When Parties Get Social. The RNC Considers Something New.

I have to confess, I find it hard to talk about political communications without including Bruce Lee.

I’m an avid mentioner of movies, MTV videos and pop culture memes in lecture. It’s all about association. I can tell you something five times while smiling. But if you don’t relate it to yourself, or to a movie or picture or feeling that you deeply know? It might be meaningless rote. But if I relate it, it seeps into your being. It’s not about counting. It’s about feeling. (2)

Now you might not agree with what I’ve said, but it’s part of your own thought process now. It is part of you. As I often say, “You can dance it.” Whatever was choreographed ‘on you’ is now in ‘you.’ Like water.

Be water, my friend. Bruce Lee’s water image is widely known, by warriors and politicians, artists and denizens of the corporate boardroom. It’s about a mind emptied, which can now go beyond itself – to fill others up. Taking their form, forming their shape, being quietly yet loudly powerful in doing so.

I thought of this video when I encountered the Politico piece on the Republican National Committee’s proposed structural shift: POLITICO: RNC Weighs Outsourcing List (link below post.)

The Republican National Committee is considering a proposal to hand over partial control of its most valuable asset – its voter file – to a newly formed private entity that would enhance it by using unregulated money from an increasingly influential network of independent groups allied with the GOP (1).

At first this shift may sound administrative. The RNC has debt. They need to address it. They are adding a revenue channel and outreach methods that will potentially do that. But actually it’s far different. It’s about what the political party may turn into. In not too long.

The new party? Will it be a nucleus, a center of a horizontally built social media-driven universe? A party that knows you extraordinarily well, via information you voluntarily offer to a number of organizations that you belong to and believe in? A party with several new channels by which to raise money?

**

Republicans and Democrats, circa 2011, have new leaders. Reince Priebus, RNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Democratic National Committee. Each creates intriguing and challenging attention. It’s a compliment to each. Were they on TV in classic versus, Wasserman-Schultz would dominate, I imagine. She’s a strong and eloquent voice. I seriously have the impression that Florida hurricanes do not blow this lady over.

In comparison, Priebus might look secondary. But such places have opportunities and freedoms that frontrunner spots don’t. They exist slightly under the radar and can take greater risk. He seems to be a quiet yet calculating chessplayer, a systems thinker. I wouldn’t dismiss him anytime soon.

It’s in that context that I read of Priebus’ new signature initiative. His way of getting the RNC out of debt, and moving the greater opinion needle redward. It may turn out to be a lot more than that.

**

I was enticed originally by the RNC’s debt picture being an incentive to this newly proposed program. It relates to my whole study area of unfederaling, an interdisciplinary research focus which looks at the new roles entities will assume within a decentralization -and lessening- of federal government’s influence. My initial question on this topic was, “what will the federal government consider when faced with enormous debt and deficit, that would not ever be on the table otherwise?”

The answer continuously came back to ways to shift responsibility. To change the structures in ways that tapped new resources/alliances on a peer level. In the paraphrased words of a student: they need to ‘spread outward’ what they are doing already ‘so they can still keep doing it.’

While that comment was made in regard to Congressman Paul Ryan’s proposals for Medicaid and Medicare within the Roadmap and Path to Prosperity, and their shifted reliance toward individual choice, the states and to private and philanthropic subsectors, it also applies here. I wondered if Priebus was trying to make his RNC a precursor of the hybrid political organization of the future. One decentralized and weaned of the idea of the federal, and ever more fluid in terms of the breadth and depth of its mission and brand.

Within that thought, and referring to the linked article, do DataTrust, and its siblings Catalist and Themis, seek to be that hybrid political organization of the future? A subject for a future post.

**

For now, let’s look at what Priebus is endeavoring to do. Towards understanding it in context, let’s look at the difference between a campaign and a movement.

Say, hypothetically, that I’ve recently been involved with a group of consultants who are very accustomed to campaigns. But now they are trying to start a movement. The transition from one to the other might prove more challenging than they expected. Here’s one reason why.

Movements and campaigns start for different reasons and in different places. Campaigns are centrally run, driving orders downwards. There are underlings out in the field, blessed by the above. Those underlings meet expectations dictated from above. So many letters, so many radio appearances. So many voters to the polls. They are accorded credit to the extent they remain uniform.

