According to our research last year’s US election was pretty much won on the basis of nine syllables. Whatever your politics and whatever you think about the morality of spending money to influence how people vote, I think its fair to say that a certain level of genius had been at play.

The nine syllables came in the form of three three-syllable phrases that Donald Trump managed to use in nearly all of his campaign speeches. In many they were turned into crowd-chants.

Drain The Swamp. Build The Wall. Lock Her Up.

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. Here were nine words that each spoke a thousand pictures. Ah, sweet Resonance.

Whoever was responsible for the genius, clearly doesn’t seem to be in place any more.

The person that came up with Rocket Man got the three syllables part right but, right from the get-go it sounded more like a pretty cool compliment than the belittling jibe it was intended to be. Recognising the mistake, some bureaucrat quickly tried to modify the phrase to ‘Little Rocket Man’. This didn’t help. Ten more minutes of thinking and they might just have come up with ‘Rocket Boy’. That would have done the intended job far more effectively. Albeit at the possible risk of nuclear Armageddon.

Things didn’t go much better this week, when Drain The Swamp got down-rated to ‘Spread the Swamp’. When the bureaucrats realised those words didn’t work, they switched to ‘Move The Swamp’. That was vaguely less clumsy, but still utterly missed the killer instinct of the original. And the ultimate election winning aphorism was now turned into an embarrassing climb-down.

Amazing how smart people can work out the DNA of election success and then ten minutes later completely screw things up.

Single syllable words. Three word phrases. Emotive verb. Thousand-pictures object. Simple.

I can feel a new SI mission statement coming on…