Leadership Quote by Scott McCallum

This is the language of a politician trying to narrate a pivot without admitting error. McCallum’s first move is to depersonalize responsibility: “the tone did take on a negativity” makes the negativity sound like weather that rolled in, not a strategy someone chose. Then comes the careful moral distancing: “that I didn’t like.” Not “that was wrong,” not “we misjudged,” just a preference claim that reads as tasteful leadership rather than accountability.

The real work happens in the second half, where the sentence swerves from values to metrics. “When you make the decision to go the other way as we did” is vague enough to cover anything from a campaign message shift to a policy rollback. “Very directly had an impact” is classic results-talk, but he doesn’t name what kind of impact until the clincher: “you can see it with the tracking.” Polling becomes the alibi. The subtext is blunt: we changed because the numbers told us to, not because we discovered principle.

Contextually, this fits the modern campaign ecosystem where “tone” is treated as a controllable asset and “tracking” is the scoreboard. McCallum isn’t describing persuasion so much as calibration - a feedback loop between message and measurement. The intent is reassurance to insiders (donors, strategists, reporters): the operation is disciplined, responsive, and empirically guided. The cost is that it also signals how thin the line can be between “going negative” as conviction and “going negative” as tactic.