Escape to Chengdu

Reading Roosevelt: The Landon Campaign

Home sick with a fluctuating fever, and reading The Politics of Upheavel by Arthur Schleshinger. The book chronicles the Presidency of FDR and provides thorough accounting of the partisan politicking of the era. The similarities between now and then are striking. Most notably…

GOP fear-mongering about DEBT DEBT DEBT

…The Republican National Committee prepared a series of radio spots, presenting the case against the New Deal in the homely terms of a soap opera.

Marriage License Clerk: Now what do you intend to do about the national debt?

Prospective Bridegroom John: National debt? Me?

Clerk: You are going to establish a family and as the head of an American family you will shoulder a debt of more than $1017.26—and it’s growing every day…Do you still want to get married?

John: You-er-I-I-What do you say, Mary!

Mary: Maybe-maybe-we better talk it over first, John…All those debts! When we though we didn’t owe anybody in the world.

John: Somebody is giving us a dirty deal…It’s a lowdown mean trick.

Voice of Doom: And the debts, like the sins of the fathers, shall be visited upon the children, aye, even unto the third and fourth generations! (Music)

In the innocent days of 1936, however, both the Columbia Broadcasting System and the National Broadcasting Company turned down these programs; as the NBC president said, it “would place the discussion of vital political and national issues on the basis of dramatic license rather than upon a basis of responsibility for stated fact or opinion.”

Rethinking Taxing Health Care Benefits

In the move toward reforming our health care system, it’s altogether possible that we may have to impose a tax of some kind to help offset the costs. Everyone - Republicans and Democrats alike - silently agree that a tax will be necessary, but no one in Washington wants to speak of it.

I’m indifferent to the financing of a new system, so long as there is quality, universal coverage. Nothing is free and having people get sick and use emergency rooms for primary care ain’t cheap either, so my understanding is that we pay for it one way or another. I’d rather pay through a predictable annual tax, than through the wild west of insurance deductables and benefit caps.

What does this all remind me of? Social security. Not surprisingly, there was quite the political fight in Washington when Roosevelt first proposed a payroll deduction for Social Security.  From Galbraith:

“At last the Republicans felt they had found an issue. Excited reports rolled into Landon: thus from Ohio - “The labor vote has stayed unimpressed and adamant until now that the Social Security payroll issue is brought home to them. This state is all agog over payroll reduction.” As voting day came nearer, Republican orators harped with ever-increasing intensity on the horror which lay ahead. The Social Security Act, said Frank Knox, “puts half the working people of America under federal control.” Republican spot broadcasts told workers that they would not have a name under the program, only a New Deal number.

…”Imagine the field opened for federal snooping. Are these 26 million going to be fingerprinted? Are their photographs to be kept on file in Washington? Or are they going to have identification tags around their necks?” In Boston John Hamilton took up this last suggestion, declaring that each one of the enslaved 26 million workers would have to wear metal dogtags (“such as the one I hold in my hand”). The Heartst newspapers featured one page 1 an arresting spread: “Do You Want A Tag and Number In The Name of False Security?” On page 2 was a picture of a bare-chested man somberly wearing a tag on a long chain: below was the stark caption: YOU.

The same is going to happen with health care - it’s already started. Health IT is going to let everyone spy on your health status. Rationing health care. The government coming between you and your doctor. The government will run health care. You’ll be forbidden from receiving the treatment you need/desire. Blah blah blah. How did Roosevelt deal with Republican scare tactics? From Galbraith:

“It did not panic the President, but it deeply angered him. Its patent cynicism summed up for him the contempt with which he believed all economic royalists viewed the democratic process. He had already in the course of 1935 passed out of the George Washingtonian mood of the first New Deal. Now he saw himself increasingly as Andrew Jackson…The attacks on the social security program completed the conversion of Roosevelt to a thoroughly Jacksonian wrath…The evident determination of [a wealthy minority] to deprive the ordinary people of social security drove Roosevelt to fury.

Roosevelt hit back the same way Obama often does — with public shaming and arresting oratory. I can’t wait.

Reading Roosevelt

Developed against the backdrop of depression, [Roosevelt’s] philosophy of compassion had a particular bias toward the idea of security — “a greater physical and mental and spiritual security fo the people of this country.”

“Security,” he once said, “means a kind of feeling within our individual selves that we have lacked all through the course of history. We have had to take our chance about our old age in days past. We have had to take our chance with depressions and boom times. We have had to take our chances buying our homes. I have believed for a great many years that the time has come in our civilization when a great many of these chances should be eliminated from our lives.”

(We’ve had to take our chance with our health care, too. Here’s hoping President Obama knocks this one out.)

deep thoughts?

Sometimes I buy unappetizing snacks—like this stale trail mix that I’m currently picking raisins from—because I know that I won’t enjoy it very much, which means I won’t eat very much of it. 

 And then I think…man, life can really suck sometimes. 

Notes from UStream Forrester Conference

Watching the Forrester conference live on http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/

Quotes & Notes:

“You need to design for desirability”

“You need to touch upon emotional relevance with your customers”

“Desirability is difficult to define. Almost as difficult as it was for Justice Stewart to define ‘obscenity’ in 1946. He said, ‘It’s really hard to define, but I know it when I see it.”

“Desirable experiences create a one-to-one connection.” Example given of Rolex homepage, where there is a gorgeous watch, and the hands on the watch are actually synced with your system clock. Subtle one-to-one connectinos through design.

“Desirable experiences understand that we’re human, and they speak to us in our natural language.”

“Sometimes desirable experiences just make us laugh.” Gives example of an uncomfortable product (body shaver for men), gets around discomfort by using humor.