A rchive Date
[ 20-01-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/jackson.html
Political alchemy
Backroom Machiavellis spin black art largely out of view of general public
By PAUL JACKSON -- Calgary Sun
January 17, 2002 A handful of weeks after the Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I explained to Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day how I could get him on Page One of virtually every newspaper in the nation and at the top of the evening TV newscasts.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien would be cornered.
In the midst of a huge scandal.
And it was all very legitimate.
But no, said Day, he'd prefer someone else expose the PM on this issue.
He didn't want to dirty his hands.
Didn't have the stomach for it.
The issue was never exposed and so Chretien got away scot-free -- and the Grit strategists who used every dirty trick they could find to sabotage Day during the 2000 election campaign, also got away with hardly a blemish.
I want to recommend a book that should be essential reading for Day and his advisers -- actually, essential reading for all the Alliance leadership contenders and their teams, even for Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark's ever-diminishing band of warriors.
It's political insider Peter G. White's Gritlock: Are the Liberals in Forever? (Canadian Political Bookshelf, $19.95. ISBN: 0-9689374-0-3).
I skimmed through this top-notch work in my Jan. 17 column "Gritlock defined," but the way column writing goes, didn't have space to concentrate on any one one single aspect.
Today, I'll do that.
White, who is working to bring the Alliance and the PCs together, but sees no way of doing it so long as Day or Clark are around, delves into the trademark Liberal election weapon: Ruthless character assassination of its opponents.
This is accomplished by innuendo, outright lies, sneaking "wedge" issues into a campaign and negative political image definition of an opposition party's leader.
It's a black art, explains White, that's been imported from the U.S. and now practised in Canada by a tiny handful of backroom Machiavellis, largely hidden from the public eye.
White explains that for at least the past decade, federal Liberal strategists have been the unchallenged masters of this particular form of character assassination, but they began to reach new heights -- or depths -- dating roughly from the election of Jean Chretien as Liberal leader in June, 1990.
Their greatest success was in the Nov. 27, 2000 campaign when the "hapless" and "guileless" Day was led like a lamb to the slaughter.
Coincidentally, Warren Kinsella, chief Liberal performer of this devious form of black arts, has penned his own book detailing exactly how Grit strategists carried off their plot to demonize and destroy Day in the eyes of voters. Kinsella and cohorts are proud, rather than ashamed, of their alchemy.
The black art of character assassination didn't start with Day, of course. The Grits used it successfully against Preston Manning, who was portrayed in the Eastern news media as a "dangerous western radical inimical to the interests of central and eastern Canada," and against Bloc Quebecois leader Giles Duceppe, who was portrayed as "incompetent and ridiculous" -- recall the photograph of him wearing a condom-style hairnet during a factory tour.
Day was caught offguard almost from the day the election was called -- when he had to admit it was Jim Dinning, not he, who balanced the books as provincial treasurer -- and then spent four out of five days on the trail defending himself rather than attacking Chretien.
Out of nowhere came the "wedge" issue of abortion, that basically killed the Alliance's chances in Ontario.
Significantly, that issue "popped up" just as the Alliance was nearly the 30% popularity mark in Ontario, a mark that normally would have spurred the party to perhaps 20 or 30 seats.
The Grit strategists just found it increasingly easy to "sandbag" - (White's nifty description) Day at every touch and turn and he became akin to a punch-drunk boxer (my description).
By election day, the superb "hatchet job" Kinsella and strategists had performed on the "completely inexperienced" Day had made him look to voters like a "dangerous extremist" with a secret agenda for destroying women's rights and undermining medicare. He was also a religious maniac.
As I said in my earlier column, Gritlock: Are the Liberals in Forever, is the most perceptive book on Canadian politics I've read in a decade. It will surely separate the men from the boys for you.
Jackson, associate editor of the Sun, can be reached at paul.jackson@calgarysun.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to callet@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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