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Synopsis - Our Common Ground

For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversation with voters across the United States. What she has learned will surprise you, enlighten you, give you hope, and change the way you think about your fellow Americans. Our inability to hear each other, our suspicion, and our impatience is stressing us out and tearing us apart. To gain insight into how we can move forward, Hessan undertook a massive listening project, conducting an ongoing series of weekly interviews with 500 voters from every state, of every age and ethnicity, and along different points of the political spectrum. The topics ranged from race to guns, from character to party politics, from masks to rallies, from the Supreme Court to the pandemic to immigration and climate change. After more than a million individual communications, two things became clear:

We have more common ground than we realize. Yet we are, sadly, failing at understanding each other. On issue after issue, our “divided” nation isn’t nearly as polarized as we imagine. An overwhelming majority of voters believe in common-sense gun licensing and regulation. They are pro-immigration. They believe climate change is real and the coronavirus is deadly. They care deeply about their families and are willing to work hard to make ends meet. And, they believe that Washington is slow, bureaucratic, and not working in their best interests.

In dozens of columns on these topics published in the Boston Globe, Hessan has upended common political wisdom. Presented together for the first time as part of this book, they reveal a unique perspective on how Americans actually think, what they value, and how we can move forward. The path to healing our divided nation is both simple and profound. We must turn down the heat. We must begin to listen, to stop presuming, to try to understand, to treat each other with dignity, and to know that most Americans are not crazy radicals. We truly share common ground. If we can pull together, we can have a much better America.

Author Bio - Diane Hessan

Diane Hessan is an award-winning entrepreneur and innovator in the market research field, and a nationally recognized expert on the American voter. Since 2016, she has been engaged in an in-depth, longitudinal study of the electorate, looking for trends, shifts, and common ground. She has written more than 50 columns about her findings for the Boston Globe, and her work has also been featured on CNN and NPR and in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and many other outlets.

She is the founder and Chairman of C Space, formerly called Communispace, which was the first company to leverage social media to help companies get insight and inspiration from their consumers. Diane was CEO of the company during 14 years of exponential growth, as C Space worked with hundreds of global brands across twelve countries. She has been honored as a disruptor in the market research industry because of her work in conducting breakthrough research via the internet. Diane recently consolidated all of her investment and advisory work into a new company called Salient Ventures, which helps accelerate the next generation of startup companies in tech.

She serves on the boards of Panera, Eastern Bank, Brightcove, Schlesinger Group, Mass Challenge, Tufts University, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2017, the Boston Globe appointed her to its editorial board. Diane has received many honors, including the Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Most Admired CEO award and Boston Power 50 awards from the Boston Business Journal, Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, the Northstar Award from Springboard, and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year. She has been inducted into the Babson College Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs, and she received the Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship from Brandeis University.

Diane previously co-authored the book Customer-Centered Growth: Five Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage, a Business Week best seller that was published in eleven languages. She received a BA in economics and English from Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Author Bio - Dana Rubin

Dana Rubin is a consultant, speechwriter, and speaker who’s on a mission to encourage more women to put their views into the public square. She created the Speaking While Female Speech Bank to broaden our understanding of the role of women orators in history. It’s the world’s largest online archive of women’s speeches from around the world and across time, free for anyone to use. Dana has just published a women’s speech anthology, "Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women,” which tells the story of America through the voices of women, from 1637-2021. Dana leads workshops that support women to be thought leaders, subject matter experts, brand ambassadors, and role models for future generations of women and girls.

Synopsis - The Healthcare Labyrinth.

The Healthcare Labyrinth is not just a comprehensive guide to navigating health plans—it offers a blueprint for fixing our broken healthcare system. Health plan and healthcare technology veteran Marc S. Ryan seeks to demystify the U.S. healthcare system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more confidence and certainty. Marc walks through how the current system operates,tracing the dysfunction, high costs, and lack of quality to three major issues:

A lack of affordable universal access.
Little focus on wellness, prevention, and care management.
Outrageous pricing, especially compared to other developed nations.

Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America’s unique system without upending the employer-based system. He relies on leading academic, research, and mainstream media sources from across the political spectrum to examine the U.S. healthcare system and compare it to those of other developed nations.

Author Bio - Marc S. Ryan

Marc S. Ryan is President of MHK, a fast-growing healthcare software technology firm. Marc was one of MHK’s first executives after its founding in 2010 and previously served as Chief Strategy and Compliance Officer and Chief Operating Officer. MHK’s CareProminence platform focuses on improving the compliance, efficiency, and quality of various clinical and administrative functions for health plans and pharmacy benefits managers. MHK’s MarketProminence platform focuses on enrollment and financial reconciliation products for Medicare.

From 1998 to 2005, he was Connecticut’s State Budget Director and Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, where he oversaw all aspects of state budgeting, policy formulation, and day-to-day management of state government. After leaving state service, Marc began his healthcare career. He has served in numerous executive-level policy, regulatory, compliance, business development, and operations roles at health plans. He has launched Medicare, Medicaid, commercial, and Exchange Marketplace plans.

In 2004, Marc was appointed by the HHS Secretary to serve on the federal State Pharmaceutical Assistance Transition Commission, which worked to integrate state senior drug assistance programs with the new Medicare Part D program. From 2005 to 2008, Marc also served on the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s Medicaid Reform Technical Advisory Panel.

Author Bio - C. Owen Paepke

C. Owen Paepke is the author of The Evolution of Progress (named best nonfiction book of 1993 by NPR’s Talk of the Nation) and the three-volume series The Seinfeld Election, which was praised by reviewers as “a provocative investigation into the American political divide.”

He has written and spoken widely on technology and science policy, including a keynote address and a speech on the prospects for technological and economic progress at the Smithsonian Institution.

He lives in Arizona, where he practiced for many years as an attorney specializing in antitrust and intellectual property, and is a graduate of Stanford and the University of Chicago.

Author Bio - Stephen B. Young

Stephen B. Young is the global executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and the author of Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good, The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam, and The Theory and Practice of Associative Power: CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967–1972.

He and his wife, Pham Thi Hoa, translated from Vietnamese the novel about Ho Chi Minh published as The Zenith. His 1968–1971 service in Vietnam for the US Agency for International Development in village development and counterinsurgency was highly praised by President Richard Nixon, Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby, and ambassador to Saigon Ellsworth Bunker.

In 1975 and again in 1978, Young took a lead in successful efforts to resettle refugees from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the United States. For many years Young was a confidant of Nguyen Ngoc Huy, the founder of the Tan Dai Viet Nationalist political party in South Vietnam.

Young also served as an assistant dean at the Harvard Law School and dean and professor of law at the Hamline University School of Law. He graduated from the International School in Bangkok, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School.

In 1966, Young discovered the Bronze Age culture of the village of Ban Chiang in Northeast Thailand, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 1989, he proposed the formation of a United Nations interim administration for Cambodia to finally put an end to the Killing Fields in that country.

Author Bio - Jim Spurlino

was a candidate for Congress in Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District in 2016. He is the founder of Spurlino Materials, a nationally recognized supplier of construction materials. For more than a decade, he has been active on a range of issues, including small business, construction, transportation, and early childhood issues pertaining to at-risk families. He has been a longtime advocate for good government, speaking at the local, state, and national levels. His board service has been wide-ranging and includes the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, Ohio Concrete, Every Child Succeeds, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), and Council for a Strong America. He is a graduate of the University of Dayton with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA.

Losing Our Elections.

What is it really like to run for Congress?
In 2015, Jim Spurlino decided to run for the congressional seat recently vacated by longtime Ohio congressman John Boehner. Though he had no political experience, he—like many other Americans—had been a passionate observer of national politics. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a difference. Running as an outsider with a background as a successful owner of a construction materials company, his campaign was a test of the system—to see if a moderate candidate from outside the political establishment could bring fresh thinking to the public conversation. In the course of a four-month campaign in the Republican primary, he encountered the good, the bad, and the ugly: heartfelt supporters; hardball consultants; endless, mind-numbing fundraising calls; smear campaigns; and even blank manila envelopes with damaging information. In the end, he walked away with 7 percent of the vote and an education in modern American politics. Losing Our Elections captures what life is really like for political candidates—how and why campaigns are run, the pressures they face, the compromises they make, and the failures of the system—and presents a compelling roadmap for getting our country back on track.

Branding Democrats, Authors

Ken Weber:

Ken is president of Weber Asset Management,a registered investment advisor firm based in New York. He started the business with no formal training in the financial industry’s sales techniques, but within a few years it grew—thanks to branding and marketing—to be among the top ten percent of the industry, based on assets under management. For ten years, Ken Weber wrote a political blog, Sanity-First. com, and he is the author of the book Dear Investor, What the HELL are You Doing?.

Daryl Weber:

Ken’s son, is a brand strategist who has worked for some of the biggest brands in the world, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Johnnie Walker, Google, and many others. He was previously global director of creative strategy at The Coca-Cola Company and a strategy director at the brand consultancy Redscout. Daryl’s book, Brand Seduction: How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands, has been translated into several languages and has received rave industry reviews.

Synopsis - Branding Democrats

Branding Democrats offers Democrats a way forward: to build a stronger—and smarter—brand that works in the volatile political climate today. Using real world examples from past campaigns and years of branding expertise, Ken and Daryl Weber lay out a blueprint for taking the Democratic Party’s brand from nonexistent to a consistent message that resonates with voters.

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