I’ve been puzzling over his motivations since the massacre, and suddenly realized something today: he’s the lone wolf that security agencies have been warning us about for a while.

He clearly had a mixed-up history and “broke bad” at some point.  But he didn’t really have a way to give shape to his badness until, really until ISIS burst on the scene.

Watching the other massacres, he realized he could affiliate himself with ISIS — no need for a pesky trip to Syria or even much contact with them — and then carry out an attack.

He did impinge on the FBI and other radars several times, but, because there was nothing further to his plotting — no connections, no ties, no infrastructure — there was no way to escalate our interest in him, no way to pick him out from millions of mixed-up bad-breaking people who might look to ISIS for some kind of justification for their bad feeling.

I sympathize with our security guys: lone wolves are probably the “long tail” of their job, and very very hard to know how to triage the severity of the threat posed by a lone wolf.

But that’s what it looks like he was.  An ISIS wannabe.

I was born the year Adlai Stevenson first lost to Eisenhower for President.  Eisenhower, like Trump, had never held public office (although it could be argued that his D-Day invasion at least didn’t go bankrupt).  Stevenson was a clever, intellectual, and even witty Governor, so he had run a state (something that voters think well of historically in the U.S., better, say, than being in the House or Senate).

Yet Stevenson lost to Ike, lost badly.  Ike’s slogan: “I Like Ike.”  No rocket science.  No “fitness for office”.  No “I’m way more qualified than he is.”

Democrats for my entire life seem to have not gotten the message from this: smart doesn’t pay in politics.  Quals don’t pay in politics.  Experience doesn’t pay in politics.

Likeable pays in politics.  “Good guy” (or good gal) pays in politics.  “I get where he/she’s coming from” pays in politics.

It looks like this Democratic idiocy is going to play out again this election season (or I guess I’m worried it will; hope it won’t).

Hilary will emphasize her brains, her experience, her fitness for office.  She’ll get no more likable than she is now.  And guess what?  I’m worried she’ll lose.

Trump is a master of the Homeric epithet.  “Lyin’ Ted”.  “Little Marco.”  “Crooked Hillary.”  He coins them, and then he works them over and over, until his audience absorbs them.  In the era of the sound byte, the byte has to be repeated over and over until it sinks in.

The Clinton campaign needs a Homeric epithet against Trump, one that doesn’t have to do with fitness for office, or intelligence, or capabilities, and one that will sink in.  “Nasty Trump”?  “Tiny Trump”? (hands, other parts, smallness of personality and vision.)

I just finished my friend David Black‘s book “Software Business and Product Strategy”.  A thoughtful book and, thanks to the stories, a good read.

David’s thesis is that software businesses are somewhat different from other businesses in that:

1. Software is intangible
2. All meaningful software projects are really building something for the first time
3. A software spec is almost the same thing as the software itself (try that for an injection-molded plastic part!)
4. The substrate for software — computer hardware — is still doubling in power something like every 18 months

He then draws out the implications of these differences.  He says that the principles for building a successful software business are well-understood and even simple, but, like many simple things, are quite hard to execute.

There are a lot of riches in this book.  He talks about “positioning” and “execution” as the two major sources of sofware-business woe, and says some great things about both.

And he talks about sources of failure in software executive teams, the main one being a kind of noble hubris that makes tech innovators want to solve the biggest, most complex, most general problems first when the game is to solve the simplest, most pressing specific problems first.

This is “noble” hubris because wanting to solve big problems is a great and lofty aim.  But in order to solve them one has to build up a track record of solving specific problems first, and that requires — see it coming — attention to “positioning” and “execution”.

The richness of the book is in the scads of stories.  David has lived through more software businesses than most of us and has thought deeply about what went right and wrong with them.

Check it out.