When commenting recently about the silliness coming out of the party war rooms in modern campaigning, we realized we might have been to blame for naming them. Back in the 1970s and 80s, we used to give talks around Ontario to Liberal Party faithful on campaigning that often used military analogies to make the point. Liberally quoting from the philosophies of Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz gave the concepts considerable credibility. People found it fun. It made the campaign planning more exciting and increased interest.
But the party war rooms of today are too far from the frontlines of politics to really know what is happening. They are also too caught up in the different levels on which the campaign operates to give these levels proper weighting. As in warfare from the beginning of time, the only command post that has any real intelligence on what is going on is the one in constant danger of being overrun by the enemy.
Today’s political war room usually has a direct say in regards to only a few of the multiple campaign levels. Most commonly, it is in the war room where the campaign advertising is controlled. This is probably the reason why people start to throw things at the television late in the campaign when they are still being pounded by advertising that was devised early in the campaign.
The war rooms seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on the new media because nobody else knows what they are doing in this area anyway. It would be great to say you had a helpful YouTube video go viral with a half million hits or a party leader with more than 100,000 friends on Facebook. And comparing McGuinty’s 16,000 twitter followers with Hudak’s 12,000 is a waste of time. Both twitter pages are a bore. Our standard advice to people who waste time on social networking is that they should try to get out more often.
It used to be that we could get a fix on what Ontario voters were thinking by solid interpretation of the public opinion surveys. That used to work until people started using cell phones instead of home telephones, stopped answering any calling numbers they did not know and routinely lied to people trying to conduct a survey. Unless the caller was offering free beer, they were just not that interested. We used to do surveys with a probability of being accurate 19 times out of 20. Now you are lucky if the pollsters are close 10 times out of 20.
A war room, by definition, is a closed environment. It feeds on itself and becomes progressively more out of touch throughout the campaign. Only election day saves it from self destruction. Then comes the challenge to justify themselves.
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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry
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