Number Three: FIRED UP! READY TO GO!

Last Tuesday night I promised to follow up on some thoughts that I'd had during the "Turn the Page in Iraq" rally held in Brooklyn that evening. Actually, I left an ellipsis hanging in the air, saying that number three would come the next day.

Well, it's not last Wednesday, but this is Number Three. A couple of things have happened in the interim, but let me get straight to the point that I wanted to make a week ago.

3. PICK A SLOGAN

In fact, I'll do it for you. Now that I've changed the decor on this blog, you'll have a hard time missing it. FIRED UP! READY TO GO!

One striking thing about Tuesday's rally was the difficulty speakers had in eliciting a solid response from calls to the crowd. In part, that can be attributed to the relatively small number of attendees in the large, open space.

I'm convinced, though, that the other problem is that the campaign hasn't fully committed to the best thing that they have going. Why not go with a chant that seems to light up crowds across the country?

FIRED UP! READY TO GO!

People should associate these few words immediately with Barack Obama in 2008. "Turn the Page" is fine, but it just rolled out yesterday, and seems like it might be gone tomorrow.

Campaigns don't thrive on complexity. That doesn't have to mean addressing issues in soundbites, but it does mean that some good sloganeering is desperately needed in a campaign built on enthusiasm.

Fired up! Ready to go! It's just that simple.

Actually, It Started on Broadway...

I don't know why the campaign has been slow to roll with this call front and center, but it struck me first at the Barack on Broadway event on September 25. I was in a room filled with people who had paid at least $250 per ticket (other than the displaced Brooklynites like myself) to support Barack.

He delivered the anecdote about his trip to Greenwood, South Carolina, and when he began calling out "Fired up! Ready to go!" the place went wild. How many more dollars might have been collected that night if there had been any merchandise at all that capitalized on the power of this chant? Where were $20 t-shirts for the big wallets that were fired up and ready to buy?

More important than the money is the ability to carry that energy out of the room and spread it to people who weren't there. It's past time to connect with people who haven't been converted. There has to be more of an effort to spread the fervor.

Straight Ahead

I hope that Obama supporters embrace "Fired up!" as the signature of the campaign and it trickles back up to HQ. I think South Carolina's taking proud ownership of it, and that's a good start. There was an event recently in NYC that worked the words into its title. They're moving, but I'm always eager to see things move faster.

I'm not worried about getting the timing right. Just let the zeitgeist work for you.

I'm putting these designs out there as one more example of what's possible. I know there are more than 11,000 Obama-related items up on cafepress.com of varying quality and intent.

I happen to like the way that my friend took an image of Ms. Edith Childs, the woman who got Barack Obama fired up, and fused it with those magic words. I read that Ms. Childs heard the "Fired up!" chant at an NAACP rally in the early eighties and adopted it as her own. Now it's been passed on again. That movement is testament to a powerful force.

My friend also grabbed my Buffaloes for Barack and worked them into another version. It looks great to me -- let's leave the donkeys and elephants out this time, eh? Time for another type of political animal.

I'll convert these into some basic goods for sale and put a link up, but that's not so much the point. It's really about how easy and essential it is to push the ideas that any of us think work, and not to wait for any official sanction to do it.