Campaign Movie Quotes

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr. Reagan told an epic story of World War II courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer — that made quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9. Many other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan's public statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

she found Link watching a Harry Potter movie, a series she had campaigned to ban from the Gatlin County Library because she thought it promoted witchcraft.

Failure was a luxury we couldn't afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight. One box office flop from a female director and no one wanted "girl" movies, one stock market plunge from a company with a woman CEO and women couldn't lead, one false accusation and we were liars, all of us. Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn't because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain bad luck.

It was the twenty-first century. I shouldn’t have to date someone to stay relevant. But as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. There was a reason celebrities always magically entered relationships before a big album drop or movie premiere, and why unmarried politicians rarely won campaigns.

A boxing movie without clichés is like a political campaign without lies.

For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies!

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.

If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future. If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives.

As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, “the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left.”20

The average American,” Whitaker wrote, “doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“ he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“ he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”):

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

Starting with a Statement •What a beautiful day.What’s your favorite season of the year? •I was truly touched by that movie.How did you like it? Why? •This is a wonderful restaurant.What is your favorite restaurant? Why? •What a great conference! Tell me about the sessions you attended. •I was absent last week.What did I miss? •That was an interesting program after lunch.What did you think? •Presidential campaigns seem to start immediately after the inauguration.What do you think of the campaign process? •I am so frustrated with getting this business off the ground.Do you have any ideas? •I am excited about our new mayor.How do you think her administration will be different from her predecessor’s? •Your lawn always looks so green.What is your secret? •We’ve been working together for months now.I’d like to get to know you better.Tell me about some of your outside interests. •You worked pretty hard on that stair stepper.What other equipment do you use? •You always wear such attractive clothes.What are your favorite stores? •What a beautiful home.How do you manage to run a house with four children? •I read in the newspaper that our governor has taken another trip overseas.What do you think of all his travel?

know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire. I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him. When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating. After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every now and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and

Another CSPI campaign successfully convinced movie theaters across America to switch from butter and coconut oil to partially hydrogenated oils in their popcorn poppers.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Since the publicity campaigns for these blockbusters have proven effective in the popcorn economy, studios recycle their elements into endless sequels, such as those for Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, and Mission Impossible, which then become the studios’ franchises on which they earn almost all their profits.

PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.

Napoleon Dynamite In small-town Preston, Idaho, awkward teen Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) has trouble fitting in. After his grandmother is injured in an accident, his life is made even worse when his strangely nostalgic uncle, Rico (Jon Gries), shows up to keep an eye on him. With no safe haven at home or at school, Napoleon befriends the new kid, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a morose Hispanic boy who speaks little English. Together the two launch a campaign to run for class president.     #101

A few months later, Procter & Gamble tried something similar. Its CEO, A. G. Lafley, had begun talking about the need for P&G to get closer to its consumers. After reading about this, Facebook ad salesman Colleran did one of his masterful cold calls to find out if P&G was targeting any of its brands at the college market. It turned out that while P&G’s Crest White Strips teeth-whitening product had never been aimed specifically at college students, company data showed that the strips sold particularly well at Wal-Marts located near campuses. Colleran and P&G marketers came up with a Facebook campaign called Smile State. Much as Chase and Apple had done, P&G created a sponsored group on Facebook for Crest White Strips. It advertised the Smile State group only to users who were students at one of twenty large state universities located near Wal-Marts. Any student who joined got tickets to an upcoming college-oriented Matthew McConaughey movie called We Are Marshall. In addition, the schools that enrolled the most members in the Crest White Strips group got a concert organized by Def Jam Records. Over 20,000 people joined. To have 20,000 people explicitly expressing affinity for Crest White Strips using their real name is the kind of thing that gives marketers goose bumps. It was a huge win for P&G and for Facebook.

The reviews of Kentucky boosted Brennan to an even higher level in the Hollywood echelon. The Hollywood Reporter (December 15) summed up the sentiment of the time: “Walter Brennan, who has already carved a large niche for himself in the movie hall of fame, has himself a really grand and glorious triumph as a Kentucky gentleman and horse breeder. A real persona and thoroughly lovable one, he wraps up the picture neatly with his capable acting and beautiful characterization and is a tribute to the South. And Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons did not mind campaigning for Brennan, calling his performance a “standout” that “might well earn him an Academy Award.

Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them.

Hobbesian fear, unlike Nazi terror, afflicts a society in which the preeminence of safety and security (“law and order”) has been drummed into the popular consciousness over the course of many political campaigns and television and movie seasons. Nowhere is the manipulation of fear better illustrated than by the numerous invasions of privacy authorized under the Patriot Act and encroachments upon constitutional guarantees, particularly those pertaining to right to counsel, confidentiality of communications between lawyers and their clients, and the resort to secret tribunals.

Campaigners for God, Country and the American Way of Life did not stop when they had crushed radical trade unions and jailed socialist, syndicalist and communist spokespeople. They also bought out and took over the communication apparatus: the press, the schools and colleges, the libraries, the churches, civic organizations, the movies, radio and television. The professions, notably education were purged of subversive teachers, textbooks and ideas. The same men who operated mines, factories and department stores became owners, directors and trustees of the entire communication apparatus. Communication, like merchandising and farming became parts of the big business octopus that was reaching its tentacles into every profit-yielding corner of American life. ….Papers that spoke for the Oligarchs and their interests got the advertising. Others died of financial malnutrition…. ….Book publishers and magazine editors were members of the American Oligarchy. They were not top-flight members; they held their jobs so long as they built readership, got advertising and showed profits on the investment…

So while we formally mourn the dead from our past wars once a year, we increasingly see war as something that happens when peace—the normal state of affairs—breaks down. At the same time we can indulge a fascination with great military heroes and their battles of the past; we admire stories of courage and daring exploits in war; the shelves of bookshops and libraries are packed with military histories; and movie and television producers know that war is always a popular subject. The public never seems to tire of Napoleon and his campaigns, Dunkirk, D-Day or the fantasies of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. We enjoy them in part because they are at a safe distance; we are confident that we ourselves will never have to take part in war. The result is that we do not take war as seriously as it deserves. We may prefer to avert our eyes from what is so often a grim and depressing subject, but we should not.

Liberals dominate most of the leading opinion-making areas of American life-- journalism, the movie and television industries, academia, the publishing industry, the legal profession, the mainline churches, and the arts. Conservatives dominate talk radio, evangelical churches, and have Fox News, but that hardly evens things out. By contrast with liberal dominance in the opinion-making elite, the playing field is more or less level with regard to spending on political campaigns-- on average, Democrats and Republicans spend approximately the same amount. Nether party has the massive, structural advantages when it comes to campaign spending that the Democrats have in the broader political and ideological arena. Without the relatively level playing field of campaign spending, left-leaning opinion-makers would be able to virtually monopolize American political discourse. So the Obama administration's and leading Democratic politicians' over-the-top reaction to Citizens United was not because they suddenly became Boy Scouts interested in improving the American political system by reducing the relevance of money-- indeed, in 2008 Obama, breaking a campaign promise, became the first major-party candidate to decline federal campaign funds and the spending limits that come with those funds. His campaign wound up outspending McCain's by the largest margin in history. Rather, the Democrats understand that reducing the funds available to all candidates will disproportionately harm the Republicans, because Republicans have fewer "free" ways to get their message out.

Domains of Human Concerns: Common Types of Possibilities For Action 1. BODY: exercise, medical checkups, traveling to an appointment. 2. PLAY or AESTHETICS: taking a vacation, going to the movies, going to an art museum, painting, putting a puzzle together. 3. SOCIABILITY: inviting a new person into a conversation, meeting an old friend, declaring a person trustworthy or untrustworthy. 4. FAMILY: getting married, sending children to college. 5. WORK: finishing a report, writing a letter. 6. EDUCATION: enrolling in a class, reading a book. 7. CAREER: choosing a major in college, getting a new job. 8. MONEY or PRUDENCE: investing money, bargaining for a new salary, buying health insurance. 9. MEMBERSHIP: joining a professional organization, becoming a citizen of a new country, founding a new club. 10. WORLD: working in a political campaign, visiting another country or culture.        11. DIGNITY: declaring pride in your work, declaring that your work is significant or insignificant, declaring standards of action for yourself to live up to.        12. SITUATION: declaring that your future is good or not good, declaring that you have more possibilities than you have been seeing, declaring that you have fewer possibilities in life than you supposed, discussing your possibilities with other persons. 13. SPIRITUALITY: reflecting on the facticity of life, going to church, philosophical discussions with others.

we can figure that out, including how to talk about it in a way that Americans will understand and support, that will be both good policy and good politics. There’s another angle to consider as well. Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.

Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.

Were the average man suddenly called upon to assemble all the women in his town who looked like Mary Pickford, he might find himself at a loss as to how to commence. In fact, he might even doubt that there were sufficient persons answering this description to warrant such a campaign.

If the intent is to stabilize Afghanistan, the Taliban were and are the best solution.” “What is the solution?” Smith asked him. It was clear that the Taliban was not an answer acceptable to the United States. “Withdraw your legions,” Mahmud answered with a smile, quoting a line from the movie Ben-Hur. “The U.S. military campaign is not working. You’re creating more enemies than you’re killing. You don’t need a large military force to go after Al Qaeda. And what is Al Qaeda these days, anyway? It’s more of an idea than a force in being.”2

Their first campaign for the dignity and rights of colored people in Oakland was to end the showing of the picture The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed Negroes as barbarians and only served to raise animosity. President Wilson revealed his prejudice by showing that vile movie as the first moving picture ever to be screened at the White House.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

The movie and the political campaign GEMS built around it were typical of [Rachel] Lloyd's in-your-face approach to politics and publicity. "If we just framed it as 'rescuing children,' people would give us more money," she says. "I could put pictures of little scared blond kids on our Web page. But this isn't about rescuing a child from a bad situation. This is about what we, as a culture and a society, are creating; why can this be perpetuated within our society?

Ice, I’ve got a movie role for you.” I’m like, “Yeah, okay, cool.” I figured Mario was doing his own campaigning, you know, trying to impress these females. We should work together—that’s a classic Hollywood bullshit line.

Later, I talked with Doug Trumbull, a Hollywood director now but then a special-effects man for the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He had looked me up because he was interested in interspecies communication. Since my career had been devoted to dolphins and the problems of communicating with them, I was one of a number of people Doug was questioning about how we might relate to creatures intelligent but totally different from us. I didn’t know which movie he was working on then—I got the impression it was about an airplane—but when I saw Close Encounters, which is about man’s first contact with an alien intelligence, I realized what we had been talking about.

What is now Tanzania was once Tanganyika and before that part of British East Africa and prior to that a colony of Germany. During World War I the fighting actually came to the Continent of Africa. Known as the East African Campaign, many of the battles almost went unreported and are little known, however the romance of this war is portrayed by many novels and the well-known movie “African Queen,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. The film is a stretch, but strictly speaking it is based on a true story, however even saying this, neither the original novel nor the movie bears more than a passing resemblance to reality. The four years of warfare mostly fought in Europe, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles in Africa, although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German soldiers with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. “In actual fact the four years of warfare from 1914 to 1918, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German troops with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. An example of the type of battles fought in Africa was the Battle of Bukoba. Here the British objective was the destruction of the Bukoba wireless station on the shore of Lake Victoria, it was decided that the raid should take the form of an amphibious assault by the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and the 25th Frontier Royal Fusiliers who served in the African Theatre of war around Lake Tanganyika, British East African and German East African territory. Upon reaching the objective at Bukoba, the attackers were mistakenly landed in a large swamp and were pinned down by fierce rifle

Just as in Hollywood, what matters most is not the movie you made twenty years ago, ten years ago, or even just a couple of years ago, it’s the one you made most recently that counts. You need to be constantly refueling your brag campaign to reflect changes in your circumstances and audience.

The problem faced by the company DeBeers, which in 1902 controlled 90 percent of the world’s diamond production, was how to sell to this much bigger market without devaluing the gems in the process. They managed it through a cunning marketing campaign: by concocting the phrase “Diamonds are forever,” they invented the idea of the diamond engagement ring as the only true way to express everlasting love. Anyone who wished to convince their lover of the truth of their feelings needed to buy one, and the more expensive the diamond, the truer the feelings expressed. The marketing campaign took off spectacularly, catapulting a diamond into millions of households and culminating in a James Bond movie, accompanied by a Shirley Bassey / John Barry song, that enshrined the new social role of the diamond as the embodiment of romantic love.