.

Political slogans that harness the power of metaphors  can manipulate us emotionally without actually delivering a single workable policy.

That ‘ladder of opportunity’ doesn’t go anywhere, but you cannot argue with a metaphor. They do not exist in the real world.

Here are some campaign classics:

1992 Bill Clinton: Putting People First (What did previous governments do? Put gophers first.)

1996 Bill Clinton: Building a Bridge to the 21st Century (A bridge to a different century!)

2012 Barrack Obama: Forward (NO! I wanna vote for the party that can turn back time.)

 Vagueness Award:

1976 Jimmy Carter: Not Just Peanuts.

1996 Tony Blair: The Third Way (So, ah, let’s try Plan C this time.)

2001 John Howard: Keeping Australia in Safe Hands (Sounds ticklish to me)

2007 John Howard: Go for Growth (Or, ah, would you rather Go for Shrinkage?)

Only a new metaphor can kill off the old one. The metaphor I want to kill contributed to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis namely:

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If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

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This is propaganda put out by the monkeys to get more peanuts. If the monkeys in the financial sector were worth their peanuts, there wouldn’t have been a Global Financial Crisis. For many of these monkeys, grabbing their up-sized share of the peanuts was their only concern.

We need a new metaphor to kill the idea that the ‘peanuts’ are the only measure of a good manager. How about this?

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If you pay a King’s Ransom, you just get thieves.

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