THE REALITY OF POLITICS

The enclosed intrigued me. The sheer economic pressures of what Martin Luther King called “the fierce intensity of now” takes smiles off faces and puts steel into behaviour. Today I got a request (well nearly, very nearly a demand) for £215 from Barnado’s to identify and rescue a child vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

The latter days of Obama campaign plus Sandy plus a lot of money concluded the affair.

Moral: get the money in….then get them out….get them voting (however reluctantly)…

Before the election – “we need your money ….now!”

"Friend --

In a few hours, I'm walking into a budget meeting with the rest of the campaign management team.

By the time we walk out of that room, we'll have decided exactly what kinds of resources we can get to organizers on the ground and which attacks we can beat back in the last three days of this election.

This is seriously your last chance to help decide what that looks like. Your donation will determine which attacks get a response -- and which don't.
According to our records associated with this email address, you haven't chipped in to this campaign yet. So this is it, the very last call. If you care about the outcome of this election, now is the time to show it.

Please give $5 or more, and help while you still can:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Budget-Decisions

Please hear me when I say this is serious, and the decisions we're making are very concrete -- and final.

Give what you can, and let's make sure we win.

Thank you.

Ann Marie

Ann Marie Habershaw
Chief Operating Officer
Obama for America

After the election – phew!!!

Friend –

I'm about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first.

I want you to know that this wasn't fate, and it wasn't an accident. You made this happen.

You organized yourselves block by block. You took ownership of this campaign five and ten dollars at a time. And when it wasn't easy, you pressed forward.

I will spend the rest of my presidency honoring your support, and doing what I can to finish what we started.

But I want you to take real pride, as I do, in how we got the chance in the first place.

Today is the clearest proof yet that, against the odds, ordinary Americans can overcome powerful interests.

There's a lot more work to do.

But for right now: Thank you.

Barack

www.colourfulthinkers.com

THE FIERCE INTENSITY OF NOW

This wonderful line came from Martin Luther King’s lips. He was talking about that tipping point when it’s suddenly exactly the right time to go for it, what Shakespeare in Julius Caesar described as high tide:

“There in a tide in the affairs of men                                                                                                           which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”

Poetic it may be and none the worse for that because poetry manages to dramatise, synthesise and distil all at once. A friend once called me “a marketing poet” which alternately upset and, then, pleased me. I think (I hope) he was referring to my EQ and the fact that I passionately believe that marketing is only about people and how they make up their minds about things and how we marketers manipulate that.

The intensity to which Martin Luther King refers seems especially apt in our fast moving-ball-game of life. We live in a high-drama-present – from the Olympics to the US Open to the Ryder Cup we are in a constant state of breathlessness. In a world so full of speed, making any business decisions has to be done fast relying on intuition not on “give me two weeks to think about that.

Nicolas Colsaerts playing one of the best Ryder Cup rounds ever seen on Friday afternoon at the Medina Club, Chicago.

We are living in the present and that is the only place to live.

In Britain we used to live in the memories of the past. No more.

The Americans have always lived for “now”. An American I knew would say “Richard I’m starting a fantastic briefcase business”. A year later I’d see him and with a flourish he’d produce spectacles from his pocket saying “Fashion spectacles, the next big thing. I’m going into this in a big way”. When I asked about briefcases he’d look puzzled as though trying to remember and would say:- ”Briefcases. No. That was a terrible idea. I got out of that ages back.”

Gurus, meanwhile, try to live in the future, where nobody has any idea what’s going to happen, so they are pretty well bomb proof.

William Sieghart, the founder of National Poetry Day, tried something at a recent literary event. He set up a poetry pharmacy. People would come up and see “I feel depressed” and he’d prescribe a dose of Keats. Or it would be lassitude - “try a spoonful of Milton”. Or for someone who’s lost all hope – “two Emilies twice daily” and it worked apparently.

Well poetry (hopefully) does work.

Especially when poets are trying to manipulate their girlfriends – “Come live with me and be my love” and other such - but I think we know what they’re after – a bit of “fierce intensity of now”.

www.colourfulthinkers.com