by Steve Stoute
On Sunday, August 28, when Katrina was upgraded to Category 4 at two A.M. and then to Category 5 at seven A.M., President Bush was specifically warned of possible levee failure by the National Hurricane Center Director, Dr. Max Mayfield. That afternoon, the National Weather Service’s special warning described the nightmare that would follow a dead-on hit from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, saying that most of the area would be uninhabitable for weeks or longer, that homes would be destroyed or severely damaged, that power outages would last weeks, and that “water shortages [would] make human suffering incredible by most modern standards.” Meanwhile, the media ran headlines alerting the entire nation of forecasters’ fears that storm waters would top the levees after the hurricane had come through. With a massive evacuation under way, New Orleans Mayor Nagin said, “We’re facing the storm most of us have feared.” In no uncertain terms, he emphasized that it would be an unprecedented event.
After the National Guard requested seven hundred buses from FEMA, only one hundred were sent. Of those left behind—most of them people of color, poor, families with children, elderly, and disabled—some stayed in their homes to ride out the storm while the Superdome filled up with thirty thousand evacuees and only a day and a half’s worth of food and supplies for all of them.
As a Category 4 hurricane, Katrina made landfall at seven A.M. on Monday, August 29, and though the media exhaled for a second with the news that the city had dodged a bullet, within a half hour that relief was canceled by the announcement that the levees had been breached. The Associated Press reported that the Bush administration was notified of the realization of this worst case scenario; the White House acknowledged it along with twenty-eight various other government agencies. With harrowing stories of floodwaters rapidly rising, pump stations breaking down, and accounts published of concerns voiced to President Bush (then on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas)—by none other than the guy with no experience heading up FEMA, Michael Brown—it seemed the commander-in-chief had other priorities. Announcing that he had put the matter in the hands of Homeland Security, President Bush told reporters that he was getting on Air Force One to go discuss immigration with John McCain. Before noon, he was posing for a photo-op with McCain and his birthday cake. The president’s next stops included resorts in Arizona and California to promote the new Medicare prescription bill he had just signed and that night a commitment to go early to bed—without a word about the American city that was in the process of drowning.
Although Brown had ordered one thousand National Guard troops to the region, he had given them two days to get there. In spite of what was seen next through horrific images of people stranded on rooftops, snakes and alligators devouring people, countless missing persons, and the loss of people’s pets, plus violence erupting amid the chaos, the response on Tuesday from the Pentagon was that there were adequate units in the gulf region to handle any problems. As for the USS Bataan that was sitting offshore ready to serve with the ability to make up to one hundred thousand gallons of water a day, its own hospital operating rooms, doctors, food, and beds for six hundred, it was left at sea and empty. Seemingly oblivious, President Bush on Tuesday afternoon was playing guitar with a popular country-western musician.
On Wednesday, August 31, after FEMA workers warned Brown that people were dying at the Superdome, he was unable to respond because, his press secretary noted, he needed more time for his restaurant meal. The Los Angeles Times described conditions that day, with thousands still trapped at the Superdome, as if out of a horror movie. With no sanitation, the smell was said to be “overwhelming.” Walls had bloodstains on them, bathrooms were littered with crack vials, and people had no choice but to urinate on the floor. Among those who had died was a man who had leapt to his death unable to live with what he had seen. Children were reported to be among rape victims.
Eighty thousand men, women, kids, and babies were estimated to be stranded in New Orleans, as Reuters reported. Wednesday afternoon, George W. Bush flew over the city in Air Force One, at the same time that Homeland Security issued a statement praising the federal government’s response to the disaster.
On Thursday, the administration put its energies into damage control, asserting that they never knew the levees could be breached and, in the case of Michael Brown, that no one had told him about the violence and about people dying in the Superdome. The following day, White House activity was focused on blaming local officials for the bungled response. Karl Rove was in charge of this PR, yes, but it was the president of the United States who two days later told The Washington Post that Governor Blanco had never declared a state of emergency.
Five days after the levees broke Bush flew to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and famously congratulated “Brownie” for doing a “heckuva job,” staging photos with workers and appearing to cheer them on.
And so, while watching what looked like the end of the world unfolding, the final straw for me was when the White House released a statement from Bush that he had visited with Senator Trent Lott, who had lost his house and was determined to rebuild. The president added, “And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.” This must have been the last straw for a lot of the media too. Time said that the comments were “astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans.”