Movements, however, flip that model. They are by nature edge to center. They seek to influence central behavior via outside momentum, which both starts at the edge and grows there. Movements and campaigns may have similar results at times, and they may ally at times when mutually advantageous (see Obama 08.) But movements look nothing like campaigns.

Campaigns are cut and dried, monolith meet monarchy, all quite well planned beforehand. Certainty equals effectiveness. If they morph they probably fail.

Movements are flexible and morph by their very nature. Their power is in their digital social mosaic, their ability to form and shape themselves situationally. You can’t catch them, strangle them or kill them, because they are virtually everywhere.

As I see it, Priebus wants a movement-like force to grab hold of the RNC. What’s he doing about that?

He’s letting go.

**

The RNC plans to allow its lists to move outward for use and exchange, into the component parts that make up its wider constituency.

Duncan and Priebus, in their Monday presentation last week, insisted the RNC would retain tight control over the list, no matter the final contours of the deal with Data Trust, and they made the case that the types of enhancements that the trust will make to the list for free would cost the committee as much as $6 million a year to do in-house.(1)

No longer a case of an uberheadquarters keeping secrets, now power flows outward. Perhaps not to return. Delegation of into component parts. The NRA. Faith and civic based organizations, chambers and clubs of commerce, prosperity and growth. Persons, places and things which, at the local level, interweave emotional and financial member identity. And which sit outside (at the moment…) of stringent FEC reporting requirements.

It’s possible to identify emotively as a Republican. But you don’t identify with the RNC in the same way, do you? That’s always been a problem. But RNC morphing into its outer specific identities? Choreographing on them and letting them own the dance as its performer? Is creating new cycles and loci of ownership. Quite a departure from the 20th century campaign, in its topdown blitz via airwar. It’s a strategy that grows from the caucusing ground. A movement.

The Politico piece discusses concerns around this strategy.

“Once the asset is outside the four walls, they’ve lost control,” said the source, who speculated what would happen if an entity like the Tea Party Express wanted to rent the list to help the primary opponent of an incumbent Republican, or if the NRA rented it to use in support of one of its rare Democratic endorsees.(1)

Won’t a decentralization like this cripple a once strong organization? Maybe, and maybe not. I say it will strengthen it.

Yet here’s the friction point, as touched upon in the article.

Priebus insists that the spread will be wide, and will target with precision. Yet he also says that the RNC proper will maintain control from the center at all times.

 He can’t have both of those things.

**

If he allows the message to grow via the edge, at the edge, he must let go.

If he tries to hold on, then the edge and the center will eventually come to odds, and that would be inefficient, not to mention embarrassing.

If power is in letting go, Priebus as chair becomes a sort of event coordinator. Not its overseer or its director. It is not only a reframing of party structure, but of what a Party Chair is about.

About what sort of personality that chair should have. The Party Chair in this new iteration cannot be a domineer. Nor one that yells.

He/she will need to be quiet, prescient, brilliant. A chessplayer. But isn’t that what Priebus is?

**

I’ve only touched the surface here. The shift, if played out, will have effect on manner and method of fundraising, of GotV efforts, of local message management. It may guide and influence the Tea Party which stands as the RNC’s rebellious crafty sibling, or its rival DNC, led by Ms. Wasserman-Schultz, whom, no doubt, is watching this closely and with intelligent calculation. Her party has already dipped their toe into the water here. But not ever gone as far as is now being proposed. Will she leap over what he’s doing? Beat him to the punch?

Does she want to?

 **

Both Priebus and Wasserman-Schultz want their tenures – meaning their Committees – to mean something to their members and constituents. In a way their parties haven’t lately.

But the process of such choreography is a scary one. Control is not yours to keep. Yet responsibility is.

Reince Priebus may not even realize what he could be setting off here. It could change it all. For good, for bad, or more likely some of each.

Dilution may occur, as former North Dakota GOP chairman Gary Emineth strongly inferred in his quote in this Politico piece. (1)  In my own words? "What we are may float away, may seep out into everything. We may not be able to find ourselves at times, because with so many faces we won’t be in control. But we will be everywhere."

Yes, quite possible. But isn’t that the point?

 To be water, my friend.

