Messaging Leadership: Nuance Discussions And Value-Based Campaign

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Bernie Sanders who has been gaining momentum had come off from winning the Nevada caucus, the frontrunner, which he hasn’t always been in that position. Everybody was saying, “He’s the real front runner.” The guy commits a self-inflicted wound that is shocking.

This is a good topic to go over.

On our last episode, we talked about Michael Bloomberg and his messaging and somebody as much of a seasoned politician and campaigner as Bernie Sanders, I was surprised that he made such a blunder. On 60 Minutes, literally not even 24 hours after he wins the Nevada caucus, he’s got all this momentum. Everybody is talking, “Can anybody stop Bernie Sanders?” He does his level best to stop himself. On 60 Minutes, he is asked the question about Fidel Castro of Cuba who as we all know is an authoritarian, dictator and all this. He had been an enemy of the United States ever since 1961 or even before that, the early ’60s. Bernie Sanders talking about Fidel Castro says, “Everything he did was bad but he did some things that are good. For instance, he educated all those people and put in the literacy program,” and all that anybody could hear is the literacy program when Fidel Castro killed thousands of his own people. He would jail dissidents who spoke out against him. Freedom of speech does not exist in Fidel Castro’s Cuba or did not exist. It was an OMG moment where it’s like, “Bernie Sanders, are you kidding me?” He gave his opponents and the Donald Trump campaign so much ammunition to try to take him down. It’s like, “What were you thinking?”

It’s difficult to watch. We call them seasoned politicians and with that, there’s an expectation that two things are going to take place. That they’re going to do leadership and they’re going to know something about communication. That’s what we assume but they’re regrettably a little bit more middle of the road. What I mean by the middle of the road is on a scale of 1 to 10, when we take a look at leadership or take a look at communication, those specific things. Leadership is a construct where one person is getting a group of people going and to do that, they’ve got to embody the value of communication. Winston Churchill had his gaps too. John F. Kennedy had his gaps too, but they also didn’t have the internet.

They also didn’t have the hundreds of cable stations to recycle and regurgitate these things. If you get a person that’s regurgitating, “This is the best economy ever in the whole United States,” and that’s the only film clip that you have available to repopulate, then what happens is that is the thing that gets imprinted. What Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and some of these folks don’t understand in communication is there is no room for a nuanced discussion in public. You can’t sit there and have a nuanced discussion mostly because people don’t have the ability to empathize with the opposite point of view. They don’t have room and space to treat you as a human being first for the first fifteen minutes of the discussion. They immediately click, “You’re in that camp with that identity, we hate those people.” They’ve already been pushed over and regrettably, their brain is very quickly hooked into the fight response or the even the flight response of, “I can’t talk about this or if I do talk about this, I have to hit you in the face.”



I can imagine because in 60 Minutes while in the broader context of America is seen as a news organization of integrity, I do think in our current polarized America, half of the country or 40% of the countries sees 60 Minutes as being more of a Liberal media machine or the mass media that Donald Trump always calls out as part of that no fake news media. Here, if any Donald Trump followers or supporters were watching this interview, I’m sure as soon as he said that, they switched it off and went back to Fox news. One of those things was like, “This organization is trying to promote Bernie Sanders who is a socialist,” or even they might’ve gone so far in their minds to think, “He’s a communist just like Fidel Castro. He likes him. He’s saying he wasn’t a bad guy or all a bad guy.” How devastating was this, Bill?

On a scale of one to ten because it’s a two-party system. You only get to pick one or the other. There are many people that disliked Donald Trump so much that if he’s the nominee, they’re going to go with him. The only problem that doesn’t help his leadership or his ability to communicate out that. It’s a nuanced discussion about how Fidel Castro had universal healthcare. Every person on that island had access to healthcare and every person on that island had access to education. The intention but how Fidel Castro got. There was something you have to stay on. You have to go after the violence. You have to go after not being able to be adversarial to your enemies as in killing them. Think about this as a minor message is that Fidel Castro had the for us or against us mindset. Donald Trump has cultivated the for us or against us mindset. Therefore, if the other side, wins we might get executed. They’re in polarity. Even though that’s not a reality for us, that’s a reality for them. He scared the middle to move to the right slightly.

