The NDP’s program has now been heard,
Layton knows it’s no good to come third.
_____________________________
What political campaign promises mean.
During election campaigns, the news media love to post the party leaders’ promises of the day. There are also books of promises made that can become fodder for arguments about whether they are affordable or not. And sometimes, there are arguments about whether Canadians really want what is promised. The only problem with all of this during an election campaign is that these promises are not necessarily intended to be kept.
If anything, campaign promises should be perceived as directions that party might be interested in going towards, sometime. They might even be something that is perceived as being important to the voter that will make a good sound bite for the six pm news and will never surface again. It is all in the perception.
Look how long it took the Liberals to bring in Medicare across the country. That had been a promise from the party since the early years of Prime Minister Mackenzie King. The party was still fighting internally about it as late as 1966.
The most unlikely set of promises to be offered is in the Conservative’s blue book of promises for the May 2 election. While there is some rehashing of the recent failed budget in the book, it is the little goodies in it that might happen if the budget gets balanced in the next four years that cause the most chuckles. When planning $6 billion in big business tax cuts, billions on new prisons and quickly escalating billions for some unneeded stealth fighter aircraft, the dribs and drabs for families will probably be promises we can read about again in the Tory book for the next election.
One of the advantages of the Internet is that these things can now be published electronically and people can actually read them. Few do.
To say the Tories favour the rich is to put it mildly. One promise is that in four years you will be able to put away up to $10,000 a year in a tax-free savings account. There would not likely be a large number of Canadians with that much money they want to have in low interest liquidity.
One of the more dishonest promises of the Tories is their recycled promise to kill the funding for federal political parties. This is the money based on votes won in the previous election. It is a vicious attempt by the Tories to use the wealth of their Tory supporters to bludgeon their opponents. They want to keep the tax credits that we all pay for. And all taxpayers would have to pay the higher costs for the tax credits. It just gives more tax credits to the already wealthy. It is a Conservative shell game we all lose.
It is believed by many Liberals that Jean Chrétien initiated those party payments to try to take away the advantage that wealthy Paul Martin had to be his successor.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Mr. Harper’s appearances are just as tightly scripted as we thought,
Video from behind the tame crowd caught the prompter we sought.
_________________________________________________
Does anyone know what they are doing?
One of the keys to an effective political campaign is careful planning at the beginning of the campaign and then sticking to the plan. Should be easy? Right?
Wrong. Sticking to the plan is the most difficult part. All the pressures of the campaign are determined to change your course. There are things you did not think of. There are new opportunities. Your opponents have done something to which you really want to respond. People are saying you need to change direction every day.
If you are a control freak like Stephen Harper, you tell the flunkies what to do and you do not let them tell you. And yet he has been thrown off stride by this campaign. He had to apologize for the Mounties keeping some young voters out of his highly structured campaign events. When he let them in, they could only stand and listen politely.
Two factors have muted Harper’s early plans to use the supposed ‘coalition’ against Ignatieff. One was that the polls showed that most Canadians were happy with the idea of a coalition. The second was that the original coalition with the Bloc and the NDP was proposed by Harper in 2004 to try to remove Paul Martin as Prime Minister.
Campaigns have many buzz words. One of the most effective against Harper in the past ten years has been the hidden ‘agenda.’ The anti-gun registry stance was linked at the time to anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment and other right-wing extremist positions. Imagine Ignatieff’s surprise when he is accused of having a hidden agenda to remove some of the Conservative’s harsher sentencing penalties for the courts. All of that type of law is routinely reviewed by Parliament over time and there is probably no disparity at all between Liberal critic Mark Holland and his leader Michael Ignatieff’s views on this.
The worst problems in sticking to the plan are at the local electoral district level. You are never sure if people there had a plan in the first place. Signs are ordered before literature is designed and any similarity has to be in party colors and nothing else. Every day, voters are telling you what is important and what they have told you is a blur before the day is finished. Campaign managers are chosen for their youth and their limited dollar expense. Few really know what they are doing. Their agenda is survival.
It seems to be an axiom that the less a candidate knows about campaigning, the more the person wants to control their campaign. Where they really need controls is on the expenditures being made on their behalf.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Son, about this election, we’ll tell you a few things,
Elections an’ opries ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.
_____________________________________
Be wary of the political science pundits.
It is not that they are necessarily wrong. Political science academics are just not always experts in the street politics that the country is seeing in the run-up to the 2011 federal election. When political science professor tells a reporter that you will know in the next two weeks if the Conservative’s are in trouble in Babel, he is basing it on past results and not judging what is in play in the electoral district this time.
Babel is more central to the hopes and dreams of Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff, than people realize. The electoral district is not safe for either. There is no slam dunk here.
Start with the basics. Out of just over 90,000 potential voters, there are 20,000 voters who will vote Conservative no matter who is the candidate. Some are committed Conservative party supporters and some are racists who like the clever way the Tories show that they are keeping the riff-raff from around the world out of the country. The Tories also attract homophobic voters and right-to-lifers. They are also playing to the gun nuts, the pro-capital punishment and the ignorant.
Next, consider the yellow-dog Liberals. These are people who will vote Liberal even if the party ran a big yellow dog. That figure can be assumed to be the rock-bottom vote that the Liberals got in 2008. This vote was just over 12,000. The four also-ran candidates in Babel shared almost that many votes in that election..
What we know is that, in this election, about 65,000 voters will cast a ballot in Babel. Based on past experience, we already have an idea how 45,000 of them will vote. That leaves just 20,000 voters who will really decide the election. These are the people the candidates are trying to reach.