**

(1)  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55147.html#ixzz1N6M0Zf5b POLITICO: RNC weighs outsourcing list By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith May 17, 2011 04:00 PM EDT

(2) Hat tip to one of my favorite films, The Turning Point. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4143644953/ The concept captured in these words was spoken on a number of occasions by Leslie Browne in her brilliant performance as Emilia

In a World of ‘Versus’

Anyone who has seen a movie preview is familiar with the phrase, “in a world.”

A voiceover of epic commanding basso introduces the preview we’re seeing. He says,

“In a world … where the craze of brutal struggle … means living… yet another day!”

So I made up that particular line, but you can probably recall that voice. It’s saying, in whatever words apply to that film, that this is a movie. The rules of entertainment apply. The idea being that you’ll accept a different context and set of rules inside the theatre than you would outside of it, in real life.

On matters DC, that’s often what the media does. In the worlds, exciting and mundane, of The Capitol and The Oval, they offer us the context of the theatre.

It’s within this set of ‘movie rules’ that most understand and consume political news. It’s thick jowly men in the smoky back rooms of yore, it’s ambitious young communications directors sending tweets of today. It’s the dark secrets and the sleeplessness of the wicked, and the ample coffee and other beverages that connect it all. Battle as entertainment. In a world…of versus.

Since I first worked in Washington I’ve watched the development of the versus narrative. I’ve heard media through its bullhorn. I try to tease out the structures it uses to tease me. I say, so that’s how you structured that story? As a duality?

But what if the two sides agree on 95% of the issue, and just differ on a few methods? Why does it still look like a boxing match between big red and blue gloves?

Now most in media aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re providing a narrative, a rationale, a reason why your heart or gut should care. They’re attaching meaning to what you are reading and enabling you to associate the words with your own experience. Within this ‘familiarized’ context, a reader is more easily convinced of a point.

A point’s more clearly defined in opposition to another one. Writers write about politics in a world of versus. And it’s not always Republican vs. Democrat.

Title: Ryan vs. Toomey http://bit.ly/jCCWTU (National Review Online)

Lede: Republicans choose sides on whether Medicare reform is politically feasible.

Are Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA)’s  budget proposals, titled “Path to Prosperity” and “Restoring Balance” respectively, at odds with each other? No. They are presenting two different process methods toward the same greater objectives.

Yet the versus (the second word of the three word title) is followed by a lede of intrigue. Inferring a duel. In a world of jousting Celtic knights, or a rivalry brewing in an underground urban boxing ring. Over Medicare, of all things.

Entertaining? Yes. But is the context productive?

Please read Andrew Stiles’ piece, which is well done. But look at the title’s context and consider this. Both budget proposals seek to address rising debt and deficit. They do it in two similar ways, with Ryan focusing on a longer term and his expertise in Medicare alternatives, and Toomey on a shorter term with focus on tax code simplification. Both address spending, with Ryan using 2008 levels and Toomey a return to 2006 levels as a basis.

These are two well-thought versions of the same shade of red. Their differences and emphasis preferences will, we hope, spur productive discussion in each Chamber.

Why the versus? It’s structure. Plain and simple. Attention is granted to the loud grit of battles, not always to their quiet valor. The media knows this.

So they’ll mention that Ryan was attacked from the left for his ideas, and Toomey from the far right for his. The big question that’s now going on – so who is each guy fighting off? Could they be fighting, as the title implies, each other? 

On the Democratic side, similar narratives emerge. While opinions differ within parties, many could be cast as healthy conversation on a vital issue. Instead, they are cast in dramatic, urgent language.

Our legislative entertainment is rarely about who is achieving consensus. Expressing beliefs but going the distance to solution. Seeing what’s right and not just what’s politically easy.

It will be a challenge for movements such as NoLabels, and the citizens that seek to comprise it, to step outside of the alluringly easy narrative of versus. Such messaging, however emotive, urgent or dualistic, contradicts the NoLabels declaration and introduces questions around its core efficiency of process power.

It hearkens back to barrages of political fundraising letters, advocating one candidate or side, not a new civility which transcends this, and thereby welcomes citizens who identify strongly as Republicans or as Democrats, yet first call themselves “Americans.” 

Corporate Ads. Political “Code.”

