This morning, Terry McAuliffe sent out an email, linking to a video that he thought was Hillary's most persuasive moment in last night's debate. The problem is, Hillary totally blew it. She didn't answer the question and she should have. If her campaign team had understood STORY and prepared her, she would have, instead of avoiding it, embraced the question as a gift offering her an opportunity to show who she really is.

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This morning, Terry McAuliffe sent out an email, linking to a video that he thought was Hillary's most persuasive moment in last night's debate.

The problem is, Hillary totally blew it in that moment. She didn't answer the question, and she should have. If her campaign team had prepared her properly, she would have, instead of dancing around it, embraced the question as a gift, offering her an opportunity to show who she really is, at her best. It's why her campaign is failing. Her handlers just don't understand the power of story.

When Hillary tells people she's more experienced, it doesn't do the job.

When Hillary documents her experience by saying she's been to eighty countries, she's just not closing the sale.

So far, Hillary is failing to make her experience enough of an issue, failing to present her 15 years of diplomacy, leadership etcetera as a compelling reason to vote for her over Obama.

The only way she has any chance of turning things around is to create a narrative that actually reaches beyond people's heads and into their hearts. That narrative can only be built with stories.

This is not rocket science. People are not responding to her logical, rational arguments, valid as they may be. That's because they are not wrapped in stories.

Stories take an idea and give it heart and spirit. Stories take an idea and make it something that people can empathize with, relate to and connect with, not just at the level of the head, but also at the emotional, heart and spirit level. Voting is not just a rational process, that's for sure.

Unfortunately for Hillary, her handlers and she just do not get it. As I was writing this, I checked my email. Terry McAuliffe, Chairman, Hillary Clinton for President, former head of the DNC, sent out an email, saying,

It's worth watching this video. Apparently, all the people running Hillary's campaign cherry-picked this part of last night's debate as the best she put out. The video shows her response to the question,

Now, I coach candidates on how to give stump speeches-- how to weave the issues they are focusing upon with the stories in their lives. And the fact that the Clinton Campaign uses this response shows just how badly her advisors have failed in understanding what wins elections.

The question was perfect, a gift for a well prepared candidate. But Hillary didn't answer it. She ignored it clearly not having a clue that this was her shot at proving herself, at SHOWING her experience. Instead, she tried to TELL who she is. She told a story that demonstrated who she is and what she thought. The question gave her an opportunity to really showcase her experience, to SHOW her inner strength, her character under fire.

Frankly, it's not a question you just dredge up an answer to. You have to have thought it through, honed and fined tuned your understanding of the actual challenging experience-- how you were tested, the dynamics, the pressure put upon you, and then, how you stood up to and overcame those challenges.

Any candidate I'd have coached would have have been ready and eager to answer that question head on. An honest, truthful, head-on answer to that question could have been the home run that Hillary was looking for. Instead, she went for the walk, lecturing about her values rather than showing and illustrating them via a story-- a real story which showed her facing a real challenge, actually being tested.

I've written about this in at least two previous articles:

Tapping the Power of story

Tap The Power of Story To Max Your Message or Campaign

In the second article I included a list of the kinds of stories candidates should identify in their lives:

The archetypal American story is all about facing challenges at some stage in life, then recovering and overcoming them. A candidate who doesn't have a story about challenges faced and overcome is running a campaign on three wheels. If Hillary had spent an hour or two, at the least, doing a story analysis of her life, she would have had the story of the greatest test she'd faced analyzed, reviewed, rehearsed... she'd have told it hundreds of times and it would have been easy to reply directly and truthfully, but more important, persuasively and movingly, to that question.

Harold Wolfson, Terry McAuliffe, and the rest of her gazillion dollar campaign failed to tap the most important power, the most valuable resources Hillary had. Hillary's response to the debate question reflects that failure perfectly.

But it's worse. If you have experience, then you have stories to tell, stories which are moving, that touch the heart, that bring tears to the eye. Hillary hasn't told these. In response to the debate question McAuliffe hilighted, she told a story about her being honored at a ceremony.

A candidate needs to understand the power of story. It's clear Hillary did not.

I'm not sure Obama is any better at this. With some coaching, he'd be brilliant at it, applying his oratory skills. But we're talking about Hillary, for now. If she wants to win, her only chance is to develop an inventory of stories with real people, that touch the heart-- stories that describe, in precise detail, how she got her experience, how she applied her experience to get things done. These stories can have warts. They can show mistakes and they can show how those mistakes were overcome. But if she keeps going on, just telling about her experience, if she keeps attacking Obama, evoking cold prickly feelings in her audiences, she will insure her failure. To win, she needs three or four powerful stories from her life-- stories that show how she faced challenges and succeeded, stories that touch people's hearts, stories that people can relate to, stories that people can be proud of.

In the focus groups, Hillary supporters describe how Hillary has gone through the ringer, been in the trenches. If Hillary could just describe some real stories that show this, she'd be in a far better position.

If Hillary can identify those stories-- and I'm sure she has them-- then she might be able to pull out from the plummeting fall she's been experiencing. There's no doubt in my mind about one thing. If earlier in her campaign she'd understood and used the power of story, if she'd done the simple chore of spending a few hours identifying the most powerful stories in her life, she would have been in a very different situation. The truth is that her failure to find and use the stories in her life that truly showed who she is-- that failure has been fatal for her campaign.

Hillary has a few weeks to find the magic, not a parachute, but some mystical intervention that will lift her campaign like no negative attack, no sales pitch ever can. There is no human creation older nor more powerful to change the world than story. If she doesn't find hers in the next few days, she might as well start writing up the epitaph on her campaign's tombstone.

Meanwhile, there will be thousands of campaigns just getting going in the months to come. I wonder how many of them will expend, combined hundreds of millions of dollars on campaign managers and experts without tapping the most powerful message transmitter humans have ever known-- stories.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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