Why is it important to understand my governing philosophy, the values I represent and the public image I want to convey?

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Ron Faucheux is one of America's top political and public affairs analysts. Contributor-at-Large for Campaigns & Elections magazine - a nonpartisan publication he previously published and edited - he writes a column on politics and public opinion.

Currently head of government affairs for the American Institute of Architects, Dr. Faucheux is a former state legislator and cabinet secretary. He's the author of the acclaimed book for candidates, Running for Office; editor of The Debate Book, a manual of standards and guidelines for political debates; and editor of Winning Elections, a treasure chest of the best campaign advice ever published.

He's handled 116 candidate and issue campaigns as a media consultant and campaign strategist. He's worked on a wide range of issue advocacy, association, corporate and grassroots lobbying campaigns.

Since the early 1990s, he's made over 350 national television appearances and has anchored his own national cable TV news show. His network appearances have included the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Lou Dobbs Show on CNN, ABC's Nightline, NBC's The Today Show and ABC's Good Morning America.

He's trained thousands of political candidates, issue advocates, corporate executives and association leaders. The campaign "message development" process he created has been used successfully by many campaigns, large and small, around the world.

Dr. Faucheux graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, received a law degree from the LSU Law Center and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of New Orleans.

He teaches courses in Campaign Management and Running For Office at The Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute.

He was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives at 25 - at the time the legislature's youngest member. He was re-elected twice, once with 84 percent of the vote and once without opposition. He also served as state Secretary of Commerce.

Dr. Faucheux resides in the Washington, D.C. area. His office is located at 1735 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20006-5292

Why is it important to understand my governing philosophy, the values I represent and the public image I want to convey?

In this video, expert Ron Faucheux shares his tips and techniques on how to run for office.

This expert: 33,748 views

This series: 10,136 views

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Transcripts

Ron Faucheux: I am Ron Faucheux. I wrote a book titled Running for Office and I teach courses in Political Campaign Management and Running for Office at The Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. We have been talking about what it takes to be a political candidate and now, we are going to talk about what you have to do to prepare yourself to run for office.

Speaker: Why is it important to understand my governing philosophy, the values I represent, and the public image I want to convey?

Ron Faucheux: When you run for office, you really need to know who you are. You need to know what you are and what you stand for and that includes your governing philosophy; what motivates your philosophy of government; what motivates how you look at government and public policy and public issues; that's very important. You also have to look at what values that your political philosophy is based on. Voters don't want to just hear a laundry list of policy proposal. They want to have some sense of what values do you represent; what's important to you, what will help guide the decisions you make over the course of your term of office and of course you have to have a sense of what you want to project to the voters in a way that's honest, that's a realistic and that really is you. There are political candidates who get in the political campaigns and they think they can have makeovers and they think they can project something other than what they are and that is a very hard thing to do and extreme makeovers may work fine on television programs, but in political campaigns, you really need to be yourself.

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