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flanagan and duffy

Election Ringside: A daily exchange for The Globe and Mail between strategists Tom Flanagan, left, and John DuffyThe Globe and Mail

Election Ringside is a daily e-mail exchange for The Globe and Mail between strategists Tom Flanagan and John Duffy. Check in every weekday afternoon during the 2011 federal election campaign for their insights and opinions about the campaign as it unfolds.

From: Tom Flanagan

Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2011 2:03 PM

To: John Duffy

Subject: Election Ringside

Hi John,

Today I'd like to reflect on negative campaigning, which can turn out very differently in a multi-party system like Canada's than in a two-party system like that of the United States. In the USA, if you effectively attack your opponent, two things are likely to happen. You will suppress some of his vote (i.e., some of his erstwhile supporters will stay home on election day), and you will bring some of his supporters over to your side. In either case, you benefit, though obviously you benefit more in the second scenario than in the first.

In a multi-party system, both of these things can happen, but there is also another and unintended possible consequence, namely that your attacks on an opponent promote voting for a third party. I think this is part of the explanation for the rise of the NDP at the end of this campaign.

Conservative advertising attacks on Michael Ignatieff began two years ago, ran steadily on TV for three months before the writ was dropped, and continued during the campaign. Practically all observers, whether they approve of the strategy or not, believe they have been highly effective in undercutting Mr. Ignatieff's credibility. In Quebec, the Conservatives focused their attacks more on the BQ, accusing the party of ignoring "the regions" in favour of Montreal. All three opposition parties ran extremely negative campaigns against the Conservatives, accusing Mr. Harper of being a liar, a dictator, etc.

Amidst this welter of negativity, the NDP got off relatively unscathed because no opponent focused on them. (The Conservatives did run one anti-Layton ad early in the campaign, but it was only a tiny part of what they did.) The other three parties did a fine job of destroying each other's credibility, leaving Mr. Layton as the last man standing (with the aid of his cane!).

I think the moral of the story is that negative campaigning can work for you in a multi-party system as long as you can be sure that you have only one main opponent. That was largely true in 2004, 2006, and 2008, where the Liberals and Conservatives were each other's main opponent, at least outside Quebec. The problem is that there seems to be no way to predict when a new contender may emerge, or an old party may suddenly get new life, thus turning negative campaigning into an unguided missile.

I think this will be an interesting conundrum for party strategists to ponder in future elections. I don't claim to have an answer, but I can see the problem.

Tom

From: John Duffy

Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2011 11:28 AM

To: Tom Flanagan

Subject: Election Ringside

Tom,

I couldn't agree more, and would expand on this theme. As in, you might want to go get a beer. We're only doing one post today, so I'm going to let a few thoughts roll.



The whole Conservative campaign has been wrapped around the kinds of in-your-face plays you are describing. And a lot of the story of this campaign is that -- surprise -- folks don't like things in their faces.



Now, I've described in detail over several postings (e.g. Election Ringside, April 14 and Election Ringside, April 27) my own take on Mr. Harper's efforts. I see what he's been doing as positioning himself against the odium of the political system when on stage, while arguably fuelling that odium offstage in advertising and social with the kind of negative plays you describe so well.

The shorthand for the recent article Will Harper regret strategy of running not to lose? is to say that Mr. Harper went after Mr. Ignatieff but all the benefit went to Mr. Layton. But that's only part of it. What's happened mid-this-week is that Mr. Harper's campaigning stopped hurting the Grits and is now threatening to cost the Conservatives their majority. That's a different, albeit complementary dynamic -- one much more pregnant with irony. Mr. Harper conjured the down-with-politics genie, but it didn't stop with gobbling on Mr. Ignatieff, it started munching on Mr. Harper as well. Aladdin's uncle comes to mind.

It's part of a bigger issue. The Conservative campaigning approach has been built around two realities: a low ceiling on the popularity of right-of-centre viewpoints in Canada, and a low-engagement political environment. That's governed pretty much everything this government does, in and out of campaigns.