Leadership is a construct where one person is getting a group of people going.

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When a person doesn’t know how to go after what the prime objection is, how to quickly make a discerning moment and be able to go after a value or a need versus going after an issue. Don’t talk about climate change. Talk about caring for our planet. Do you want somebody to take a bag of trash and throwing it in your yard? Is that what you’d like? Because the coal plant is over here and putting smoke up here and it drifts into your yard. It’s exactly like throwing a bag of trash in your yard and then your kids have to breathe in. Can’t we do a little better than that than throwing trash at each other and not expecting people to clean up the trash? What am I talking about? Climate change, but I’m not talking about climate change.

That’s the thing. People focus more on the literal thing you said about the garbage being thrown in their yard and that’s bad and they don’t want it. You may be convincing them to align themselves more with preventing climate change, but that’s not maybe the way they think about it at that moment.

They don’t want trash being thrown in their yard. If you can’t see it, is it still trash? If it’s up in the atmosphere, you can’t see it. All of a sudden it’s like, “Now, I’m up to my neck in the trash. How did I get here?” It’s a funny thing to say, but take a couple of pictures of India and put it in the sky and do some funny graphics with it and got it. It’s like, “Do you want this where this is not being cared for?” Take on the issue. You don’t want to get caught in the nuance. Communication has increased the impression that your leadership can get it done and that’s what a value-based campaign does versus an issue-based campaign.

That’s interesting you say that. I’d like to read a statement that was made. CNN did three Town Halls in a row, Bernie Sanders and then Pete Buttigieg did one as well. Here’s what I think is a value-based statement in response to this whole Fidel Castro was not all bad comment about literacy and I want to get your reaction to that, Bill, and see what you think. I think this was a pretty astute and value-based response. Pete Buttigieg said, “As a Democrat, I don’t want to be explaining why our nominee is encouraging people to look on the bright side of the Fidel Castro regime going into the election of our lives.” Isn’t that an interesting statement?

Yeah, he’s closer. On a scale of one to ten, that’s a very strong seven message.



He followed it up with, “Of course, literacy is a good thing, but why are we spotlighting the literacy programs of a brutal dictator instead of being unambiguous in our condemnation about the way he was treating his own people?” You’re getting more of a vision here.

Rule of law goes ahead of personal vendettas.

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Money allows you to play the long game. You don’t have to worry about food, shelter, heating, and yachts. You don’t have to worry about it because you can get on a yacht. You can go over here and spend time over here. You can take a vacation across the world if you want. You got money to do that thing. You don’t have to worry about these other things. You have a house that’s sitting empty on top of the hill looking out over an ocean and you’re still traveling the world for a year and you can afford to pay for that. That’s why Trump can say what he wants. The people that are, “He’s saying what I want,” he’s living in the oligarch authoritarian mindset and who doesn’t want to rule the world? The problem is that most people don’t have the skill to do it. The 16, 17 oligarchs in the Soviet Union have it good. The 47 billionaires in the United States have it good. Do they get to say what they want and what everybody else has to follow? That’s the fight of our life. That’s what Pete Buttigieg was talking about. The fight of our life is to do certain people get to say and do whatever they want?

That statement, “The fight of our life,” isn’t that like a rallying cry for all people that are sick and tired of Donald Trump. That’s the motivating subdivision tone that we’re going to have to come to at some point here when there is one candidate. Everybody’s going to have to rally behind and vote for that candidate to remove Donald Trump.” Even regrettably if one of them has made unfortunate statements that are sympathetic to a dictator like Fidel Castro. That’s hard to do for a lot of people.

It’s sympathetic to the value of a dictator that is in charge of caring for a very small Island. Bernie Sanders could have pivoted that way. “He was brutal to his people and when he was in charge, he instituted these things. We’re a capitalist country. We need to care for our people. Our current form of capitalism in the medical industry is not caring for our people. If they would just care for our people, we wouldn’t be in this discussion right now, but they’re taking profit instead of caring for all people.” I’m not talking about communism. You’ve got to care for your people.

That’s a value-based message.



