Leadership Quote by Bob Schaffer

Branding as a political weapon is hiding in plain sight here: “Orange Revolution” turns an unruly civic uprising into a color-coded product, instantly legible to foreign media and donors. Orange isn’t ideology; it’s a campaign hue. By foregrounding it anyway, Schaffer compresses a messy struggle over institutions, sovereignty, and post-Soviet power into a story with a logo. That’s not neutral description. It’s a way of making the event travel.

The second sentence does the heavier moral lift. “The demonstrators say” gives the speaker distance and plausible deniability, but it also functions as a stamp of authenticity: the people themselves are narrating their grievance. “Tired of living under a corrupt government” is deliberately broad, the kind of language that invites identification rather than debate. No names, no mechanisms, no complicating details about oligarchs, regional divides, or geopolitical pressure; just corruption as a single, solvable villain. It’s grievance framed as exhaustion, not rage, which makes the movement sound patient, reasonable, overdue.

Context matters: the Orange Revolution (2004) followed allegations of election fraud in Ukraine and became a global media template for “color revolutions,” often read in the West as democratic awakening and, in Moscow, as Western-engineered regime change. Schaffer, a politician, deploys a tidy frame that flatters American instincts: citizens versus corruption, democracy as consumer choice, reform as rebranding. The subtext is alignment: Yushchenko’s camp is the “good” side, and the color makes it easy to remember who that is.