Introduction
by Ken Valenzuela, BeALeader.Net's Chief Editor
Common places and simple metaphors capture hearts and minds, and that's what senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did to try to win the race to be the democratic nominee to be president of the United States. They brought a message that was common place to a big number of Americans. In fact, the greatest number of Americans that participated in a presidential nomination campaign.
THE SUPPORTERS
The hard numbers say both candidates have almost the same support in terms of people who voted for each one them. Each one got nearly 18 million votes with a difference of 300.000 between them depending on the way you count or consider the votes. Anyway, Mr. Obama has clinched the nomination. And although Mrs. Clinton had almost the same support in raw numbers, we can say they're basically tied. Each one got the equivalent of 6% of the total U.S. population support on their own.
These hard numbers should be enough to understand that the democratic party has no one leader, but two strong leaders to rely upon. And of course that's why they got such an incredible support.
Back to July 2007 and most of the world thought the next democratic nominee would be Hillary Clinton. But in the last five months the establishment was broken and Mr. Obama finally got the nomination and became the first african-american citizen to represent the democratic party for the presidency.
What an Election Means?
In every election you give your vote to whom represents best your ideals and interests, or at least, is near yours. For the democrates the stake was they're chosing the leader who will restore the country to what they think it should be.
In his book "Learning to Lead" (1997) Warren Bennis states clearly what to do if you want to lead people:
"If you want to be a Leader the first thing to do is to get them to buy into shared objectives. Then you have to learn how to generate and sustain trust. The trust factor is critical".