It’s not what your country can do for you, it’s what you can do for your country is a value-based narrative. It’s also a socialist narrative. It’s not about what you could do for your country is the blend of socialism and capitalism. He was on the line there with that one. You can argue that sentence from both sides. It’s not what your country can do for you because that’s more a little more socialism and it’s what you can do for your country is a little more capitalism. The point of it is that there’s still a balance between that narratives. We are in the fight of our lives. What fight of our lives? The fight of our lives is there going to be a continuous path down the two-tier, the wealth and American inequality.

I wasn’t planning to do this, Bill, but I think it makes sense. I’m not going to call him out, but we have a common friend on Facebook who was interviewed on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox news on the same day. He was asked by each network because he was at a political rally. He was asked by each network what he wanted in a leader for this country. Fox news was his last interview and he asked the interviewer, “Do you really want to know as you might not be a fan of my answer?” They said, “We want to know.” He says, “I’m looking to live in the United States, not divided states. I’m looking for a leader that will build bridges, not walls between each of us. I’m looking for emotional maturity, not someone who stopped growing emotionally in the seventh grade. I’m looking for a leader who can apologize with action that rights a wrong, not someone who has a victim personality and it is always someone else’s fault. I’m looking for where truth and integrity matter.” It goes on a bit. I won’t read the whole thing, but it’s interesting that those are all value-based statements though. That’s where I think it relates.

Value-based with a little bit of perspective and a little bit of, “I’m not voting for your guy.”

He was compassionate about it. It was veiled labeling and diagnosis with the seventh-grader comment, but honestly, that’s nothing different that you and I have said on this that many things that come out of Donald Trump’s are the mentality of we’ve said the eighth-grader. It’s not far off. It is though more of an inclusive value-based message what that person gave than it was any kind of us versus them. It was more inclusive.

Labels and diagnoses are what I call a good place to start, but it is not a place to finish. You could call someone a narcissist, but you cannot finish there and just keep them in the box. You’ve got to do something about how the person’s meeting their need for respect at the expense of others. Meeting the need for fairness at the expense of others. Meeting their need for self-worth at the expense of others. I can go down the list. Those are all value-based narrative. To be able to be in a place to lead with strength. The way I’d like to describe it is to let the value do the work for you. When somebody and if any politician is reading right now, let the need do the work for you. Let the value do the work for you. When somebody asks you a question, “Respect looks like this for me. Integrity looks like this for me. Fairness looks like this for me.”

What happens is you get the most important thing out before you try to frame or you’re helping the person’s brain put a frame around what you’re saying. What an early childhood program looks like to me is the frame that Bernie Sanders starts with. He drops the Fidel Castro just to say there’s a lot of good things. He talks about the thing he likes. One of the hardest things for Americans to do is there certain things that we steal and there are certain things we don’t. One of the things that we struggle with is taking other people’s good ideas and using them here. China doesn’t have any problem with this one with its value structure. They have no problem taking someone else’s new idea or things, stealing it and not paying them and reproducing it. “Thank you very much for your new idea. That’s a good idea. We get to take it.” They have their own mental construct around that. In America, it is, “No, we want to protect that idea therefore, we are hesitant to take other people’s stuff. We can creatively figure out.” Some of the things we get are lesser than the good thing.

Do you know why that happens in China?

Please tell me.

Do you know why that’s rooted in their culture? I know this and this is a sidebar, a tangent a little bit from our discussion. I do think that oftentimes in America, especially Americans who never left the country or maybe have never been to China very easily paint China with a broad brush that, “China is bad. America’s good.” I’m not saying I want to live in China. I love America and this is my home and I believe in America. I want to put that out there. The reason that the Chinese that revere copying things, they don’t see copying as a character flaw. It goes back to like in the year 600. It goes back thousands of years here were a Chinese emperor at the time saw this beautifully crafted vase. I don’t have the reference. I can get it because I read it in a book. This incredibly well-crafted artisan vase, he’s like, “This is amazing.” It was not the original, it was a copy of another vase. He said, “The skill to create a copy that I couldn’t tell the difference between the original artisan handcrafted piece and this other one, that takes a greater skill in some ways to copy that than somebody making something new that no one’s ever done.” In their culture deeply rooted, the idea of copying something is a high value and not cheating or taking advantage of somebody. It’s at a deep cultural root.

