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With the dust now settling, I’ll interpret the campaign from a narratological perspective. This is substantially different from the traditional electoral politics approach. In the latter, political parties are seen as dividing the electorate up into segments (“slicing and dicing”) and in their platforms proposing sets of policies to appeal to these segments. If a party wins the support of enough voters in enough segments, it will win the election. One challenge in this approach is classification – how to reduce people’s multi-dimensional lives to homogeneous population segments – and a second is coherence – how to write a platform that is more than a shopping list of (possibly conflicting) policies.

The narrative approach to campaigning focuses on leadership, historical continuity, and coherence. It postulates that people are voting as much to choose a leader as to choose a set of policies. In choosing a leader, they are evaluating a candidate’s (that is, a party leader’s) life experience and inferring from it about how he or she would perform in office. Candidates present essentially the same set of experiences – the same story – to the entire electorate. When a leader presents a platform, he or she is telling a comprehensive story relevant to the entire electorate. In this approach, candidates are talking about where the country has been and where they have been, and, if elected, where they would take the country and how they would lead it.

In the electoral politics approach, competition involves either parties bidding against each other by offering more to particular groups of voters, or going negative by attacking policy proposals that they claim will hurt the interests of segments other than the one at which it was directed.

In the narrative approach, campaigning involves a struggle of competing narratives. Each party and its candidate is trying to frame an attractive and compelling story for itself and a repellent story for its opponents. The goal is to make both stories stick.

As in previous posts, I’m using my four quadrant narrative model to categorize these stories. The vertical axis refers to the country and whether it advances or declines. The horizontal axis refers to the candidate and whether he or she achieves or fails to achieve a personal ambition. An incumbent party wants to tell a story that under its stewardship the nation has advanced, and that that its leader has in some way grown in office. If that party is elected, the nation will continue to advance, which justifies the fulfillment of the prime minister’s personal ambition. This is the upper-left quadrant of the four quadrant model. An opposition party wants to take issue with the incumbent party’s interpretation of recent history, and argue that its policies promise the best hope of national advancement, and that its leader is therefore worthy of personal advancement to prime minister. The upper left quadrant is the high ground, and incumbents and opposition struggle to seize it.

In contrast, the lower-left quadrant represents the low ground, and each party is trying to force its opponents onto it. It associates decline for the country – either in the past or projected into the future – with the realization of ambition on the part of a party leader. In effect, the country will suffer if the leader achieves his personal ambitions.

The results of the election can be interpreted as three leaders (Elizabeth May, Jack Layton, Steven Harper) successfully claiming the high ground in the upper-left quadrant, with two, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, being forced to the low ground of the lower-left quadrant.

Elizabeth May’s policy goal is to preserve and enhance the Canadian environment. She wisely chose to run in a constituency that is among the physically most beautiful in the country. Her winning message, given force by her exclusion from the leaders’ debate, was that she would most effectively advance this goal from a seat in the House of Commons. This outcome represented a clear alignment between her vision of national renewal and the achievement of her ambition.

As I argued in my most recent post about Jack Layton, he combined an optimistic personal narrative of cheerfully overcoming illness with advancement for the voters through improving health care and more generous public pensions. He had the advantage that both the Conservatives and the Liberals ignored him until the last ten days of the campaign. Because of his personal circumstances, when the attacks did come, they focused on the cost of his promises, but did not attempt to disrupt his personal narrative.

Stephen Harper’s initial narrative, as I argued in my post of March 28 that analyzed his first television ad, focused on a story of successful economic recovery for the country combined with Harper becoming an internationally significant statesman. That message changed during the campaign, and Harper redefined personal advancement as becoming the leader of a majority government. By portraying himself as the facilitator of economic renewal, Harper argued that his personal ambition served the public interest: a win-win. His surrogates, for example, Preston Manning, emphasized that Harper is a “trained economist.” And, given the widespread perception of economists as people who don’t have the personality to become accountants, Harper’s low-key self-presentation was certainly in keeping with his message.

Michael Ignatieff made the fatal mistake of allowing the Conservatives to write his narrative through their attack ads that associated bad economic policy (from a conservative perspective, tax-and-spend) with the fulfillment of his personal ambition. That a market-oriented party succeeded at portraying a man who has spent his career thinking about the mutual obligations of state and citizens as acting solely out of personal ambition is deeply ironic. The fact that as thoughtful a group as the Globe and Mail editorial board saw fit to ask him the question posed in the attack ads – why did you come back to Canada ? – meant that Ignatieff never developed a compelling personal narrative encompassing his pre-political career as scholar and public intellectual and his return to Canada as a political actor.

