A Fortune-100 CEO, once taught me that when making any kind of sales presentation the most important question that must always, always be answered is ; “SO WHAT”. Furthermore, when a presentation digresses from answering that it fundamentally disrespects its targeted decision-makers, usually resulting in failure. Often digression comes in the form of self promotions, deception, over reaching hyperbole’s of a competitor and/or otherwise, just wasting the precious time of the audience with irrelevant distractions. When a pitch uses any of these tactics they are no different than a used car salesman. The RNC Convention didn't do just one or two they threw the proverbial "kitchen sink at America and then some! UsingFox News' own words:
[A]nyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
My family takes seriously political decisions and genuinely gives all sides a chance even though for the last dozen years we have consistently leaned strong Democratic. Previously we supported Perot and my daughter and I were even a Green Party national delegates twice. So when we watched the RNC Convention we did so under the
"so what question" specifically; “why vote Republican" and "especially why vote for Romney?” We did so fully understanding that going into the convention that many [if not most] Republicans, “Tea Partiers” and Libertarians who deeply dislike or even despise President Obama. They do so for a variety of reasons, (granted some border on psychotic, or closed bigoted pathologies) and it just seems they are fixated on removing him more so than most other partisan elections. But for that to happen, Romney and the GOP must persuade a majority of Independents and even a few Democrats to vote for him, therefore, the need to answer the
“so what question”.
Essentially, any national political convention offers three primary presentations in an effort to reach and hopefully persuade decision-makers outside their loyal base; the Keynote Address, the Vice-President nominee's speech and their Presidential nominee's Acceptance Speech. In the sales-presentation model it is no different than"the approach", "the presentation" and "the close". All the other stuff is merely cheer leading exercises for the party's faithful.
If the Romney team and the RNC attempted to successfully approach America's decision-makers through the Keynote Address, N.J.'s Gov. Chris Christie came out of the gate like a champion horse with a broken a leg! He focused more on self-promotion than introducing to America's any relevant framing why we should make a change, outside the idea that Republicans don't like Obama in the White House. We walked away from the speech saying "so what, they better have much more than that!"
(I wonder if Christie was demonstrating what actual hyperindividualism using this platform to imagine himself seeking the Presidency in the near future?)
The following night, (or what I describe as the "presentation portion"), Rep. Paul Ryan's acceptance speech. It was littered with falsehoods, misrepresentations and excessive hyperbole's from where numerous fact-checking groups immediately deemed the speech so deceptive. Even the MSM pushed back, imagine that!
Fox News Channel Sally Kohn summarized his address in three words, “dazzling, deceitful, and distracting” where
"[T]o anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech."
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post said:
The original pitch was for “the five biggest lies in Paul Ryan’s speech.” I said no. It’s not that the speech didn’t include some lies. It’s that I wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see it from Ryan’s perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst. So I suggested an alternative: The true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech. (Note here that we’re talking about political claims, not personal ones. Ryan’s biography isn’t what we’re examining here though, for the record, I found his story deeply moving.) An hour later, the draft came in — Dylan Matthews is a very fast writer. There was one item in the “true” section.
CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley reported: Pelley pressed Ryan on his claim last night that President Obama was responsible for the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating,
Pelley confronted Ryan on that point, reading from the S&P's own report saying that it was Republicans' refusal to accept any revenue-raising measures that prompted the credit downgrade.
Was Paul Ryan imagining no one would check the facts, especially the
"whopper" that Obama was retroactively president on October 13, 2008, when even his own
Congressional Office put out a press statement announcing that his district's GM Plant was shutting down in December 2008, a month before Obama's inauguration.
Both cases, the RNC speakers broke my CEO's cardinal rules as they delivered irrelevant presentations that were self-promoting, sizzle and deception, which outside your own cheer leading section gets you no where. Yet, Romney's pollster, publicly responded to the immediate public outcry of constant inaccuracies in the campaign's, saying;
"Newhouse suggested the problem was with the fact-checkers, not the facts themselves:'Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs and you know what? We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.'"