These were the events that preceded a telethon held on Saturday, September 3, that featured a most diverse group of artists—in tanning terms they were polyethnic, multigenerational, and from across the musical spectrum—all of whom wanted to lend their talents to the effort to raise money for the victims. After six days of witnessing unacceptable images showing people of color poor or without resources, left and abandoned by the federal government, when comedian Mike Myers of Austin Powers fame and Kanye West came out to speak, Kanye was moved to go off script and say what was on a lot of people’s minds—“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
The moment those words came out of Kanye’s mouth it was, for lack of a better phrase, the shot heard round the world. He wasn’t voicing a minority opinion. There was a clear lack of concern for humanity. Overwhelmingly, much of the public—white, black, and other—couldn’t have agreed more. All at once a majority of Americans of good conscience, regardless of political persuasion, knew that a change needed to come and had to come—that this was not America. The tanning, it turned out, was in the shared grief, shared outrage.
It was the following November 2006, during the midterm elections, that the political climate change took many pundits by surprise. With Democrats regaining control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the elections were interpreted as an expression of discontent with Bush and the war in Iraq. But they were also historic in terms of how many voters under the age of thirty had voted, compared to the previous midterms—two million more. And what no one could disregard this time was the fact that they voted more emphatically Democratic than ever before—voting for Democrats by a 22 percent margin over Republicans.
By 2007, with the Democratic presidential field wide-open, I started hearing the political marketing principle known as the rule of three—meaning that if an unaffiliated voting cohort consistently votes for one party over the other for three successive elections, they could be counted on for life.
Though I have no certain knowledge of how Barack Obama considered the rule of three when he was debating over whether to run or not, I just have the feeling it played into his decision making. Did he expect that in the primary contest he would win 60 percent of young voters versus 40 percent for Hillary Clinton? Probably not. But I think he knew that once they were in his corner and had his back, he was going all the way.
Subtext Matters
One of these days, I’d like to play cards with Wolf Blitzer. I’d clean up. The man cannot keep a poker face. I’ll never forget hurrying over to Jay-Z’s place to watch the returns of the 2008 presidential race on CNN with him and his wife and other frie
nds and sharing the experience of seeing history unfold—history our generation had helped make happen! Wolf very clearly knew how things were trending in Obama’s favor from the exit polling but wasn’t allowed to say anything. Still, he was practically telegraphing the results. Great, I thought, one of the most exciting moments in many of our lifetimes, and Wolf Blitzer is making it anticlimactic! Well, almost. The truth is that none of us could forget what happened in 2000 and I certainly wasn’t going to have that glass of champagne until it had been declared Obama had won by a landslide.
Waiting for those results, I thought back over the important roles that hip-hop and the tan mind-set had played in changing culture over the years and in helping shape the environment in which Barack Obama could be a legitimate candidate. I also thought about one of the aspects that made Obama a transformative candidate, and that was how culturally curious and conversant he was with people from all kinds of backgrounds and age groups.
The truth is that he wasn’t aligned with one culture over the other, but rather showed a respect for all. Such evidence was on display during a moment on the campaign trail after he got roughed up in one of the tougher primary battles. On that occasion, Obama had reassured his supporters with a gesture of confidence that needed no translation—taking his hand to his shoulder and flicking imaginary dirt off it. If you had never seen that bit of nonverbal urban slang, perhaps when an athlete did it or when a hip-hop artist employed it as a gesture, you would still get it. It’s about being confident without being arrogant—which, by the way, is the perfect pitch subtext for every and any marketing campaign ever mounted.
So that brings up another question that I pondered on election night as the results were coming in. If the cultural mixing of tanning, as we have seen, was being successfully harnessed by the marketing world, to what extent did the brilliance of the Obama campaign draw from the same principles?
Offering a partial answer to that question, a few weeks earlier, on October 17, 2008, Advertising Age had published a potentially premature headline that read OBAMA WINS! They did not mean the presidential election. They were talking about Ad Age’s vote for Marketer of the Year. As determined by the hundreds of votes by advertising executives and leading brand-builders from companies large and small, Obama and his campaign team had “edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com” as well as “mega-brand Nike, turnaround story Coors and Mr. Obama’s rival, Senator John McCain.”
For starters, there was a degree of disbelief in how swiftly the campaign had made a leading presidential candidate out of an Illinois senator previously best known as a “skinny kid with a funny name,” as he referred to himself in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech for John Kerry, and for his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War before the invasion. Many marketers noted that the campaign would be studied for years to come, particularly the use of social networking and the organizing tools that had been created for engaging volunteers and voters. Journalists quoted in the article, like Jon Fine of BusinessWeek, who said in amazement, “It’s the f**kin’ Web 2.0 thing,” recognized that everything achieved in total for the campaign was groundbreaking.
