Blog

This was a political maxim Liberal strategist Jim Coutts told my public management class on a visit several years ago. Tit for tat. Continuing from last week’s post, this is not the strategy the Liberals are following as they choose not to respond to the Conservatives’ attack ads. Perhaps they simply don’t have the money to market test, produce, and air the ads, or even to post them online.

Michael Ignatieff has taken the position that he won’t dignify the attacks on his integrity with a response. This position is a well-known implicit narrative: I demonstrate that I’m the better man by not responding. By not responding, he’s denying additional attention to the attack ads. But he’s also leaving it up to the public to assess them.

Some voters will agree with Ignatieff that the ads are beneath contempt, but others will agree with the Conservatives that they reveal a sort of opportunism in Ignatieff that represents a serious character flaw.

If the Conservatives’ market testing reveals that these attacks work for a significant portion of the electorate, particularly swing voters, we can expect to see more of them during the campaign. It has also been darkly suggested that, given Ignatieff’s many televised utterances as a public intellectual, the most damaging ads are yet to come.

One can interpret Ignatieff’s most recent book, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada as an attempt to write a counter-narrative that responds to the Conservatives’ attack ads. The problem is that the initial hardcover ranks 49,325 on amazon.ca. Even if his publisher releases a paperback edition in time for the election campaign it will reach far fewer voters than televised ads.

Political campaigns – and governing – are about both policy and leadership. Policy is the easier of the two to discuss. Policy positions can be presented with some specificity and citizens can see policies put in place and affecting them. But leadership, defined as that set of intellectual and emotional traits that a politician brings to the job, matters enormously. The vast majority of voters have never met the party leaders, and only a few hundred have ever spent long enough interacting with them to have any in-depth understanding of their leadership styles. So what most of us know, or think we know, about party leaders – as leaders – comes from the media. We form our impressions from their speaking style, body language as glimpsed in short clips, or insider reports or gossip.

(Personal disclosure: I have never met Stephen Harper. I met Michael Ignatieff once, at a reception in Toronto for Harvard Kennedy School alumni. The Dean of HKS cancelled at the last minute and Ignatieff gave a graceful and eloquent speech in his absence, leading me to the limited conclusion that he handles the public component of academic leadership very well.)

I see attack ads that deal with a candidate’s character as a legitimate though imperfect element of political discourse. They attempt to talk about character weaknesses, though often using questionable evidence.

If the Conservatives are attacking Ignatieff’s character, then it is legitimate for the Liberals to attack Harper’s. Notice that Coutts didn’t say “if he says you’re fat, you say you’re thin.” There is a big difference between denying that you’re fat and saying that your opponent is bald.

The Conservatives’ narrative is that Stephen Harper has grown in stature as prime minister. The Liberals’ response would be to attempt to disrupt that narrative, to argue that he hasn’t grown in stature, that he’s still the “same old Harper” he was in his Reform Party and Canadian Taxpayers’ Foundation days. They could focus not only on his policies but on well-known aspects of his record as prime minister such as his controlling, autocratic, and secretive style of leadership. And they would also point out parallels with the past.

Whether the Liberals will do this when the campaign begins is another matter. But Jim Coutts was an awfully shrewd and successful political strategist.

In an excellent column on March 5, The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson critiqued the federal Conservative’s attack ads by showing how Stephen Harper’s policy positions on health insurance, bilingualism, regional development, and proportional representation have changed, and then asking “what if the PM’s previous views were used against him?”

I will put Simpson’s point in a broader perspective to show how the Conservatives are developing narratives to be used in the next election campaign, whenever it comes. I start with the four quadrant public management narrative model that I used in my previous post to look at this year’s three Academy Award winning public sector narratives. The key point is that an effective public sector narrative includes both a narrative about a protagonist and a narrative about the polity.

