smith, and other teams feared him, so they centered games around him. Bad choice, because we also had Alvin Harper, who could go deep and burn you while you were covering Emmit. So teams dropped someone back to cover the deep threat, and focused the rest on Smith. Bad. Irvin would go down the sidelines and kill you. So you double team Irvin, double team Harper, and focus the rest on the line to stop Smith. Then Novacek would turn from blocker to receiver and hurt you over the middle, and if you covered him, Johnson would do it. And if you covered Smith at the line, Novacek and Johnson over the middle, Harper deep, and Irvin down the field, you'd leave some third stringer open somewhere, and Aikman could hit him and hurt you, too. You couldn't cover it all.
It wasn't one player, it wasn't one strategy. It was the diversity. And the coach with the leadership to use it.
We need a leader who can handle the whole game, not one who keeps trying to decide which faction to appeal to. The Cowboys played much the same no matter who their opponent was, because they weren't concerned with the opponent, only with how they played. We need that. We need to worry about what we can do for America, and quit worrying about what we can do for each group we want to make happy.
We need a leader who can say "Here's an economic plan to enrich everyone. Here's a social policy that provides real justice to everyone. Here's a foreign policy that will keep us safe yet honor the rights of other nations and peoples. Here's a corporate policy that protects jobs but also protects workers and the environment. We don't care what the other guy is offering, because it isn't as good as what we are offering. We aren't trying to be all things to all people, we are just trying to handle the big picture in a way that benefits all people. Vote for us if this is what you want."
Then the little issues go away. Then the Southern white males with confederate bumper stickers say "Finally someone who cares about me," and the black voters in the same state say the same thing, and it is true for both.
Here in Austin I was talking to a campaign strategist for the 2002 election, and he was talking about the county-wide plan. They were going to do mailout to those who had voted Democrat in one of the last three elections, and they were going to do GOTV in heavily minority districts, and they were going to put out hangers in the traditional Democratic strongholds. Etc. All good plans, all basic campaign management 101. But no one was going to worry about the message. Didn't really occur to them. So I asked "Since we lost the last three elections, wouldn't we want to call more than just the people who supported Democrats in the past three elections?" Really seemed to catch them off gaurd.
Too much strategy. Too many factions. Not enough leadership. You can't throw all the strategy and planning out the window, but it is there only to supplement our message. Without a winning message, it means nothing. That's the part that's missing.
And I don't see it in any of the candidates running now. I keep hoping to, but so far I don't.
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