I'm going down the political path again, but this is more PR than it is political to me. Forget for a moment that we are talking about a Presidential candidate and think of John Kerry as a business. He's run like one. John Kerry is not running for President by himself–he has an enormously large staff helping and supporting his efforts. He has bank accounts, an existing customer (i.e. voter) base, a potential market (i.e. undecided voters), and a deadline to make it all come together. The element that ties all of this together is his public relations effort, and that's the one thing that he can't seem to get right.
In fact, this whole Cambodia controversy is a good example of how not to run a PR campaign. If you're running for President, it doesn't take a genius to figure out how you'll be dealt with. For example:
- When running for President in today's age, every aspect of your life is fair game. Your enemies and journalists will stop at nothing to track down a story that could bring you to your knees.
- Because of blogs, cable news, and radio pundits, there are a million fact-checkers out there. Bloggers are especially good researchers. I find comments in blogs very educational on some Web sites because many of the participants are armchair historians with a special interest in specific subjects.
- The success of Fox News has proven that alternative view points are viable and important.
- You can't please everybody at the same time.
The end result is that you must be a person of high moral character, consistent, and open about your past. Kerry is not showing any of those traits and his campaign is beginning to implode. Kerry's problem is that he is undermining the efforts of those who want him elected. I'm willing to bet that his self-image is so skewed, he can't even see there is a problem and he probably sits around fuming at the insolence of people questioning his integrity.
While I'm no political expert, I do see the writing on the wall for his campaign because Kerry is, above all, inconsistent and that is proving him to be a liar. I don't think any candidate can recover from lying to the Senate. I'm not the only one thinking this way either. The best articulation of this crisis is this article by Kathleen Parker.
If Kerry didn't fabricate, he exaggerated. Or misspoke. Or got confused. Or something. But whatever the differences among versions, the story is part of a larger narrative that may matter more than the details.
It is a story of naked ambition and grandiosity, the narrative of a self-absorbed man who always needed to be best and first, whether captain of the boat in Vietnam or winner of the debate in school. Who, when accidentally knocked off his snowboard as an adult fumed, "I don't fall down.'
He's the sort of man who thinks to take a movie camera to war to document himself for uses now known to be political; who willingly exploits his heroism in ways real heroes never do; who builds a career on disgust toward a war he later characterizes as the crowning achievement in a life that seems more risumi than real.
I'm sure there were many in the Kerry campaign who saw this coming and probably advised him. However, he continues to manufacture answers to please the audience at that moment, forgetting the bigger picture. This is a PR problem and Kerry will fail because he can not will not expose who he is really.
There has to be truth in marketing or the campaign will fail. Business can learn a lot from Presidential campaigns because they are the ultimate rapid product development environment.
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Unrest by Parkway Drive