I found the passage on the Where and the How particularly interesting, especially in an election year. Leaders running for office must decide how they will balance appealing to the masses while clearly articulating their platform and plans. The example given, contrasting Obama’s “soaring rhetoric” with a heavy focus on ‘we’ and Clinton’s more pragmatic but less inspiring realism about the difficulty of leading the country. Obama, of course, won that campaign, and it could even be argued that Trump beat Clinton using the same focus on what he said, not the how of accomplishing his goals.<\/p>\n
Looking at this election through that lens, candidates who were very plan oriented, such as Elizabeth Warren, had strong bases but failed to expand their appeal. Pete Buttigieg, who famously adopted much of Obama’s language, managed to rise in the polls. The two candidates with the most support, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, had clashing styles. Bernie Sanders used people-oriented policy to explain how he would get support for his plans, while Joe Biden touted his experience as Obama’s VP. In this, they combined both the rhetoric with the ‘how’ to gain mass appeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found the passage on the Where and the How particularly interesting, especially in an election year. Leaders running for office must decide how they will balance appealing to the masses while clearly articulating their platform and plans. The example given, contrasting Obama’s “soaring rhetoric” with a heavy focus on ‘we’ and Clinton’s more pragmatic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4675,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}