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work on a story, the more you can find yourself losing direction. No detail is too small. You just don’t know what your story is anymore.”
    This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is so common that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead. “Burying the lead” occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure.
    The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful
metaphor
for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve
forced prioritization
. Suppose you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose.
    Forced prioritization is really painful. Smart people recognize the value of all the material. They see nuance, multiple perspectives—and because they fully appreciate the complexities of a situation, they’re often tempted to linger there. This tendency to gravitatetoward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize. This difficult quest—the need to wrestle priorities out of complexity—was exactly the situation that James Carville faced in the Clinton campaign of 1992.
“If You Say Three Things,
You Don’t Say Anything.”
    A political campaign is a breeding ground of decision angst. If you think your organization has problems, imagine this challenge: You must build a nationwide organization from scratch, using primarily unpaid and largely unskilled workers. You’ve got about a year to pull the team together and line up an endless supply of doughnuts. Everyone in the organization needs to sing from the same hymnal, but you don’t have much time to rehearse the choir. And the media prod you to sing a new song every day. To make matters worse, you must constantly contend with opponents who will seize on every errant word.
    Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was a classic example of sticky ideas at work in a difficult environment. Not only did the campaign have the normal set of complexities, Clinton himself added a few new wrinkles. First, there were the “bimbo eruptions,” which need not be reexamined here. Second, Clinton was a policy wonk by nature, which meant that he was inclined to pontificate on virtually every issue that he was asked about, instead of staying focused on a few key principles.
    As his key political adviser, James Carville had to cope with this complexity. One day, struggling to maintain his focus, he wrote three phrases on a whiteboard for all the campaign workers to see. One of the phrases on the impromptu list was “It’s the economy, stupid.” This message would become the core of Clinton’s successful campaign.
    The word “stupid” was added as a taunt to the campaign workersthemselves, reminding them not to lose focus on what was important. “It was simple and it was self-effacing,” Carville explained. “I was trying to say, ‘Let’s don’t be too clever here, don’t come down here thinking we’re too smart. Let’s just remember the basics.’”
    The need for focus extended to Bill Clinton himself, perhaps especially to Clinton himself. At one point, Clinton was frustrated that he’d been advised to stop talking about balanced budgets despite the fact that Ross Perot, the third-party candidate for president in 1992, was getting positive attention for his stand on the balanced budget. Clinton said, “I’ve been talking about these things for two years, why should I stop talking about them now because Perot is in?” Clinton’s advisers had to tell him, “There has to be message triage. If you say three things, you don’t say anything.”
    “It’s the economy, stupid” was the lead of the Clinton story—and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession. But if “It’s the economy, stupid” is the lead, then the