The fact that a presidential campaign had won that year over Apple was very telling. Apple’s marketing genius, after all, can be seen in its consistency, a brand attribute conveyed in subtext in all their advertising. And Zappos, the dark horse that surprised a lot of experts by coming in third after Apple, had taken mind-set marketing to a new level by weaving the idea of “delivering happiness” into an online shoe business. Moreover, its name played well with agency executives hip to the power of Hispanic and multicultural consumers.
Obviously, an understanding of culture had been important to all of those brands and certainly was vital to the Obama campaign. But that was only scratching the surface. Looking more closely at the strategies that were used, however, revealed a more direct linkage to youth culture and the properties of tanning. That was apparent when I revisited the speech Obama had delivered at the 2004 Democratic Convention and looked at the main theme that first put the spotlight of history on him. It was the thesis of a like-mindedness, about celebrating differences and connection, about sharing the same mental complexion while coming together and caring for one another: It is that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.
E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us—the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.
Woven into the speech were other themes that resurfaced in his own presidential run: Obama’s story and the idea of an American dream in need of rescue. There was a mention of the audacity of hope and a call to vote for change. But the real subtext of that speech and of his eventual campaign for president, if you were paying attention, was empowerment. That was a new marketing message, a new call to action, not to be a passive citizenry but to become involved in solving the problems of the day.
That was the message the young generation had been waiting to hear and that must have struck those who heard him in 2004 with the same dog-whistle effect that happened hearing hip-hop for the first time. He represented something different and not even political. He was authentic, believable, smart, cool, and aspirational. And young. And because he had spoken out against the invasion of Iraq at a time when it was not politically expedient to do so, he had some counterculture credibility too. Suddenly, as early as the spring of 2005, kids started showing up at rallies protesting the war or at Earth Day celebrations or at cultural events—in cities and suburbs alike—bearing homemade signs reading OBAMA ’08.
Grassroots organizing, in its earliest stages, had begun even before the candidate had formed an exploratory committee. Like hip-hop, it was not a case of a leader founding a movement; rather it was about people creating a movement and summoning a leader. This then became fodder for media speculation that in turn handed marketing opportunities to the campaign when it prepared to launch.
From the coverage of how Team Obama evolved and how strategies were developed, including The Audacity to Win by campaign manager David Plouffe, I could see other lessons drawn from the manner in which a culture that started in a central location proliferated so rapidly. What the South Bronx was to hip-hop culture, the ground game the campaign built in Iowa would be to Obama’s presidency. Plouffe writes about why so much energy was poured into that radical disruption phase, explaining, “From the get-go, it was clear we could not win if the caucus universe was the same as it was in 2004. . . . To win, we would have to attain the holy grail of politics—a fundamentally altered electorate.” In going up against an odds-on favorite like Hillary Clinton or a popular figure like John Edwards, there was a comparison to the marketing world, as Plouffe described: “Say you are a business trying to expand your percent of market share against an established brand-name product. Your competitor’s customers have been buying their products for decades and are unlikely to sample something new. How do you outsell that competitor without converting their customers? You have to recruit new buyers.”
With that, Team Obama had the inspiration to grow the electorate with outreach to younger voters, more minorities, more independents, and Republicans who were open to the messages that an outsider candidate could offer. Basing the campaign in Chicago, in Obama’s hometown, rather than in Washington, D.C., also provided important subtext to communicate to the public about a candidate who was taking a stance against the status quo. Much of the structure could then be built on community.
Volunteers—much like the street teams sharing mix tapes in the spread of
hip-hop culture and street marketing teams representing brands interacting with consumers—were to become the fertilizer for the grassroots movement. What was being sold? Not a candidate but a mind-set—the belief that engagement in civic life worked to the betterment of all citizens. Volunteers not only helped organize communities in different locations in organic ways, like the spread of culture, but also grew the numbers rapidly, which naturally led to smaller-donor-base fund-raising and offered a person-to-person endorsement of the candidate. The campaign was careful not to create inauthentic messages or talking points for volunteers but instead encouraged them to speak from their hearts about how they had become involved.
In the past, architects of political campaigns had kept pop culture figures at arm’s length—much in the same way that brands were once hesitant to align themselves with hip-hop figures. There was no such distancing for Obama, who not only understood the culture but met with those artists who wanted to do more and who had insights on multicultural outreach. The Obama team recognized that music, in particular, was, is, and will always be the barometer for marketing’s impact because it’s so immediate, such a touchstone for the audience. Not much can come close to the cultural immediacy of music unless it is presented as rooted in truth and emotion. Obama knew that, felt that, and honored it. Even before Obama had decided to run for office, he had met with community leaders and hip-hop figures to find the truth of what was happening in the inner cities.