How to use messaging on McDonald's to win the presidency.

Like a number of people, I spent time flipping burgers, running fry stations, and taking drive-thru orders at fast food restaurants. Wendy's and Burger King helped me pay tuition. Supervising the night shift at an Arby's helped bring in extra money for my young family. In a way, working those jobs were a continuation of a legacy. My dad worked in the hotel and restaurant business for over thirty years. My Uncle Melza and my Great Aunt Margaret were merchants, each owning a shop in the Irishtown section of Basseterre, St. Kitts. Customer service was in the DNA.

I was not expecting per se that Kamala Harris would be able to tie her mention of her fast-food working days to the experiences of we ordinary blokes. Ms. Harris shared her fast-food experience more as a passing comment than as the platform for making a policy argument or at least providing a teachable moment. Her failure to create that teachable moment only fed the pre-judgment from right-wing critics and the perceptions of Republican and independent voters that she was not bright or intelligent. Unfair observations, but she fed them.

When I taught economics at community college, I would use my fast-food experience to explain the economy. For example, when I discussed the marginal productivity of labor, I would provide an example of how the number of whoppers we made would fall off if the sandwich board had too many people making whoppers versus moving a couple workers to the fryers to make fries or fish sandwiches. Simple, real-world examples used to explain complex economics.

To be fair to Ms. Harris, most politicians could not conjure up those teachable moments. They either do not have those real-world experiences or simply lack the political intelligence to make the connection between those experiences and their flesh and blood constituents. Rather, we get over-degreed snobs, who like George Herbert Walker Bush, freak out at the realities of the economy when faced with them at a grocery store cash register.

It is no wonder that autocrats like Nicolas Maduro can maintain a hold onto Venezuela. I'm no fan of Maduro. He has led Venezuela into economic chaos and threatened the sovereign integrity of neighboring Guyana, but I give him this. When you come up through the ranks of the masses, from a bus driver to a union leader to a politico, you have the pulse of the people, and in the end, political intelligence is optimal when you can relate to an electorate.

This is not to say that the political class have to be all chummy chummy with we regular folk, but doing the Obama finger wag or making patronizing comments about a brief stint at Micky Dees won't help win votes.

The takeaway: optimize your real-world experience by incorporating it into your campaign with teachable moments. Do not oversell it (not everyone worked at much less eats at McDonald's) but use it effectively as a tool to explain the real-world of your constituents and extricate solutions from those experiences. Use your real-world experiences to relate or don't bother using them at all.

Alton Drew

11 November 2024