This is the first seven minutes or so a speech that David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and later a White House senior adviser, gave in December 2010 in Lagos, Nigeria for the company MTN Group. Not only did this speech and another in Nigeria net him a cool $100,000, but he was apparently the featured speaker at this particular event, according to the Washington Post.
Well, for $100,000 it must have been pretty spectacular, right? Well, if the first seven minutes are anything to go by – the rest of the speech does not appear to be online, at least not on youtube – it was a complete snoozefest. Plouffe talks mainly about how technology, especially social media, was a real boost to the campaign. It is an observation so obvious, so banal that the MTN Group would have been justified in demanding their money back.
Of course, that is assuming that it was the speech that MTN Group was really paying for and not access to a top adviser to the president of the United States at a time when the U.S. was mulling sanctions against Iran that could impact the company’s business.
