Publication date: 5-6-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn
I was glad to have run the three-part Actress series that concluded last week for a couple of reasons. One, it always feel good to assist in getting over a local artist; and second you were spared three weeks of analysis of the election campaign. You may send appropriate thank you gifts care of this paper. Unmarked bills will do just fine.
Now that it is all over and we have once more realized the prescience of Pete Townshend when he ended Won’t Get Fooled Again with the pessimistic couplet ‘meet the new boss/same as the old boss’ there are elements of the media campaign that bear examination. So let’s have a look at these Portraits at the Exhibition.
The Telling Moment: The most important moment of this entire campaign was seen by only a handful of the readers of this column. During the French-language debate, NDP leader Jack Layton took the tar baby of constitutional negotiations with Quebec, bounced it on his knee and said (metaphorically obviously) let’s play.
This did two things almost simultaneously. One, a lethargic Bloc Quebecois campaign was kicked to the curb as Quebeckers saw a national party endorsing their interests and ran to it. The resultant and inevitably referred to ‘surge’ (I kept looking for General David Petraeus riding in a convoy with Layton) in the polls in turn boosted NDP fortunes across the rest of the country.
The Fawlty Towers Issue: Remember that episode of Fawlty Towers where Basil hits his head and keeps cautioning Manuel and Polly, ‘Don’t mention the war!’ to a group of German tourists. Outside of Layton flatly stating that an NDP government would bring the troops home from Afghanistan promptly and with dispatch, the whole question of Canada’s defence policies went ignored. This might have been an opportunity for the Liberals to have made a strong case for how they would govern differently than the Conservatives - they had invented Pearsonian peacekeeping after all - but for one little problem.
You Get What You Pay For: The Liberals had anointed Michael Ignatieff as leader without a leadership convention because they saw him as a second Pierre Trudeau. Ignatieff had a PhD., had appeared on television frequently and the examination stopped there. So, one reasonably expected that their campaign would feature the illuminating ideas of Michael Ignatieff. Where were they?
Well, they were well-hidden and for good reason. Perhaps the best thing Jean Chretien did was keep Canada out of the Iraq war. Ignatieff endorsed the war, to the point of contracting himself out to the U.S. Defense Department as a consultant. Worse yet, he takes a benign neglect stance towards the torture of political prisoners. These tend to be ideas not endorsed by the majority of Canadian voters. I suspect, without knowing it, that both the NDP and Conservatives had attack ads on these positions at the ready if the Liberal campaign had gained any traction.
Nixon’s The One: Richard Nixon won a crushing victory over George McGovern in 1972 despite leading a government cloaked in secrecy and sleazeball tactics against its opponents. Before anyone thinks I have my dates mixed up, while it is true that the full Watergate scandal would not break open until after the election, the attempted repression of the Pentagon Papers was known already.
Nixon won on the promise of strong law and order in a tightly-controlled ‘run from the Rose Garden’ campaign with no free interplay with journalists and imaging designed to present him as a regular guy. He bowls! He laughs! He plays piano! Does any of this sound remotely familiar? Stephen Harper and his crew learned well.
Ah well, four more years. Be seeing you.
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