My Facebook status update, dated May 9th 2011 reads as follows:

The final extra credit project of the school year? Find a corporate ad. Not a political ad. A corporate one -That ‘codes’ a political message – perhaps inadvertently, but maybe not. I gave two examples- from FedEx & Xerox. Since this was an extra-c, the deadline is open. I may get answers all summer. 🙂

I added the note:

I had previously shared 2 earlier ads from Cisco. I’m looking for ads that seem unintentional but hit hard codewise – i.e. send an implicit message to targeted populations at key moments.

**

So just for fun, here are the four ads I mentioned. There are many more to call out, as I love this topic. But these are a start.

1) Cisco

We knew that 2007-08 was going to be no usual sort of Presidential election season. Barriers would be broken. It was to be a new time. Here’s a rally around that.

Targeted at hip diverse mobile millennials, it showed a world in travel and motion, where books are rewritten. Where countries are transformed. And we are powerful. Something’s happening here. For the next era.

2) Cisco

I’d also introduced this in context to a previous Cisco ad, ‘are you ready?’  This ad not only creates a harmonious vision of one united world of many. It says they are all under one ruler. I mean connected by one internet. Virtually all of the traffic of which runs on the systems of one company. For some this ad was hopeful and triumphant. Others found it terrifying and prophetic. It was politically moving in either case.

The next two, I’ll clue you, appear to have politically rightward audiences in mind. But each is subtle enough to expand its base, to work into one’s thought process and be quietly convincing.

3) Xerox (and Ducati)

This one was ideally placed one early morning in March, pre market open, on CNBC’s Squawk Box. The morning that Senator Toomey, for whom limited government and the  free market are not just an issue but a calling, was the day’s guest host. 

What do the two characters in this Xerox-Ducati play represent, in that context?  What’s the code objective? I think it’s glamorously evident.

4) FedEx

And perhaps the code-iest one of all! By FedEx. Look at this frame by frame. What do you see and hear? 

This one’s powerful. If I have to explain why, then you aren’t in the target group here. My jaw dropped when I saw this one. I almost can’t believe it’s not intentional.

5) and onward…Which ones would you suggest? What do they ‘code’ for you?

The finest code examples take each person’s own preferences into account. They may say blue to one, and red to another – but do so at the same time in the same words.

Every political advertiser – and communications director – dreams of being able to do that. The very good ones can. 

Blessed are the meek. Is Daniels running for President?

Blessed are the meek. For they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

The Beatitudes are so beautiful. And so arguable. If you are prone to doing so, perhaps after a Sunday of Mass and football games, you can get into tangles in bars over beer over what ‘meek’ means, or whether the leading Gospel of Matthew should be held above the more accessible versions of Evangelists Mark or Luke, or the intellectual allure accorded to John’s version.

Meek, however you see it, is a complex word of quietness, of one not so very tall or perfect. Of a mystery man of meaning, watching and observing. Like being a snake in the grass, a Gollum looking up to it from his cave and its soil. Or a quiet and innocent Frodo walking through that grass, carrying an extraordinary ring.

Of being humble before a deity.

It is used on occasion in communications, for this very reason. Meekness is accessible, even mythical to us, but also vague. Vague in the sense that we know what it means but it’s too darn emotional for us to understand or describe. It has something to do with each person’s version of reconciling to their own joyful or disturbed version of yesterday.

When was I meek? Was I hurt, or did I grow from this? Was it both?

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, at the outset of almost every talk I’ve seen him share, is about the meekness of the political. And everything it means. He’s the guy that makes art of the words, “I don’t know.” He says them quite often. 

Meekness, in a sense of The Beatitudes, is beyond description by words. But let’s touch it at the edges. As best we can.

It is about listening and knowing exactly what is going on. A chance at Wisdom.

It is about not just giving ones shirt, but one’s cloak as well. An absence of Need.

It is about being immune from the wiles of power, beyond pain of whim or moment. You are beyond hurt, and immeasurably beyond your attacker, so why don’t you… 

Turn the other cheek?

Meek is a big deal. It may be a cultural thing, wonderfully embracing and certain to some, and for others a question – why? If this guy’s so smart, why doesn’t he just come out there and say so?

Why is he being so humble? Is he playing a trick? Is there a method to this whole thing? Perhaps.

