Homemade PR (part 1)
You’ve gotta be a little nuts attempting to shape opinion. But I can’t seem to break the habit, I mentioned, recently, in one of my columns.
What is it, now, 40 years or more, trying like hell to get folks to think through things? I’d been at it, with publicity, mostly, until I stepped back from corporate PR and started writing columns in the media, as a contributing author. More than 200 have been published, so far.
My latest attempt at — let’s call it homemade PR — is kind of weird, I must admit, repurposing caucus, a somewhat weird-sounding word, with the goal of holding politicians accountable.
If you didn’t know a caucus is a meeting of members of a political party, you’d wonder about it, because, letting your imagination run a little wild, caucus could be something else, entirely, with an adjective like flaming preceding it, for example. Flaming caucus! What a and such a work pretty good, too.
So we’ve got caucus repurposed. Next, we get a 0–5 caucuses rating initiative going, which I’m describing, thusly:
We’re accustomed to star ratings for businesses like restaurants and hotels, with 5 stars, on a 1–5 scale, signifying top quality. But what if politicians are rated on a scale of 1–5 caucuses? So a politician’s rating is based on something other than quality? PERHAPS THE ANTITHESIS OF IT. AND ONLY 1 CAUCUS — NOT 5 — IS THE MOST COVETED RATING. OR EVEN MORE COVETED, NO CAUCUSES AT ALL. ZERO CAUCUSES!
Thinking about various politicians currently dominating news cycles, and maybe a former pol, or two, how many caucuses would you give them?
