PLAYING CHESS WITH A PIGEON

There’s a saying about trying to use reason and logic to argue with a stupid person:

“Never play chess with a pigeon.

The pigeon just knocks all the pieces over.

Then shits all over the board.

Then struts around like it won.”

You could say that’s what Hillary Clinton tried to do.

She tried to play chess with a pigeon.

Probably, never before has a candidate for President of the USA been so qualified as Hillary Clinton.

Probably, never before has a candidate been so unqualified as Donald Trump.

Hillary tried to beat him at her game: the politician’s game.

She was more intelligent, more articulate, more prepared.

She knew every detail of how government works.

Donald Trump knew next to nothing, and he didn’t care.

The more she tried to beat him at chess, the more he knocked all the pieces over.

After the three debates, I saw Hillary’s untruthfulness score rated at 23% (that’s mistakes and/or lies).

23% is pretty good, Bernie Sanders was rated at 24%.

So Hillary was more honest than most politicians.

Donald Trump’s score was rated at 67%.

More than double the number of mistakes and/or lies.

But he didn’t care.

At every debate, he knocked all the pieces over, shat all over the board and strutted around like he’d won.

And unbelievably he did win.

Because he wasn’t playing chess.

Hillary thought she would win by playing chess better than a pigeon.

But ordinary people were sick of the chess game.

It seemed to them like double-speak that ignored the real facts of their lives.

They complained that they had lost their jobs and their homes, and now they had to live in a trailer-park on food stamps.

The politicians would hold up graphs showing that unemployment was lower than it had ever been.

As if the graph was the reality and them not having a job was irrelevant.

The politicians didn’t seem to care whether or not they had a job.

The politicians cared about winning the argument.

And they won the argument with graphs and statistics and ‘expert’ reasoning.

And ordinary people felt inarticulate and stupid next to the complicated chess game: the clever words and abstract figures.

Then Donald Trump came along and he didn’t try to play chess.

He just knocked all the pieces over, shat all over the board, and strutted around like he won.

And, whether it was the truth or not, ordinary people finally had someone who spoke in a language they could understand.

For the politicians, winning the chess game had become the end in itself.

And for the people, the first thing they wanted was to get rid of the chess game.

That’s a good lesson for communications professionals with university degrees.

The logic that worked in college, often doesn’t work in the real world.