Governor Mitch Daniels spoke on May 4, 2011 to the lunch crowd at AEI. He joked, as he ascended to the podium, that they’d all been misled.

For a moment, all stood on edge, at attention.

All the people in the audience. All the viewers like me on AEI livestream. That this wasn’t to be any major policy address despite what the well known Arthur Brooks might have said in his inspiring and polite introduction.

Daniels was just here in DC for food. For a meal. Because as Calvin Coolidge said, a guy’s got to eat sometime.

And so we do.

Context established. Branding alert. If you’ve been in this town for even a moment, you just got code. In a twang that wasn’t all about the city.

This guy listens. This guy eats. Ear to the soil, ear to the rails, ear at the fence between your field and mine, the physical – not virtual- locus of where the local news gets distributed.

What he said, in a hard duality that the whole room was waiting for in real words? 

I’m not Obama.

Your question, upon hearing this. So is he running for President?

Here’s the link to the AEI broadcast. I’ll include the same link in my next 2 posts.

 

http://bcove.me/hn4lxv4w

 

Continued, part 2.  I’ll discuss communicative style, primarily, within the topics Daniels addressed. When does he blink? And when does he stand tall?

 

Center. Creative?

In a political party system where many view the Center as a mere blend between two far purer ideologies of conservatism and progressivism, Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York often has something creative to say. 

Elected in a city of greater diversity, wealth and population than many US states and several countries, he’s someone that’s perhaps worth listening to.

Yet is he actually creative? On this past Sunday’s broadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press, Mr. Mayor did not disappoint. In a roundtable segment in which he was accompanied by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Obama Adviser David Axelrod and moderator David Gregory, he touched upon a number of topics with a degree of freedom we don’t often see from our two well known – and all too well defined – major political parties. It was an agility of one comfortable with his thought process and willing to share it in a tone of Centrist legitimacy. It was a thought process less defined by what most think of as “politics.”

From campaign to classroom, I enjoy asking – can the Center be more creative? The following thought process is a fun one, and while unserious at times is worth having.

We’re questioning what functions parties really take, beyond that of an aggregative financial vehicle around a loose set of words.  This is part of that question.

There are innovative ideas with which many candidates and electeds begin to dance. Yet depth and commitment to these thoughts are soon avoided.  Platform alignment beckons and surrounds, reminding us that certain thoughtlines are politically off limits.

Might we, as viewers of this wider political play, enjoy the Center less for its brand of calm consensus, and more for its ability to think safely outside of the box?

Bloomberg gave anticipatory energy to this point, commencing with the topic of immigration. Rather than stating a well-baked party line around issues of the border, he asked whether the Federal government could link immigration policy to the regeneration of now-emptied industrial cities. The cities needed people, businesses, a new economy. Who better to fulfill this than those who dream of being part of America?  That’s not a slogan. It’s an idea.

Yet perhaps the Mayor most enjoyed speaking about how government should debate its budget.

“We are all looking at this in the wrong way…The debate should be about whether or not government should provide this kind of education or that, this kind of defense or that,… (don’t) let the money drive it…the most important thing is…what are we going to do to keep the country safe and growing?”

It’s basic common sense, plus a tinge of revolution. What he suggested was a way to turn the current budget process on its head. Or perhaps flip it back on its own two feet?

‘Decide first, then raise the money.’ In current political thought, there’s a sense of big or small government, red or blue, guns or butter. Each fighting for their own assigned incremental raise. Questioning whether a program is still relevant often falls to the wayside, with the raise itself being the definition of political success. And we ask why the government spends too much.

Mayor Bloomberg suggested a holistic view of the government function, a rethinking of the machine. Neither red nor blue, but according to possibility. Zero-based budgeting, common to social benefit efforts and new startups in emerging industries, is a naturally creative process as well as one that tends to budgets that balance. It also looks outside of traditional funding sources, combining a number of stakeholders in both contribution and mission.

You may call it a leap to consider this, because the government just doesn’t work that way.

Precisely. And that way? Government isn’t working.   

Consider that free of the platform constraints of party, and its associated traditions and favors, a mind at the Center can, as one of my favorite Apple ad campaigns says, think different.