The Conservatives’ narrative about themselves is situated squarely in the upper left quadrant. The key policy point they will make is that, under their leadership, the country weathered the challenge of the global economic recession and emerged with its economic institutions in relatively good shape. The Government of Canada ads about the Economic Action Plan are continually telling that story.

The second part of the narrative concerns Stephen Harper as protagonist. What is essential here is that it contains some component of personal growth and renewal. In this context, the Stephen Harper of the past that Simpson revisits is the starting point of the narrative. The evolution Harper has been trying to project for himself is that he is now less ideological and more pragmatic, a global statesman rather than a domestic politician, and at the personal level a mainstream middle-class piano-playing hockey dad. This is what we will see in the Conservative ads as soon as the writ is dropped.

This is a narrative arc straight out of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2. Prince Hal was too much the party boy just as Stephen Harper was too much the Party’s boy, but both evolved.

The Conservative’s other narrative concerns Michael Ignatieff. They are using the attack ads, aired to the large audiences of the Superbowl, hockey games, and Academy Awards, to keep retelling a story of what would happen if Michael Ignatieff were PM. They are trying to place Ignatieff and the Liberals in the lower left quadrant of the public sector narrative model. That quadrant, remember, combines personal renewal for the protagonist with decline for the polity. The attack on his policy positions whether previous (carbon tax, higher GST) or current (no corporate tax cuts) is arguing that, economically, the polity would be worse off under his leadership.

The “just visiting” theme tells a story of personal ambition. Dredging up instances of Ignatieff speaking as the cosmopolitan intellectual, identifying with his adopted home whether the UK or the US, and slighting his Canadian origins, are as essential to the ads as the attack on his policy positions. Their message is that Ignatieff’s personal narrative has been one of distancing himself from Canada, disaffiliation and deracination. To attempt to return is evidence of inauthenticity, of ambition rather than patriotism. This message is premised on the assumption that Canadians don’t resent compatriots who’ve made it big overseas – Celine Dion or Malcolm Gladwell – but they most appreciate them if they stay overseas.

Judging by the public opinion polls, in particular the question about who would make the best leader, the Conservative’s narrative strategy is working very well. The personal narrative they have created for Michael Ignatieff, in the minds of much of the electorate, is sticking. They’ve positioned themselves on the high ground – squarely in the upper left quadrant – and forced the Liberals, and Michael Ignatieff especially, to the lower left quadrant. Whenever the election comes, the Conservatives will keep retelling these two stories.

At first glance, Republican House leader John Boehner, the chain-smoking “congressman from K Street,” didn’t appear to be the sort of person I could in any way identify with. But, reading Peter Boyer’s profile of him in The New Yorker of last December 13, I recognized something in common in our family backgrounds.

Like my parents in Toronto, his parents in Cincinnati owned a tavern that served a blue-collar clientele. Boyer recounts John’s father Earl opening up early to serve shots and beer before work, John himself tending bar, and the whole family doing an annual cleaning, attempting to remove the layers of cigarette tar from the walls.

All this sounds very familiar. In the fifties my father and his father owned a tavern in Toronto near the Massey-Ferguson factory and in the sixties my father and mother owned another one thirty miles away in Whitby, near the GM factory. As I recall them telling me, it was hard work, but it provided a decent living.

Taverns were regulated in Ontario, and there was a standard draft beer glass with a line approximately 1/16 inch thick near the top. In serving, the trick was to pour so that the meniscus just touched the bottom of the line at the sides of the glass. Doing that consistently contributed substantially to the profit margin.

The clientele usually ordered draft, so the owner’s big decision was which brewer’s draft to sell. As a reward from one brewer or another, my parents often received free tickets to Toronto Maple Leafs games (at a time when they were contenders for the Stanley Cup).

John’s parents, devout Catholics, had a family of twelve children, and that stretched the income very thinly. As second oldest, he had considerable responsibility for minding his younger siblings and helping in the tavern. It took him seven years of part-time study to earn his undergrad degree, and he was the first in his family to do so.

