The DNC Convention, Day 1: Did It Sell?

Your Business Blogger(R) once asked writer and reporter Richard Miniter about the sales process. He described sales as The Transference of Emotion.

Nothing was transferred last night.

The political confab is designed to sell both a tangible and an intangible: A Person and his Ideas.

Neither was sold on Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention.

Mary Jo Kopechne, Born: July 26, 1940;

Died: July 18,1969

Charmaine is currently in Minneapolis and I will be joining her soon for a series of meetings.

One of our favorite constant questions is, “Will it sell?”

In any human transaction, someone is selling and someone is buying. The Democrats did not have much of a pitch last night.

The were attempting to sell Michelle Obama. But I kept thinking of another Democratic woman.

The video brought a flood of tears to all eyes who watched it. The Democrats were swooning, estatic, drowning in thier adulation.

But not conservatives. We cried for other reasons.

The Ted Kennedy video was horrifying. The opening scene was of water lapping up on a quiet shore. I kept looking for a half submerged car — at least there wasn’t a bridge in the picture. He kept talking about his connection to the water.

The Democrats have all the resources of the best minds in Hollywood and the mainstream media — and this is the best they could do? Goodness.

The footage of a smiling Ted Kennedy sailing his 80 foot something sailing yacht made me think of all the maintenance that somebody does to keep that old boat barnacle-free (no, no, not Teddy).

Work not done by the Kennedys. Elitists don’t polish brass.

The Democratic marketing machine did not deliver its intended message. This is the party of abortion, of darkness, of death.

The Democrats, as Romesh Punnuru writes, are The Party of Death.

Mary Jo Kopechne, Requiscat in Pace

###

Thankyou (foot)notes,

Alert Readers wll recall that Your Business Blogger(R) teaches sales training — but still learned something from the former Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Miniter.

Proving that it is possible to learn something, even from a journalist…

Senior Editor, National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru will be the keynoter at the Americans United for Life gala on October 9th in Chicago. We will celebrate Life.

From NNB,

Near midnight on Chappaquiddick Island, a possibly drunk and definitely married Senator Ted Kennedy takes a right turn instead of a left. His car winds up skidding off Dike Bridge and is quickly submerged upside-down in salty Poucha Pond.

His passenger, RFK office secretary Mary Jo Kopechne, is knocked into the back seat. Kennedy swims to safety, whereupon he fails to rescue his companion or even simply report the incident to authorities until the following morning.

Because no autopsy is ever performed on Kopechne’s body (her body had been promptly whisked out of state) it is uncertain how long it took her to drown, if she wasn’t killed on impact. Likewise, it is never established whether Kopechne was pregnant or exhibited signs of recent sexual activity.

See Sandler Sales Technique: Selling Tangible and Intangibles.

Update: 26 August 2009, Ted Kennedy dies. Perhaps Mary Jo can now Rest In Peace. From Myrna Blyth, NRO,

This week we may hear a little about the 35th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, but there is another anniversary that has already gone unnoticed. On July 18, 1969, a couple of nights before Armstrong took that “giant step for mankind,” Ted Kennedy took a turn onto a narrow bridge in Chappaquiddick. The passenger in his car that night was Mary Jo Kopechne, a pretty, blond Capitol Hill secretary, just about to celebrate her 29th birthday. The two events are inextricably linked in my mind because my husband, who was a correspondent for a British newspaper, instead of reporting on our glorious odyssey into space, ended up at police headquarters on Martha’s Vineyard covering that sordid story.