Looking at the demographics, the best guess is that more than 60 per cent of these deciders are women. The median age of these women is about 36 years. The majority have young children. In looking at these voters, we find that they do not really like the Conservative candidate. He comes across to them as young, callow and uninteresting. In contrast, in a Freudian way, the Liberal candidate comes across as sexy and interesting.
At the same time, there is a rising tide of youth resentment to what they see as Harper’s anti-democratic tactics. This could invoke the kind of social media tidal wave that worked so well for Barrack Obama in the last American presidential election.
We also know that these deciders are not going to waste their vote. They know they have to choose between Conservative and Liberal. In the 2008 election there were many potential Liberal votes that were turned off by Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and a faltering local candidate. A much stronger campaign by Michael Ignatieff will neutralize those Liberal votes that went to the Conservatives last time. The appeal of the local candidate to women and younger voters will swing a majority of the 20,000 deciders to vote Liberal in this election.
That brings us to an almost equal vote for the Tory and the Liberal candidates in Babel.
What will really decide this election in Babel are the votes for the NDP and the Green parties. Not that either can win. They are protest votes. The candidates are the perennial candidates for those parties. They are well spoken, decent people. They are just running for a principle.
But the people who are inclined to vote for them have to realize that all a Green or NDP vote will do is help the Conservative to win the electoral district. It can be that close.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Michael Ignatieff released the latest Liberal RedBook,
Stephen Harper will rush to produce a Tory BlueBook.
______________________________________
Be wary of candidate’s significant others.
One of the many tips we pass along to aspiring campaign managers is to always interview the husband or wife, or significant other, before agreeing to run someone’s campaign. That was one of the first key political lessons we learned. The scars healed long ago but the memory lingers on.
As a young man, we were eager to show our stuff politically and we called a guy who was already a celebrity who had said he wanted to get into provincial politics. We had already determined that a number of the key politicos we knew wanted him to get involved. We met over lunch one day and found that we were both on the same wavelength on where we felt the party needed to go. He was so pleased that he asked that a small group come to his home that Sunday afternoon to discuss a campaign. He said to have people bring their bathing suits and prepare for a relaxed day.
Relaxing was not the first thing that came to mind when meeting the guy’s wife as she came out of the pool in a bathing suit that was quite transparent when wet. That was, in some ways, the high point of the day. The lady was a popular entertainer and a strikingly beautiful woman. She made quite an impression. And it was not all good.
It was soon clear to the group that she did not welcome her husband’s political ambitions. Nor did we feel all that welcome. That proved to be one of the most difficult campaigns in our career. We learned a heck of a lot, as it was also our first loss. It was the first time that we had to deal with a candidate’s spouse who needed more careful handling than the candidate. The candidate said at one time that the wife really liked me. Our retort (after the campaign) was that “she likes me like a vulture likes dinner.” When they divorced within a few years, it was easier to have him as a friend.
One time when we were asked to help a mayoral candidate, we knew him but had never met his wife. On first meeting with the two of them, we reported back that we would have to get her to be the candidate and send him on a long trip during the campaign. It worked out that he lost badly, she divorced him and she went on to a series of high profile political appointments.
Some candidate spouses are great at going to the doors with the candidate, while others should be sent to different doors. There are also soul mates that can only be used on the sign crew or to do literature drops.
But the campaign manager argues with this person at their peril. Always remember, the spouse or significant other will always have the last word, in the privacy of the bedroom.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
To run a good campaign, you need a sense of humour,
Mr. Harper does not even have a pleasant demeanour.
______________________________________
We get the funniest e-mails.
No, they are not jokes or funny videos of kids. We get e-mails that people write in response to our blogs. Some make us smile and a few can really make you scratch your head in puzzlement.
Our biggest smile recently was from a Canadian who happens to speak one of the major Chinese dialects and understands the Chinese culture. He explained something that had been puzzling us for some time. We use Google Analytics to keep track of readership and whether this story or that story is of more interest to readers. It is very useful.
There were two major upswings in readership recently. One of the upswings was people reading the eulogy for the late Senator Keith Davey. I was delighted with this interest and I was glad to add a few words in honour of an old friend.
But there was another surprising upswing in readership that had been going on since last October. On October 9, we posted a blog about our old friend Eugene Whelan. Gene, I am pleased to say, is still with us. We entitled the story Eugene Whelan and his stupid stetson. That could have got us a strong note from the Stetson Company because Stetson is a registered trademark. Mind you, the reason for calling it stupid was not because it was a big felt Stetson but because it was green.
For the past five months, babel-on-the-bay has been getting constant search engine queries for Eugene Whelan and his Stetson. It has not let up since last October. And these are new readers. One of those new readers familiar with Chinese culture explained it for us.
It seems that, unbeknownst to those who could have prevented the gaffe, Gene wore the hat to China on an official visit as Canada’s Minster of Agriculture. The Chinese expert was horrified. “Didn’t anyone tell him,” the expert asked, “that the expression ‘to wear a green hat’ in China means to be cuckolded.”
Having been in the position for most of our career of providing protocol information to clients, we know that the advice is not always followed. Gene might have had the advice and laughed it off.
But not all e-mails we get amuse us. We got one the other day that rudely suggested that our blog was of material that people flush down toilets. That was annoying. Then we came to the part of the e-mail where the gentleman said that he had better things to do than read our blog. It seems a friend had told him about the awful things we wrote.
Rather than suggest that he needs new friends, we thanked him for taking the time to e-mail us. You can hardly win them all.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]