It’s high respect. Can you copy this and make it better? Can you copy this so you can’t tell the difference? It’s interesting and you and I have talked about thinking styles too in the past. It’s like, “Creativity is here, the details are down here.” Here’s this creativity, the initial concept to fruition. Here’s this person that’s copying that thing, we value detail, structure, and discipline. Those are all down here. Creativity is up here, which is you’re drawing down things from the ether and you’re adding the breath of spirit to this creative thing. Here there are two polar value sets.

Bill, you know me. I’m a very creative individual. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but I have 40 patents. I value creativity and in America, we value creativity and originality much more so than the Chinese culture does and protecting it. The United States patent system was invented as a model for the world. I’ve spent a lot of time in China over the years and understand that culture may be more than a lot of Americans. People are fundamentally good people and they want the same things that all of us want. Safety and protection for their family, advancement, doing better than their parents and all that sort of thing. They live in a very different government structure that is not in alignment always with those things for sure. The United States as much more so and certainly I’m an American citizen and I love it here, but I do think that it helps to have a better understanding of each other and our cultures as we live in the same small world and we need each other in reality. I’m sorry. I’ll get off the whole soapbox.

There’s no need to apologize. I feel good about this because it’s about perspective. A big part of this conversation, Tom, is about if you’re campaigning, you can’t talk perspective. You’d have no time to have perspective. You have time to stand for value. You have time to stand for a need. You have time to frame your discussion in a way that’s away from somebody that wants to put you in a box. You can’t be in a box. You’ve got to have the narrative, “This is what I’m fighting for as a leader, as an American and that your vote is well-spent with me.” This is a good vote because I am not going to divide us. I am going to lead all of us.

Leadership is the construct. Communication is the need that you've got to deliver.

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That would have been a great pivot for Bernie Sanders with the literacy thing. There are many ways he could have done that.

They get stuck and they have the people around them that say, “Great job,” instead of, “I have micro feedback here. Here’s an upgrade that you need. Here’s a way to message that that’s going to be better for you. Here’s a way to get that to stick better. Here’s a way to say it in such a way that you’ll pick up the 10% that you need to win.” It’s funny to say, but the smart young guy is the one that is closest to it and from a narrative place.

He’s not heard as much because number one, he doesn’t have the dollars that Michael Bloomberg has. Michael Bloomberg is plastering the airwaves and the physical mail inboxes with all sorts of setting vision messages. What he’s got to do is he needs to combine himself with what Pete Buttigieg is doing when he speaks off the cuff at an event, at a Town Hall or in a debate. He would wrap this thing up pretty quickly. It’ll be interesting to see how much this whole Fidel Castro thing holds Bernie Sanders back or stops his momentum.

I think after Super Tuesday is where it’s going to land for all of us and then it’s, “Who’s going to stay in and who’s going to drop out and that kind of stuff. My belief is I don’t think the nation is ready to re-bet on Donald Trump again as a whole. I think that many people are interested in and not hearing from Donald Trump again. We don’t want him to have the position of leadership and represent what we represent. Even people that would rather not vote for Bernie Sanders are going to say, “I don’t want to listen to this other guy.”

You may well be right but everybody needs to come together and get over whatever they don’t like about that ultimate candidate on the democratic side and agree that it’s in the nation’s best interest to vote for this candidate regardless of who they are. Some of the candidates are talking that way already and I think that’s a good thing in some ways. We have plenty of time to talk about those issues. This was fun, Bill. Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Next time, we’ll roll up our sleeve a little bit and take a look at when a question is asked, how to stay out of the nuance and how to go after the throat of the question. As a communicator and leader, you’ve got to get on the value-based narrative and get that to frame your discussion or frame your narrative very quickly to get people to say, “I don’t know what it is about that guy, but I like it. I don’t know what it is about that gal, but I like it.” What ends up happening is that once the frame or the series of frames show up and this is what Barack Obama did. Frame move, new frame move, new frame move and that makes a difference.



I think when people say, “I don’t know what it is, but I like that person,” you know that person’s in a good place. Let’s talk about that next time. Thanks, Bill.