WHWG works closely with clients’ in-house teams and their outside consultants to develop and execute high stakes communications strategy.
It’s not an uncommon situation. Being in a foreign country, clumsily trying to navigate the native language, and receiving blank stares – or, scowls – in return.
That’s exactly what Deborah Fallows – wife of famed journalist James Fallows – describes in her recent interview on NPR and writes about in her new book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language. When Fallows accompanied her husband to China, she had taken a few semesters of Mandarin. But when they arrived, she found it a real challenge to communicate.
Fallows is no stranger to foreign tongues. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half-a-dozen languages. But she learned there’s an art to mastering a tonal language in which one syllable can have many, many meanings. And more often than not, Fallows felt she was mastering the art of miscommunication.
In one humorous anecdote, the author describes her effort to order “take-out” – or “dabao” from a Shanghai Taco Bell. She tries every possible tonal combination, but the server couldn’t understand her request. He finally retrieved three other employees from the back, and Fallows continued to repeat dabao, dabao, dabao to them. Finally – finally! – one of the men said “ah, dabao!” And, just like that, she struck the chord and got her tacos to go.
For Fallows, hitting the right note was a cultural journey. But in communications, being on-key is everything. You just can’t afford to be tone-deaf.
It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Why?
It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. Read
I recently met with a possible client, and as part of a larger communications strategy, I suggested his business consider hosting a small policy dinner with an elite group of writers and scholars. I was met with a strange reaction – laughing. He understood op-eds, speeches, even conferences. But a dinner? How is that going to help advance our issue campaign?
White House Writers Group has been organizing policy dinners for years, but using a meal as a platform to influence opinion has a much longer history in the nation’s capital. Dinner parties in Washington have been the source of politics and politicking since the days of Thomas Jefferson. As Catherine Allgor, the author of Parlor Politics writes, “Historians have long recognized the political advantages of Jefferson’s dinners, calling them part of his statecraft.”
Jefferson was strategic with his dinner parties, giving them throughout the political “season,” or Congressional session. He typically hosted guests from one political party at a time, careful not to mix Republicans and Federalists. But these were not official state dinners, the way we’re accustomed to hearing about today. Rather, they were intended to be much more “democratic” and generally reflected the president’s casual, Virginia hospitality. Jefferson’s dinners espoused democracy, always using a round table, for instance, to encourage easy conversation, intimacy, and equality.
The act of breaking bread with others helps merge the personal with the political, engage in debate, bridge differences, and move opinion. And in Washington, it appears, we have a long tradition of using food to advance political change.