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December 08, 2008
Joseph Cao's word of mouth story
Joseph Cao is 5'2.
He fled Vietnam as a refugee when he was 8 years old.
He was separated from his parents and grew up practically an orphan in the U.S., bouncing from state to state.
Despite an unstable family life, he earned degrees in physics at Baylor, philosophy at Fordham and law at Loyola in New Orleans.
He grew up thinking he'd become a priest, "to help and to serve the poor."
A Republican, he just defeated a longtime Democrat for a congressional seat in a heavily democratic part of New Orleans.
He is the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress.
He defies the anti-intellectualism prevalent among many in his party; the central insight he appreciates from his philosophical masters, the Russian and French apostles of existentialism, is that "life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it."
"I don’t want to conform to any ideology, to be put into a little corner," he says.
All of those details and his wonderfully insightful quotes help define what it takes to generate real, authentic word of mouth, not word of mouth marketing: a life with purpose, an authentic story and lots of hard, sometimes tedious work to build a network where it seemed impossible.
Joseph Cao's story also defines what it means to stand out from the crowd, to defy convention, and to resist the temptations of iron-clad ideology as the pathway to success.
Other blogs that reference Joseph Cao's word of mouth story:
From afar, Cao makes a better story than he does up close and personal. Cao won his seat because he was running against an indicted Black congressman ("Doller" Bill Jefferson) in a re-scheduled off-season post-Obama election where Black voter turnout in his district was at an all-time low. Local disgust with his opponent's corruption ($90,000 in FBI-marked cash found hidden in Jefferson's freezer)played a much bigger role than Cao's Word-of-Mouth appeal.He got enough national money to look credible, and the Anyone But Jefferon sentiment did the rest.
As for standing out from the crowd, he has been a bit disappointing. Despite near-universal support in his district for the Stimulus bill, Cao voted in lock-step with his fellow Republicans against it.
