Subject: Re: book idea
From: "Rob Norton" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:50:27 -0500

Also, I think we may want to refrain from labeling this "advocacy" and make
the book more about service and individual heroes who have made a
difference through extraordinary acts of advocacy. I bet if we asked
several chiefs of staff to give us examples of people who did amazing
things to get things done, we would get some interesting answers. We need
about 5 stories like Gary's where some important public people will say
that a big initiative wouldn't have gotten done without their work and the
person themselves can tell a few war stories. I keep thinking about Gary's
description of a few guys acting like ninjas to get shit done. Along those
lines, it would be super cool to do one of the cases on Bob Geldoff when he
put together the Live Aid concerts during the '85 Ethiopian famine... same
idea - one guy doing dramatic things to help the world. Again, the goal is
to be positive and motivational, so we need a wide spectrum of examples
that cross party/idealogical lines, so that everyone can find something
they can appreciate.

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Rob Norton <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Thinking more about this and I think we should go with an "advocates
> making a better world" angle and create a book that's positive and a
> motivator to enter public service. This could be an introductory chapter
> that may start by saying that advocates or "lobbyists" are often viewed
> with suspicion, often with good reason, but a lot of good work has been
> accomplished by people who do this work. Then we follow with (roughly) 5
> accounts of how good work was accomplished by dedicated advocates who are
> exemplary public servants. We need to select the cases carefully because
> they each need to include 1-2 interesting anecdotes that involve public
> people doing things that are unexpected. Gary Edson's PEPFAR story is a
> great example and I think we need to try and get interviews with President
> Bush (maybe Gary could even swing Bono) to reinforce this and give the
> account a lot of cache. We'll need to identify 4 more cases that give us
> opportunities to take the same approach and those cases will need to cross
> party lines. In other words, the book needs to provide cool, behind the
> scenes stories of all kinds of people working hard as advocates to make a
> better world. Maybe one of the cases addresses Haiti so we could include
> President Clinton.
>
> This approach gives a publisher a few hooks to promote the book. First, it
> seems to me that there's a lot of opportunity here to highlight untold,
> behind the scenes stories of public people working hard to do good work --
> a human interest hook that may generate stories that one might see in the
> Washington Post Style section or on the morning news/talk shows. The goal
> should be to include at least one anecdote in each case that would be
> newsworthy and worth a short discussion or highlight on a morning news show
> -- the strange bedfellows approach or some other story that demonstrates
> the humanity of the principals and will capture people's attention. Second,
> we stake out a position that there are some advocates/lobbyists that do
> good work and provide an interesting "side" for political talk shows...
> "these guys say not all lobbyists are bad -- let's talk to them hear
> why"... that type of thing. The key is having the hard examples and
> anecdotes that allow us to tell the story and that will serve as hooks to
> want to read the book and hear us talk about it. On a more basic level, we
> would be able to do some promotion in the Washington area bookstores like
> Politics & Prose, but if we have strong anecdotes maybe this can expand
> outside the beltway.
>
> I'm biased, but this seems feasible. The key is having some good stories
> to make it all interesting.
>
>
>
>

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