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It’s been less than a week, but the campaign is starting to show clearly how online technology changes politics.

• Two party leaders, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton, decide to muscle Elizabeth May out of the leader’s debate. The reaction – an online petition and critical comments on Layton’s facebook page – is immediate, and within a day Harper and Layton reverse themselves.

• The kids in the Conservative war room make two mistakes – the pooping puffin and an email to the media hitting back below the belt at the father of a slain soldier – and they are instantly picked up and amplified and Harper must apologize for both.

The first incident shows how voters can speak up quickly and loudly over the Internet. The second incident shows how power in a political organization has been decentralized and made transparent. Everyone in the war room represents the party in everything he or she emails, text messages, or posts online. A war room can’t run by having every part of every website and every email checked by a supervisor, it must run on the basis of a set of values. Ultimately, the leader is responsible for these values.

It’s still early in the campaign, of course, but a political campaign is made up of millions of actions taken by the foot soldiers and impressions created in the minds of voters. Are they starting to connect the dots?

My conclusion after a visit to all the federal party websites is that they do not come near the leading edge political sites. Two leaders I’ve posted about previously are Barack Obama’s and the 2007 Ontario Liberal party’s. While there are occasional exceptions, most of the federal party sites show the following deficiencies.

Top-Down, not Bottom-Up

Unlike Obama’s site, they provide little opportunity for real engagement. “Action” usually is limited to donating, getting a sign, or working in the constituency. The Conservatives’ “my campaign” page goes a bit further to include sending a form letter to a newspaper or using a prepared script to call talk radio. The Greens and the Bloc are the only parties that take blogging seriously: Elizabeth May posts herself and encourages voters to post.

Policy-Lite

The Bloc and the Greens appear to have the most comprehensive policy papers, though the former focuses on one policy area and the latter on one region. The Conservatives, Liberals, and NDP don’t match the Liberal red books of the past. One of the virtues of a fixed election date, in contrast to this year’s sudden call, is it provides more time to develop a comprehensive manifesto.

Not Much Diversity

The Ontario Liberals have shown diversity in making at least parts of their site available in a variety of languages; the federal sites don’t go beyond the two official ones. Barack Obama’s site has pages for many interest groups (women, veterans, blacks, Hispanics), but there is nothing comparable on any of the federal sites.

Narrowcasts or Portals

The Liberals have four sites (the Liberal site, Green shift, this is Dion, and scandalpedia) while the Conservatives have two (the Conservative site, not a leader). The argument for multiple sites is that each is narrowcasting a particular message in a particular style. The problem with multiple sites is that each takes on a life of its own, potentially departing from the key messages and overall tone of the campaign. This was demonstrated by not-a-leader’s pooping puffin, which was likely the creation of a web developer working with too little sleep, too much caffeine, and without the benefit of adult supervision.
In the voters’ eyes, parties will ultimately own all their messaging, both positive and negative, and I favour putting it all out there on one portal.

The 1968 Harvard-Yale game was a curious classic. Both teams were undefeated, and as it was the last game of the season, the Ivy League championship was at stake. Yale, led by quarterback Brian Dowling and halfback Calvin Hill, both of whom would go on to NFL careers, was heavily favoured. In the first half, Yale lived up to expectations, rolling up a 22-0 lead. After calling on backup quarterback Frank Champi, Harvard got back into the game, but with a score of 29-13 going into the last minute, it still seemed hopeless. Amazingly, Harvard scored two touchdowns, both with two point conversions, and the game ended in a 29-29 tie. The Harvard student newspaper published a broadside immediately after the game with the headline “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29″ that summed up perfectly how fans on both the Harvard and Yale sides of the field felt (personal disclosure: I was on the Harvard side).

Documentarist Kevin Rafferty’s telling of this story had its world premiere last Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Film Festival’s program, inferring from Rafferty’s background in political documentary, and attempting to broaden the film’s appeal beyond Harvard and Yale alums, spins it as being about The Sixties. I disagree. The Sixties (Vietnam, student activism, the pill) are there only as context; the Harvard team included both a Vietnam vet and members of the far-left Students for a Democratic Society, but the players interviewed pointed out that success on the field required suppressing their politics. Indeed, at a politically fraught time (November 1968, a few weeks after the election of Richard Nixon and a few months before Harvard’s own student upheaval), people at both universities put aside their politics for The Game.

