Brad Rourke

Brad Rourke’s Blog

  • Noelle McAfee Interviews Ziad Majed

    My good friend Noelle McAfee has just published a very important intereview that she conducted with Lebanese intellectual and activist Ziad Majed. The full interview is here. I urge you in the strongest possible way to read it. Here is one small piece: NM: You know, the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe varied according to what…

  • What Happens At A Focus Group

    My friends and colleagues who follow me on Facebook or Twitter might have noticed lately that I have been traveling all over the country, moderating focus groups. Just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been to Chicago, New York, Billings MT, Detroit, and more. Before I ever started working with focus groups, I sort…

  • The West End At The Uncorked Wine Festival

    Friends and colleagues may know I am in a band called The West End. Over the summer, we were fortunate enough to play an awesome gig at the City of Rockville’s annual “Uncorked Wine Festival.” When we play City gigs, they always provide pro sound (usually through the very awesome RCI Sound). Since we knew there’s…

  • Social Network Face-Off: Take A Survey

    Please take this survey on social network services. It is short and easy. Over the weekend, I innocently posted the following on Facebook: Does anyone really use Twitter anymore? Why? I should have known it would happen, but that question touched off a long comment trail that included lots of friends and colleagues. There was…

  • Stay Where I Can See You

    I am writing this at the airport, between flights. There is a family nearby, with a toddler. He likes to wander around, clearly. The mother calls to him, “Stay where I can see you!” It’s a parent’s nightmare: Losing your child because they wander off while playing. I remember when I had my own epiphany…

  • Resistance

    Last weekend I led a candidate training program run by the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia. It is a bipartisan four-day session that brings experts in all the important aspects of campaigning — planning, fundraising, message development, communication, GOTV, and more — and wraps it all in a framework of…

  • Three Statements That Help Civility

    I am sitting in a speech by a former state delegate of Virginia, speaking at an evening session of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership’s Candidate Training Program. She’s talking about the qualities of leaders. She identified three statements that can help any leader foster better relations, better understanding, and better results. That is, foster…

  • Ethics Scenario: All The News That Fits

    Tomorrow, I will be leading a four-day candidate training program with the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. More on that program here. The program is an ethics-based soup-to-nuts campaign school, and I provide the ethics training piece. My bit is part lecture, part case study, and part small group exercises. I thought…