Evidently, they don't perceive a political cost to the use outright and blatant deception focused at decision-makers, or, they simply imagine the facts as they desire them to be? Either way the first two failed miserably to address answer the “So What Question”.
The final day we got to their convention's sales close, Romney's Acceptance Speech. But then we couldn't ignore Clint Eastwood's entrance onto the national political stage, which he actually was there to introduce Romney to the national TV audience. Eastwood's performance was an insult to every decision-maker's valuable time, made worse with his outlandish inferred vulgar humor that publicly disrespected the Office of the Presidency. This was no late-night guest host monologue it was another racist dog-whistle! My wife said it seemed we were watching a new prime time TV Reality show; “America's Craziest Uncles”. Suddenly, our “So What Question” moved to, “What the” as in what were Romney's handlers thinking? All my experience making presentations big and small taught me that every minute in front of decision-maker's is crucial, you never get any time back, you don't get do-over's in life and more importantly; what you do in front of people, who says what, and most importantly, what and how you say it, reflects directly on the capabilities of both the organization and its leader. Disrespecting your target audience as Eastwood did leads to epic failure.
Romney's last chance to close his deal and answer the “So What Question”, was finally upon us., "Mitt why should we vote for the Republicans" and "why should he be elected president?" Frankly his speech's could be summed up as a walk in imaginary"nostalgic optimism", as in let us a step back in time. How many times did I hear phrases like “let us return to” or "we must restore this or that”, and "remember our" as if his vision for leading this country was about re-living the “good old days” of an imaginary idyllic America past. Once in his imagination he suddenly shifted to the dark side and a “foreboding nostalgic-revisionism”. He openly expressed the desire to reconstitute the Cold War with Russia and also start another preemptive war, this time with Iran---again over the perceived Intel threat of WMD's!
As his address concluded, we asked ourselves, "where was his jobs plan"? What about the need to privatize Medicare or persuade me why we should rescind Healthcare Reform. or continue indefinitely and even expand the Bush Tax Cuts let alone try to equitably solve our nation's immigration problem? He just asserted he was going annually grow the economy 4% and inferred that would solve everything---more imaginism! We turned to each other and said, Fox News was right:
[...] may [or attempted to] have helped solve some of the likeability problems facing Romney ultimately by trying to deceive voters about basic facts and trying to distract voters from his own record, [the] speech[es] caused a much larger problem for [Romney,] his running mate [the Republican Party].
--Epic fail as in disrespecting America's decision-makers and not answering the
“So what Question”. How do I know, "where's the bump?"
Guardian
Mitt Romney failed to achieve a bounce from the Republican convention, according to a poll published Sunday, lifting Democrats' spirits as they arrived in Charlotte for their own gathering...Polls put Romney ahead by two percentage points on Thursday and, after delivering a competent but uninspired speech on Thursday evening, one point on Friday.
By yesterday, a Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll showed Obama with a narrow lead, 44% to 43%.
The Examiner:
It is still early, but three polls done after the Republican National Convention in Tampa show nominee Mitt Romney with either no bump at all, or a very little bump that does little to change the race.
Gallup
The last poll from Gallup also shows no real help for Romney from the RNC. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows President Obama leading 47 percent to 46 percent for Romney.
Now as our family has digested the whole RNC Convention effort we have to the conclusion that Republican Party is actually caught up in some collective schizophrenic- bi-polar disorder called dysphoric mania. The RNC seems to imagine all sorts of facts not in reality and they even hear voices, whether it is God or the imaginary President seated in a chair on stage at his opposition's national convention. They seem to conjure up ideas of how they can successfully run the country but when it is put through the math it only makes it worse---like Voodoo Economics, Trickle Down Theory, of ignore the science. They are paranoid and fearful that WMD's are all around us and will rain on us, but they believe in hyper individualism as a means to solve all our communal problems. Lastly they believe that 51 years ago a single white girl from Kansas and an African exchange student conspired to give birth to a future president and secretly had his birth changed to U.S. Collective imaginism is the only answer unless there is something else, but what we do know is they failed to answer the
"SO WHAT".