Not adequately responding to what he now calls a campaign of “personal vilification” had, I believe, another effect on Mr. Ignatieff. He carried a huge burden of pent-up anger against the Conservatives and Mr. Harper, in particular, for his role in authorizing the campaign. The anger was finally released in the debates and in his campaign. By and large, voters are more attracted to cheerful optimists than angry prophets. When Michael Ignatieff chose to play the latter role, it was easy for Jack Layton to assume the former.

With the clarity of perfect hindsight, Mr. Ignatieff should have responded to the attacks when they first came. But how? The Liberals didn’t have the money to buy negative advertising. What Mr. Ignatieff could have done, inexpensively, was to have spoken in depth and unapologetically about his career as writer and scholar. He could have associated himself with the internationalism of the careers of Mackenzie King, Mike Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau. He could have shrugged off addressing Americans in the first person plural as intended only to get their attention, hardly a renunciation of citizenship. He could have presented his returning to Canada not as an ego trip, but a decision to personally fight for Liberal values. Perhaps the Liberals could have introducing an amendment to the Elections Act to ban political advertising when there is no formal election campaign. Or perhaps Ignatieff could have sued the Conservative Party for defamation. The Liberal Party might have sponsored a competition to crowd-source the best anti-Harper attack ads and “not just visiting” responses to the Conservative attack ads, and posted the winners on its website.

Finally, Mr. Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois. They were seen by the Quebec electorate, particularly nationalists, as having done little to advance Quebec’s interests, while having enjoyed the salaries and perks of federal MPs. They were ripe for the picking when the NDP came up with a better story.

If there are lessons to be learned from this election, and I think there are, the most compelling is Mr. Ignatieff’s on the necessity of preventing your opponents from writing a story you cannot revise or replace.

At last week’s meeting of my public management course, I asked a group of students to do an analysis of the Conservative Party website (www.conservative.ca) and another group to analyze the Liberal Party site (www.liberal.ca). Two excellent student presentations reached the same conclusion: the Conservatives’ site is election-ready, and the Liberals’ isn’t.

The Conservative site is easy to use, with everything reachable in three clicks. It has lots of information about Stephen Harper and his family, about the Government’s policies and accomplishments, and about the Conservative Party’s history back to Sir John A. Wherever you go on, the right sidebar has action options: donate, join, help, and “my campaign.” The latter, which requires a membership, includes activities like sending a letter to a newspaper or calling talk radio, and recruiting friends. Interestingly, the home page reaches out to the Net Generation, exhorting them to “freak out your friends. Join the Conservatives” and offering a program of paid summer internships in Ottawa.

The Liberal site hasn’t quite come together yet. Today – January 15 – it still carries Michael Ignatieff’s New Year’s message. It links to Michael Ignatieff’s site (www.michaelignatieff.ca) – which contains a well-written blog and lots of information about Michael – but his site is not yet integrated into the Liberal Party site. Ignatieff’s persona still stands apart from the Liberal site, unlike Stephen Harper, whose identity is clearly as PM and Conservative Party leader. The Liberal site has no statement of party policy but lots of critiques of the Conservatives – some delivered by former leader Stephane Dion. The Liberals’ action agenda is much more limited, with nothing like “My Campaign” nor a Net Generation page.

I suggest three reasons why the Liberals are so far behind. First, they haven’t nearly as much money to spend on web development as the Conservatives. Second, the party is still in a state of transition (disarray?), which is reflected in the website. Perhaps Michael Ignatieff hasn’t had the time to think about how to integrate his very effective personal website with the party site. Third, the party may not want to tip its hand on policy, preferring the standard critical Opposition approach.

In my view, the Liberals will have more leverage over the Conservatives’ forthcoming budget if they can make a credible claim that they are ready to fight an election over the budget. One aspect of credible election readiness is the website. To become election ready will require some time from the party’s senior strategists and party leader Michael Ignatieff, some money, and some involvement on the part of the Young Liberals to match the Conservatives’ Net Generation initiative. Michael Ignatieff has already shown some evidence of being an astute leader, for example in his making the point that the Conservatives’ negative advertising contradicts their desire for a consensus on the budget, and the Conservatives seem to have gotten that message. The question now is whether his organizational skills extend to cyberspace.

No, online politics weren’t as important in the Canadian election as they were in the Obama campaign. But US presidential campaigns, which run for almost two years, necessitate a focus on online campaigning, and Obama developed a particularly powerful model that combined a charismatic stage presence with online organizing – which I will say more about in future posts. Canadian campaigns, in contrast, involve a six week all-out blitz using both traditional and online media.

Looking back at the Canadian campaign, there are a number of ways online politics played an increasingly important role.