Bloomberg’s answers may have been idealistic. But the creative questions he asked were spot on.   

Watch the broadcast here:         

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/vp/42847267#42847267

‘Moderate’ is a Verb

How do you pronounce ‘Moderate?’

Well, that depends.  Is it a noun, or a verb?

Over the past week I’ve had the privilege of several discussions with members/staffers of the US Senate around the topic of the pending vote on the debt ceiling. It’s an issue I’m attracted to academically, particularly due to my past political and investment-focused career phases, plus my continued wonkish interest with all things ForEx and Fed.

My discussions earlier this week were with Democrats, though I have recently spent time with the Republican side toward assessing this issue. And driving one key point. This issue’s too big for little political agendas.

This issue needs to be ‘moderated’ to solution. Verb.

This statement, in the planet known as the US Senate, is amusing to the ear. The Majority and Minority Leaders in the Chamber being less ideologues than ruthless hardcore political players seeking a win, the oftsaid line “everything is political, except for politics, which is personal,” couldn’t be more true.

It’s a credo borne out in just about every primal legislative breath. The mere idea that something could go beyond the whim or wile of politics seems utopian.

But this is the debt ceiling. It’s different. It’s what arches over all the other things you think the government should or shouldn’t be doing.

And therein rests an opportunity.

The debt ceiling being near to attainment, we have three choices.

1)      Raise it without conditions “clean bill.” Risk interest payments and negative perceptions  rising. And possible default.

2)      Freeze it. Risk, perhaps in just a few months, default.

3)      Raise it with conditions. Least chance of default.

Along the right-left continuum, among which no reasonable person claims to like the idea of default:

1) is considered the far left position,

2) the far right position, and

3) the compromise or center position. 

As I write this, voices leaning left, led by those such as US Treasury Secretary Geithner, threaten apocalyptic default and related catastrophe if his own chosen path (which we assume reflects that of his boss, President Obama) does not occur.

Voices leaning right, among them Republicans such as Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a freshman who boldly challenged the will of the Treasury Secretary on this matter earlier this year, after having been in office just a few weeks, say that the irresponsible procrastination of a clean raise is precisely *not* the message we want to send to the markets. Considering the S&P’s ‘negative’ warning issued April 18^th, this point should be taken with acute seriousness.

Whichever one you agree with, those are some fighting words for a fighting sort of time. And, as a moderate Democrat Senator shared with me the other day, if we have a straight partyline vote on this? “The markets may not like that part either. Regardless of what we do.”

A group in the Senate called the Gang of Six, realizing this, is driving a potential bipartisan solution to avoid this potentially uncomfortable scenario.

So what happens in the middle? Well that depends upon how you define, pronounce, and categorize the noun or verb, “moderate.” And how you view the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

A Prisoner’s Dilemma, basically described, has two ‘participants with a dual ‘blind’ choice set.

Each can

1)    Cooperate >gain a shared optimal outcome,

2)    Attack > turn on the other and gain a halfish sort of outcome, or

3)    Cede > turn on oneself, and cede the battle.

Well, if the other guy isn’t known for his cooperation, what would you rationally choose? Option 2.

The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution, that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect, even though each player’s individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperatively. (a)

That’s the center outcome, the moderate outcome, ‘moderate’ pronounced as a noun.

Why do moderates look fishy to a lot of people? They aren’t standing up for things. They’re making deals. They are playing it safe for themselves. Perhaps only to get re-elected.  

Now you can’t exactly blame them. But alas, you do. Because you are left unsatisfied. How do we get to the optimal outcome, you ask?  

Well we’d have to communicate. And that is where the verb, ‘moderate,’ comes in. With its action step and its ‘long A.’

A person at the middle. Who creates a civil realm for the two to understand and agree.

Have we tried it? Have we tried to stop dismissing a real moderating methodology, as if it were a dream?  

This isn’t about meeting in the exact middle. Which is not always the best thing to do. It’s about deciding how to get to that optimal Option1.  

I’m as skeptical as anybody. But if being a noun, a ‘moderate’ is wimping out and failing, might being a verb, ‘moderating’ be the brave guy’s path to try?

We need an optimal outcome on this one. This is our debt ceiling, and we’ll hit it in a few weeks. Do we have a choice?

(a)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma