In March the CDC lied and told people masks didn’t work because they felt like people couldn’t handle the truth: they work, but there’s a shortage. We need to save them for doctors and nurses.

I realized I used to tell people the exact opposite lie about yard signs! “They’re effective, but you can’t have one because we have a shortage.” Even though we had plenty.

For Obama ‘08 the higher-ups told us, if someone comes in wanting a sign, try your best to get them to sign up for a shift knocking on doors or making phone calls, but if they say no, give them the sign. For Hillary ‘16 though, the instructions were different. No shifts, no sign service. Worth it to have fewer signs in yards if it nudged more people to donate their time.

At first I told people that straight up. “Isn’t putting a sign up better than nothing?” they’d say.

“It’s better than nothing,” I’d say, “but if we give the signs to everyone, we won’t get as many shifts.”

But that made some people really unhappy. They were too busy or too shy or whatever to do the shifts. The yard sign was the only way they could feel like they were making a difference. Denying them a sign was like cutting them from the team. So we started telling people we were reserving the signs for volunteers because we only had so many.

Looking back I think our higher-ups were lying to us. The signs worked better than they were willing to admit. Too hard to tell us the truth: you have to have measurable goals. # of doors knocked, # of phones called. Can’t measure # of neighbors convinced.

The imaginary sign shortage created its own problems. People would be like “Can’t the campaign just ship y’all some more signs then?” I didn’t have a good answer for that one.

There’s a classic blog post by a guy who goes by “DSquared” that says, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance”.

He uses it in a contrapositive way. People were telling lies about WMDs to make the case for invading Iraq, therefore invading Iraq was a bad idea. I want to use it here in its more direct form. If you have a good idea you can probably get it publically accepted just by telling the truth about it. It might take a while though and it might make some people mad.