• Online vetting of candidates conducted more diligently by constituency organizations and citizen journalists than by national party offices led to approximately a dozen candidates being dumped.

• The online medium supported citizen mobilization in a number of ways. Most significantly, Quebec singer Michel Rivard’s “culture en peril” YouTube video, in three weeks, was visited 678,000 times in French and 191,000 in English. It contributed mightily to the Conservatives’ failure to achieve a breakthrough in Quebec. The online medium was where citizens went to protest Elizabeth May being shut out of the national leaders’ debate, and they achieved their goal – overnight. Finally, cyberspace was the place where strategic voting was organized, for example through the Fair Vote Canada Facebook group.

• YouTube remains the place to spread the word about candidate gaffes. In this case, Stephane Dion’s “false start” answering the question of how he would respond to the credit crisis if he were PM had 175,000 visits in just 5 days. I find it surprising that Harper’s gaffe about responding to the stock market crash by buying stocks had only 1500 visits in the same period, which suggests that the “not a leader” negative advertising about Dion was more effective than the “right wing agenda” negative advertising about Harper.

• Party ads got considerable attention online, for example 90,000 YouTube visits for the Liberal ad focusing on Harper’s plagiarism of Australian PM John Howard’s speech, 38,000 for the ad linking Harpernomics to George Bush, and 31,000 for Jack Layton’s “new kind of strong” ad. What we don’t know is how often they were visited on party websites, or indeed how frequently party websites were visited. Similarly, we don’t know how much money the parties raised through online donations, nor do we know how successful online initiatives like the Conservatives’ MyCampaign were. All that is closely held political information.

Another aspect of the online campaign that is apparent is that the media have put more and more of their commentary online. Judging by the number of comments, for example hundreds posted on Globe and Mail articles before the hard copies are delivered at 6 am, it is clear that the online readers are out there.

So judged by the standard of past election campaigns, yes, online campaigning and citizen engagement in all their manifestations mattered more than before.

Breaking a campaign promise at the start of a mandate can lead to heavy and long-lived criticism. Just ask Dalton McGuinty, who, facing a large and unexpected deficit, broke his promise not to raise taxes when he took office in 2003.

Whoever becomes prime minister after the October 14 election will immediately be confronted with the question of whether to honour the promise, made by all party leaders, not to run a deficit. The economic rationale for a deficit now is clearcut: when a recession hits the private sector, government can and must take up the slack and stimulate demand.

Even if the government doesn’t change its policies, we are likely headed for a deficit, because tax revenues will go down and transfer payments such as employment insurance will go up. To raise taxes or cut spending to avoid this automatic deficit will make the recession worse.

If the new government decides to run a deficit, there are two ways to do it. One would be to cut taxes, thereby putting money in consumers’ pockets. This is what the Conservatives did when they cut the GST earlier in the year, and what the US government did when it gave taxpayers tax rebates totally roughly $150 billion.

The second alternative would be to spend the money directly. A fiscal stimulus package could be built around the idea of rebuilding Canada’s infrastructure, with investments in areas such as health, the knowledge economy, and transportation. I prefer the infrastructure approach because I think it has a bigger immediate impact and puts in place investments (for example hospitals, research infrastructure, public transit) that will strengthen our economic performance in the future.

Given Canada’s strong federal finances, we can afford some short term deficit spending to stimulate the economy. The challenge will be to structure the program and define its terms, for example its duration, carefully. So we need both quick action and careful thinking. Let’s hope that our professional public service is hard at work on planning an economic recovery program, so they can hand it to the new prime minister as soon as the votes are counted.

How have the political parties used the online medium to prepare for, and respond to last night’s debates in Canada and the US? They are similar on the preparation, sending out email messages to their supporters urging them to host a debate party and suggesting what to look for in the debate.

But the big difference between Canada and the US is in the parties’ reaction to the debates. Overnight, both the Obama and McCain sites have posted extensive quotes from supportive commentators and polling numbers. YouTube is already full of debate excerpts, analysis, and commentary. The Canadian scene, by contrast, is extremely disappointing. The party websites have very little reaction to the debates, either quotes from commentators or poll numbers. The latest ads still dominate their home pages. Almost nothing has been posted on YouTube about the debate, either by the parties or by the public.

What is happening this year? I can remember that in the 2003 Ontario leadership debate, opposition leader Dalton McGuinty gave a strong performance against a tired Premier Ernie Eves, and the Ontario Liberals had every bit of supportive commentary posted on their site by the next morning. Maybe this year the campaigns are already exhausted, or perhaps they’ve concluded that the debate was inconclusive, so they’ll continue to hammer away in their advertising. But I’m disappointed that none of the Canadian parties has yet seized on the debates as an important part of their campaign narrative.