I received an email a short time ago from a very dear friend. I wouldn't normally use this space to post someone else's opinions but I found this so powerful and profound that I simply had to post it somewhere. Here it is in its entirety - please feel free to link to this or post this wherever you'd like.

Subject: article

Date: January 20, 2011 12:32:54 PM EST

To: Thom Mozloom

Hey, can you post this for me somewhere? It can’t be under my name because of my position here but I want someone to think about this. Thanks.

THE QUESTIONS NOT ASKED

Several days ago an abortion doctor in Philadelphia was charged with having murdered seven babies. He induced their mothers into labor, delivered the babies and then plunged into their necks a scissors.

Seven babies dead, nameless, unwanted, unloved. Delivered by their mothers to a beast, whom they paid, and then thrown away with the rubber gloves and the cotton swabs and the rest of the medical waste. Not forgotten, but erased as though they had never lived at all, never cried or yawned or wriggled their toes. No one wants to remember.

Pinned up on refrigerators across the country are the ultrasound images of babies younger than these. They were loved before they were held. But inPhiladelphia there are no pictures. No mourners. There is no public vigil. The national editorial pages are quiet. They can find no one to scold this week. There will be no televised tribute to the babies. President Obama will not come.

Is this not a national tragedy in the same dimension as the Tucson massacre? The doctor is said to have killed many more than seven babies in the course of his gruesome career. Is there nothing here on which the media nags would like our political leaders to reflect? There are no policy implications? There is no need, then, for a national dialogue on the condition of our culture? Shouldn’t someone apologize for this?

They’ve all been bickering for two weeks over whether Republicans and Democrats should be nicer to each other, a question that is invisibly distant from what happened in Tucson. But in Philadelphia there are questions splashed in the blood of seven babies that not a single national figure cares to discuss.

I supposed that it may be the only kindness available to the babies now that they are not being used by politicians and pundits as mere opportunities for moral exhibitionism. On the other hand, if it is suddenly necessary that the nation debates whether larger ammunition clips make murder easier, then why is it not urgent as well for us to question whether partial birth abortion is as dangerous to the innocent?

No one is asking because the answers are more threatening to everyone: to the Democrats who would sooner ban crosshairs than partial-birth abortions, and to the Republicans who want not to be in the media’s crosshairs again.

Branding Can't Save the Democrats

There is an article in the Huffington Post at which I literally laughed out loud.

It's titled New Year's Resolution for Democrats: Stop Being Out-Branded by Republicans and it's written by Zach Friend.

This is the basic thinking among my political clients (both Right and Left) -- that the success of their specific agendas will boil down to how they "brand" them.

The problem with this thinking is that the the owner of a brand doesn't actually create the brand.

The consumer of the brand creates the brand.

Most people think that high impact messaging delivered through powerful marketing and advertising create a good brand.

All of that, however, is a support structure.

The thing that creates and maintains a brand better than anything is THE TRUTH.

Conversely, the single biggest reason brands fail is because their marketing and their reality are different.

THIS is the lesson of November --

In 2008 the country rallied around a guy who said that he would change the tone in Washington -- that it's not about "... red states or blue states but about the United States." He built a movement around the idea that we can work together. Many politicians stayed in office or were elected to office based on the long coattails of this brand promise.

Then they spent two years proving we actually can't work together.

Obviously, the Republicans had as much to do with the lack of unity as the Democrats did -- but the Republicans were not the brand promise makers -- and therefore, they didn't suffer at all (in fact, it was proved that they actually benefited a great deal) when the brand promise was not delivered on.

So the real lesson is this -- good branding -- built only on messaging and marketing -- can get someone to try a product... once. If the reality doesn't match the branding, however, it will be twice as hard to get them to try that same product a second time.

The pithy version of this says -- Nothing will kill a mediocre product quicker than great marketing.