Mr. Harper's proposed solution to this political conundrum was best seen in 2008. In that campaign, he parlayed to a near-majority by creating conditions where three quarters of a million Liberals stayed at home, rather than vote for the caricature that had been made of Mr. Dion. Mr. Harper made the Conservatives big by making the Liberal vote small. This year's campaign has sought a reprise of that success. But seeking to work around the low conservative-minded ceiling by working a low-engagement environment hasn't just pervaded the 2011 campaign. It's been the basic story of Mr. Harper's government, something I've argued in other posts ( Ringside: March 29) and elsewhere.

The core strategy, using low engagement politics to equalize a low support ceiling, is mirrored not only in campaigns, but also in the government's public policy strategy. Lacking sufficient public support for a conservative shrinking of the federal government, Mr. Harper's administration has ducked debate on such matters, and instead has simply gone about quietly withdrawing Ottawa from several areas of national life. It has avoided a debate where the majority would prevail against it. Generally, the quiet deconstruction has worked. People, we've been told, just don't care. Well, sometimes. Other times, many of the government's most awkward moments have come when quiet burials -- prorogation, long-form census, Kairos funding -- suddenly drew unwelcome attention.

This brings me to the final pillar of the Harper Conservative strategy: populist centralism, which is my neologism for Mr. Harper's frequent nudges of our Westminster parliamentary system towards some de facto species of direct election of the prime minister. This populist centralism has not only accelerated the long-term, multi-party subordination of cabinet to the PMO; it has arguably resulted in the wholesale sidelining of the Legislature in favour of the Executive. That's something new.

This development is -- I think -- what Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberals have spent much of the campaign trying to explain.

Now, in a low-engagement environment, successfully presenting this kind of argument would always have been at best a 50-50 proposition. So it hasn't done much for the Liberals. But failure to capitalize on an issue doesn't mean it isn't there. The democracy issue is real -- a perception, however vague, of some sort of anti-democratic tendency on Mr. Harper's part.

I think all three of these pillars of Mr. Harper's rule have braided together in this campaign and the run-up to it. The day-to-day earned media drip-feed of "scandalettes" relating to the government's controlling style, the unsettling pitch for a majority to cancel the inconveniences of minority government, and the ferocious drumbeat of negative advertising have all created -- along with other factors -- a broad general impression of the Prime Minister and his government that is quite unattractive to a lot of Canadians.

In the event, it appears this kind of distaste needed not to be pointed out -- such has been Mr. Ignatieff's strategy -- so much as it needed an alternative. Enter Jack Layton, all sunshine, smiles, and his good-tasting politics of positivity. Kudos to him and his team for spotting the opening.

Mr. Layton's emergence is straight out of one of those campus elections dominated by obnoxious junior politicos who are turning everyone off (I have some experience of this, as you can imagine). Along comes an alt.candidate who calls the whole exercise for the negative pain it's become, and people instinctively flock to that candidacy. This positioning worked for Mr. Obama in 2008, and BC's Gordon Wilson in 1991. And I think it's worked for Mr. Layton this campaign. Such is, I believe, much of the Orange Crush, and why it has turned on Mr. Harper as well as Mr. Ignatieff. And that's why I'm so cautious about talk of realignment, or tectonic movements of voting blocks, let alone of the responses that political actors might make to them.

A final thought for the weekend. Tom, a few days ago you graciously invited me to reminisce about 2004. Let me do so again. One of Mr. Martin's biggest challenges in dealing with the initial Harper surge that year was to deal with an lighthearted mood of punishment aimed at the Liberals. There was a certain chipper vengefulness to the tone of Mr. Harper's support. We set about to explain as respectfully as we could that a "free kick" at the Liberals could have some major long-term consequences that people might not like. It wasn't easy admitting in public that we were losing the campaign, but we needed to shift the tone. It worked.

This time, none of the three parties being victimized by Mr. Layton have come close to re-setting the mood to a more sober level where the NDP's shortcomings could be seriously examined. The Liberals hit the wrong notes in my view, and didn't change tone at all. The BQ threw gas on their fire by bringing out Jacques Parizeau -- Quebec's political deadlock personified. And the Conservatives? They apparently sought to game events, figuring the NDP dragon would eat everyone else and then roll over and go to sleep. Isn't working. Between the three groups, they failed to force a sober reflection amongst the public.

But maybe this weekend will do the job for them. We'll see. After all, the wedding's over. No long weekend. Spring has already sprung. Serious matters are at hand on Monday.







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