Mega h/t to Aaron Wherry for transcribing and writing this. It's a side of Poilievre you don't often see on the Hill. If you're a political junkie and you don't already read Wherry's Beyond the Commons, you are hugely missing out.
“The problem likely is that a lot of our young political activists were very good in university,” he said. “And if they could get an A on their university paper it means that they were destined to be political communicators. Why is this? Not because critical thought and learning is bad, but because in university we are taught to take five pages of content and stretch it into 20 pages of writing. When, in fact, the real skill is to do exactly the opposite, to compress that five pages into one. I think it was Rousseau who said, in a ten-page letter to a friend of his, ‘I would’ve written you this letter in one page, but I didn’t have time.’”
[SNIP]“The voter does not have any responsibility to spend their time deciphering your Latin. They have a busy life. They are raising families. They are paying taxes. They are working their jobs. It is not their responsibility to decipher excessively verbose language. It is their job to read it and get it quick. It’s your job to help them do that.”
[SNIP]"Often times, we in the political class, we develop our own language and we start to speak that language. We use acronyms that nobody understands, we use long, pointless sentences, we become vague. What you learn when you knock on doors is how to communicate with people who have busy lives and who don’t have time to decipher your Latin. And the great thing about knocking on doors is you have an instant and free focus group. You can tell by whether or not the voter’s eyes are glazing over if you are actually communicating. You can tell whether or not your language is persuasive to them, or just to you … You can test yourself over and over and over again.”
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