The other day, our comment on conservative leader Erin O’Toole was that “he was a failure to launch.” He had a launch, of sorts, the following day. We watched aghast. It can only be concluded that his communications advisors, speech writers, policy advisors and image consultants were in serious conflict.
Canadians should not expect too much from the conservatives, but what we got by way of an introduction to the O’Toole campaign was embarrassing. We have not seen anything so lame since 2000 and Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day arrived for his first news conference on a jet ski.
Start with the muscle-beach policy book cover. What idiot suggested that a dowdy, middle-aged leader such as O’Toole should try to pose like a latter-day Charles Atlas? Not even Adobe Photoshop can rescue that picture. And what fool suggested the crossed-arms pose? The crossed arms is an angry and aggressive pose and no politician can afford that kind of exposure when it is particularly disliked by women.
But the copywriter who wrote “The man with the plan” must have been impressed with the failed American sitcom on CBS. And the, obviously male, experts who dictated that plan to replace the liberal daycare program with tax benefits should have realized that they were helping the rich, not the poor. They fail to understand what the liberals seem to comprehend. The provinces have to start by creating the needed daycare spaces.
And if O’Toole is going to use that dark, cold and dreary set for his entire campaign, the conservatives should leave him in it, lock the door and consider it his mausoleum.
The contrast between the Trudeau family outing that day and the stand-alone pitch of the conservative leader was disquieting. Whatever did the conservative brain-trust have in mind? O’Toole would have done better to use the family kitchen for a set. It might have humanized the poor man.
Even the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, in Montreal at the time, realized that he needed some people on the set that day to make it look like he was in Canada. Poor O’Toole could be coming to us from the moon.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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