Buzzworthy Book

There's a new book out that has caught my attention, The Political Brain, which examines brain research and political campaigns over the last forty to fifty years and reveals how emotion, not reason, drives people to vote the way they do.

From publicaffairsbooks.com:

The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.

And a book exerpt from a Review at Daily Kos:

... the left has no brand, no counterbrand, no master narrative, no counternarrative. It has no shared terms or "talking points" for its leaders to repeat until they are part of our political lexicon. Instead, every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no history. If this is how Coke marketed itself, we would all be drinking Pepsi.

What two prominent Democrats have to say about the book:

Bill Clinton
"This is the most interesting, informative book on politics I've read in many years...you have to read this book."

Howard Dean
" ...a must read...we will win the Presidency if our candidate reads and acts on this book."

All of this is, of course, very timely and interesting to me in its own right.

BUT, what makes the book even more interesting to me is that I know the author. Remember when I posted about visiting Emory last August and having this great dinner with chatty professors and holding my own and even making the whole table laugh? The author of this book was at the table, and yes, he laughed.