Healthy Influence Blog

Rudy is out.

I was wrong. I predicted about a year ago that Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton would earn the nominations of their respective parties and that Mrs. Clinton would then win the general election. I based this prediction solely upon my intpretation of all the candidates persuasion skill as evidenced by their participation in prior elections. My claim is that the more elections you are involved with and the more often you’re on the winning team, then the better your persuasion skill.

As I analyzed the election experience of the candidates it seemed obvious to me that Mrs. Clinton is head and shoulders above the Democratic field even if a lot of her experience was merely being inside Bill Clinton’s campaigns. No one comes close to her campaigning background. On the Republican side, I dismissed John McCain’s considerable experience in campaigns because he had already lost the big one once before and that is a reliable kiss of death . . . except in the case of Mr. Ronald Reagan and I thought that Mr. McCain was no Ron Reagan. That left Mr. Giuliani as the Republican with the most campaign experience.

I think in retrospect that I broke my own rule of looking at the sheer amount of campaigns as a proxy for persuasion skill. Mr. McCain clearly has more of it than any other Republican candidate and always has. That primary loss to Mr. George W. Bush in 2000 made Mr. McCain a dead man walking in my estimation and that was incorrect.

In March of 2007 when I first thought about this rule of thumb for predicting election winners through persuasion skill, if I had stuck to a bare-faced application of the rule, I would have predicted Clinton and McCain. And, I’d be writing a different post today.

I’m not nearly as smart as I think I am, am I? I can’t even follow my own rules.