He then hit it big in industrial marketing for a plastic packaging company in the late seventies, earning $74K, which was a very hefty salary at that time. (I know from personal experience that entry level academic salaries at Northwestern’s business school were then around $20K, and $40K was a very good academic salary). In his own eyes, he had pulled himself up from poverty to claim his share of the American dream.

In contrast, I had it a lot easier than John. First and foremost, my parents had only three children. None of us ever worked in the tavern. We all attended university and, in my case, with some help from my paternal grandfather, there was enough money to pay for Ivy League tuition. John’s parents both smoked heavily and his mother died of smoking-related pulmonary failure. While my grandfather, father, and mother all inhaled far too much second-hand smoke, they were all spared lung disease.

According to Boyer, John’s reaction to his having achieved his version of the American dream was resentment at being placed in a high marginal income tax bracket, and a conversion to free-market fundamentalism. I can’t help but wonder if John didn’t also resent his parents for their rejection of family planning and the younger siblings who became his responsibility. Because such resentment would have been psychologically unacceptable, he may have transferred his resentment of his parents to the state and of his siblings to those citizens who were dependent on the state.

The trajectory of my political beliefs was also very different. Like most Canadian Jews, we identified with the Liberal Party. Reform Judaism, the branch with which we affiliated, had a strong social action tradition, comparable to the social gospel among Protestants or liberation theology among Catholics. For us, the phrase “because we were slaves unto Pharoah in Egypt” stood as a strong mandate for identification with those who were oppressed.

From my perspective, the version of the American dream for which John Boehner so readily tears up is self-seeking and narrow-minded, simply sucking up to the corporate elite and advancing their political agenda so that he can get to play at their golf courses and ride in their private jets.

But there is a bigger issue here, something Tony Blair put his finger on in his discussion of the origins of New Labour in his recent memoirs. Politically, what happens to people of modest means who work hard and achieve some measure of success? As Blair noted, in Britain they would normally convert from Labour to Tory. New Labour was an attempt to retain their loyalty by combining some tax cuts with efforts to improve public services.

Is Boehner merely the enabler of Tax Party activists intent on preserving the version of the American dream they have achieved and preventing the state from helping those less fortunate than themselves to aspire to it?

The attempted assassination of Representative Giffords is leading to political soul-searching, particularly in the House of Representatives. Is Boehner the sort of person to lead it to greater political civility? The two hopeful things I can see in his background are that tavern owners must learn to deal with dissatisfied and irrational customers and that people in marketing must be attuned to the needs of others. We’ll see.

A comment on my post about Eliot Spitzer asked about the role the media play in disseminating stories about the personal lives of its politicians, and suggested that the Canadian media are less likely to do so than the American media. I think the point is well-taken, and have some suggestions why this may be so.

In the US, the constitution mandates that the Senate provide “advice and consent” for presidential appointments of executive officials, ambassadors, and judges of the Supreme Court. Confirmation hearings have thus provided a forum for rigorous public scrutiny by senators of the professional and personal lives of nominees. Such hearings provide a rationale for the media to undertake its own investigations. Canada has no comparable forum.

On the Canadian side, Pierre Trudeau, hitherto the most successful politician of Canada’s second century – and someone who lived a colorful personal life – famously proclaimed that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. This influenced public attitudes, and the nation’s media appear to have followed, and continue to follow, this dictum.

We have an interesting case in point right now. Noted blogger, and Globe and Mail columnist, Norman Spector, posted last Dec. 24, that Laureen Harper for the first time accompanied Prime Minister Harper in his Christmas eve interview to dispel rumors that they had separated. Within six hours, the Globe and Mail pulled the post, with the justification that “it fell short of [the paper’s] standards with respect to fairness, balance, and accuracy.” So far, the MSM have not returned to the topic.

Spector’s rationale for posting was that if the Prime Minister’s marriage was in trouble, it could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions and hence “the troubled marriage could impact all Canadians.”