The narrative structure of the film is built by interspersing the game’s highlights shown chronologically — digitally enhanced and incorporating slow-motion replays — with retrospective interviews of some fifty of the players, all of whom come off as thoughtful, articulate, and sometimes hilarious. Though it was only a game, it meant a great deal to them, and their memories are extraordinarily vivid, whether what they did was heroic (throwing the pass, catching it, or picking up a fumble) or ignominious (fumbling the ball, missing a tackle, getting a stupid penalty). These memories are most compelling for the last minute of the game when, as players on both teams recalled, Harvard had an unstoppable, almost other-worldly, momentum. For example, Harvard quarterback Frank Champi described the tying touchdown pass as “finding receiver Vic Gatto and throwing into a tunnel leading right to him” and Gatto remembered the ball as being as large as a watermelon.

As a study in recollection of a suspenseful outcome, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, is superb. It isn’t just inside football. One needn’t have been there, or needn’t be a football maven, to enjoy it. Congratulations to Kevin Rafferty for making a great film about this curious classic.

It’s evident that the Don Valley West by-election won’t happen, as we head to a general election on October 14. In posting on the election I will be focusing on communication strategies, namely positive narratives extolling the leader’s strengths and the party’s vision and attack narratives taking aim at the policies or leaders of the other parties. I will also be looking at the online aspects of the campaign, in particular the messaging on and capabilities of the party’s websites, and the use of Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

In the last two years YouTube has come to play a particularly important role for circulating both political gaffes (for example. former Virginia Senator George Allen’s use of “macaca” and Hillary Clinton’s (mis)remembered dangerous visit to Bosnia) and statements of support (Yes We Can).

Before diving into the election, I decided to step back and look for the presence of recent former prime ministers on YouTube. Not surprisingly, Pierre Trudeau has the strongest presence, with the most popular video, at 80,000 views, being his famous “just watch me” interview during the 1970 FLQ Crisis. There was much less for Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney, or John Turner. Notably absent were the 1984 leaders’ debate, in which Mulroney clobbered Turner on the issue of patronage appointments, and the 1988 debate, in which Turner powerfully made the case against the Free Trade Agreement. Jacques Parizeau’s notorious speech blaming the sovereigntist defeat in the 1995 referendum on “money and ethnic votes”, however, was there.

I then had a look at Library and Archives Canada’s website. They have a huge visual archive, but the problem is that it is available onsite in Ottawa but not online. There is a gap in political cyberspace between the immediate and quirky videos posted on YouTube and the Archives’ encyclopedic Ottawa-based holdings. The Archive should establish a committee of experts to choose the top 100 Canadian political videos of the last, say, 40 years and post them on the Library and Archives website. It would be a great way of bringing our political history to life.

Prime Minister Harper just added the Toronto riding of Don Valley West to the three others which will hold by-elections on September 22. I live in Don Valley West, so I will be blogging about what I see and hear.

Let’s start with the big strategic picture. Three of the four ridings (Don Valley West, Guelph, and Westmount) were held by the Liberals and one, Saint-Lambert, by the Bloc Quebecois. The Conservatives will be testing their strategy of attacking Stephane Dion, particularly on his green shift. One or more wins would put the Liberals in check: unwilling to force an election, portrayed as Harper’s reluctant supporters, and in internal disarray. At the other end of the spectrum, the rivalry between the Greens and the NDP for third place will be spirited.

I had a quick look at the candidate websites. Conservative John Carmichael’s and the Green Party’s Georgina Wilcock’s are the most highly developed. Carmichael’s site has an opening video, lots of endorsements, a list of the government’s achievements, positions on key issues incorporating critiques of the opposition, and translation into eight languages, which makes sense in this ethnically diverse constituency. Georgina Wilcock’s site has very nicely integrated biographical information about her and details of local events with the Green Party’s site, with its emphasis on environmental policy.

Liberal Rob Oliphant’s site contains a detailed bio, information about Stephane Dion’s visit later this week, but little about policy. NDP candidate David Sparrow’s site has a personal message about why he’s running, a link to the NDP home page, and little else.

Two of the candidates already have an online presence in their professional lives. David Sparrow is an actor-writer, and his professional home page is more detailed than his political home page. Georgina Wilcock is a doctor, and Google lists her entry on www.ratemds.com before her candidacy. She has four highly complimentary ratings, which average out to 5, the top of the scale. While being a good doctor is not the same thing as a good politician, low ratings as a doctor would not have inspired confidence, and would have been circulated by her opponents.
Here are two other tidbits from the early days of the campaign.

Conservative John Carmichael has already gone negative, running radio ads attacking the Liberals, along the lines of “Stephane Dion wants to increase gasoline prices even more. Is he crazy?”
A walk in the neighbourhood revealed a street with eight Green Party signs and no others. Lawn signs are a notoriously misleading predictor of election outcomes, but this at least shows that the Greens have hit the ground running.

I’ll be away next week, but back to the by-election after Labour Day.