The counter-argument is based on the value of privacy and the assumption of professionalism. In this view, politicians, like all other citizens, have a right to privacy about their personal lives. The assumption is that the Prime Minister is a professional, in the sense that, when acting as a public official, he is able to put aside all personal matters and focus solely on his public responsibilities. Like most Canadians, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, in that I assume they can keep their personal baggage from affecting their performance at work.

I think it isn’t a bad thing if this story stays in the blogosphere for now. Because it is in the blogosphere, the MSM are watching it carefully, and, if there are any further developments, they won’t be able to ignore it any longer. If Prime Minister Harper and his wife are attempting to work out strains in their marriage, they should be able to do so without the attention of the MSM. And, if there is absolutely no truth in the rumors, little harm has been done to Prime Minister Harper.

The protagonist in C.P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power, a politician who is having an affair, quotes an old Anglican Church maxim, “You can get away with unorthodox behavior. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.” That, in a nutshell, explains Eliot Spitzer’s political demise. Call it double hubris.

We all know about the unorthodox behavior. In his recent documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, film-maker Alex Gibney elaborates on the unorthodox doctrine: aggressively prosecuting the financial sector while he was New York’s Attorney General, and aggressively trying to push reform on a Republican-controlled state senate and a corrupt legislature. Gibney suggests that the enemies Spitzer made in business helped spread the news about his use of prostitutes and, when the word was out, his political enemies pushed for his resignation.

I’m a big fan of Gibney’s documentary style. Lots of face-forward interviews of key players in the story, all of whom, including Spitzer and his favorite dates, were eager to talk. A sharp-edged, bright lights, big city aesthetic for depicting life among the New York elite. Quick transitions from scene to scene, accompanied by an ironic musical score.

But the documentary leaves unanswered one key question. Given the political risks he was already taking for his unorthodox doctrine, why did Spitzer indulge in the unorthodox behavior? Maybe he knows, and the answer would have been too personal or too wounding to share with the world. Or maybe he himself doesn’t know. So I will speculate.

For a rock star, sex comes with the territory. Groupies offer it, and no one condemns rock stars who accept it. Men in power – whether it is economic, political, or intellectual power – are, at least to a certain extent, like rock stars, and they get offers. Many, at one time or another, take advantage of them.

One of the best portrayals of this is the classic Robert Redford movie The Candidate. As the campaign of the senatorial candidate portrayed by Redford builds momentum, we see one excited young supporter ask him to sign her bra and another flash her panties with his button pinned to them. He has a solid and loving marriage, and easily dismisses these clumsy advances, but we see another, much more sophisticated woman hovering around his campaign, flashing him glances that indicate they are having an affair.

For a long time male politicians got away with recreational sex and even the occasional affair. Jack Kennedy took this to unparalleled heights. Technology that easily keeps records (like the saved text messages sent by Tiger Woods), coupled with reduced public acceptance of promiscuity have made this unorthodox behavior much riskier. Governor Clinton emulated President Kennedy and got away with it; President Clinton didn’t.

We can assume that Eliot Spitzer knew that free sex was not on, so instead he went for what his consorts referred to as “the girlfriend experience.” But the movie indicates he knew this, too, was very risky, so he took great efforts to cover his tracks, for example paying in cash.

What was the thrill Spitzer was looking for? The act of sex with someone other than his wife? Or the illicitness of the act? Or both? What led him to do it? Boredom with a smart and attractive wife? Frustration at work? Rebellion against aging? Powerful feelings of entitlement? Rage at the demanding love of ambitious parents? Again, Spitzer didn’t tell the world, and there’s no reason he should. But if he wants to come to terms with himself, he will have to share it with his analyst/therapist and his wife.

What does this all mean for the practice of politics? As long as public attitudes in the US, unlike those in at least some European countries, condemn rather than condone promiscuity in their politicians, then the set of job requirements for politicians becomes more exacting. If you’re married, have a sexually fulfilling marriage, or act as if you do.