The long goodbye

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams is blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this weekend.

Last night’s tribute to Stéphane Dion began after 11:00 p.m. central time, presumably so that the majority of Canadians living east of Thunder Bay were unlikely even to stumble across it by accident.

A little earlier, Jean Chrétien had given a rollicking partisan speech, whose centre-piece was a riff on Stephen Harper’s absence from the “family photo” at the recent G-20 meeting, reportedly because he was in the bathroom.

Chrétien wows the crowd

This speech set a standard that nothing in the program to follow remotely matched.

There was the usual video tribute to the outgoing leader, followed by a speech by Paul Martin, more energetic than memorable. Michael Ignatieff also spoke briefly before Dion himself.

Dion’s speech was reminder to the roughly 2000 Liberals in the room, and the dwindling audience of those watching on CPAC, of why he is so widely regarded as a decent human being and a terrible politician. It was long (more than 30 minutes), earnest, hectoring, replete with a reference to Schopenauer, and utterly uncontaminated with applause lines.

After Dion finished, the Liberals for some reason had scheduled a further extensive program, including a speech by former Supreme Court Justice and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour.

But Arbour spoke to a nearly empty room — or so we are left to presume, since most of the media had also long since filed their stories and left the building.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Dion hammers home a point

The full pander

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

A self-declared Montreal Canadiens-Boston Red Sox fan.

The pressure for policies

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

The world changes for Michael Ignatieff after his convention speech Saturday night. The low bridge strategy thus far has been successful thus far and has allowed him time and space to work on his organizational priorities. But it has also led inevitably to increasing media demand for news and substance.  As that demand remains unrequited, it raises the threshold for successfully meeting it. Saturday night’s threshold is now pretty high.

So on to the debate about the right time to lay out core policy.

Political strategists will say, appropriately, that it is not yet time to unveil policy. In fact, it may well be that the ideal Liberal strategy is to force the ballot question to be a referendum on the Prime Minister. That implies anteing up only the minimal policy table stakes as late in the game as possible.

But in a world of a thoroughly disengaged electorate, media arrogates to itself (and is passively delegated) the role of setting the rules, establishing the pace and defining the champions.  More often than not, as lots of academic and public opinion research has established, it frames the initial narrative for its readership about the substance, process and personalities of current politics.

Political media has little patience for the incrementalism of a slow, deliberate build because that does not meet most definitions of what is news. In its defense, media will say that a man who is now a prime minister in waiting has a responsibility to say what he will do when the wait is over. They may say that but what they really mean is that they sense a large change in the political dynamic and they want to get on with the next round of exciting leadership politics.. A Battle of Champions is the most desirable sort of political narrative these days. It is much more engaging than other political coverage and capable of competing with other more entertaining news.

You can see the narratives building.

People are saying and writing things  questioning Prime Minister Stephen Harper – re his skill set, strategic sense, grip on the party, and shelf life — in ways they have not written before. All that is fostered by his weakening in the polls. They see a new potential narrative of a Fall From Grace on the basis of a Flawed Personality and an abandonment of ideological constancy which has Mr. Harper leading a Government About Nothing.

The Rise From the Liberal Ashes narrative is the frame surrounding Mr. Ignatieff , made more credible by his standing as Public Intellectual and the added mystery of his Enigmatic Personality.

That’s the ultimate narrative arc they want with each Champion acting out a classic dramatic role.

To get there, you need engagement and conflict. And disappointingly to political media, Mr. Ignatieff has not played the game. The brinkmanship is minimal, the policy cleavages virtually non-existent.

What comes next is inevitable and predictable – increasing and harsh media pressure on Mr. Ignatieff as the media consensus solidifies that he is not entitled to be a prime minister in waiting without defining himself and his policy set. As the weather forecasters say, there’s a 90% probability of rain.

He may hold out for a good while yet as the political strategists would have it. But there will be collateral damage – the media will have its say and much of what it says will be negative and will stick, at least initially. The Conservatives will pile on, doing their best to try to make it stick permanently.

Elly Alboim is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communications and a principal in the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, specializing in strategic communications and public opinion.

Does Ignatieff really need policy now?

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Ignatieff speaks to Young Liberals

Paul Adams

Paul Adams is blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this weekend.

A recovering Martinite recently remarked to me that Paul Martin’s regime had focused enormous energy on policy (“fixing” medicare, national child care, the Kelowna Accord, Darfur, etc., etc.), but neglected the political zones both above and below: that is, party organization and the expression of “aspirational goals” that could inspire Canadians and Liberal supporters.

Interestingly, Michael Ignatieff, has concentrated all his energies so far on party organization — really the theme of this weekend’s convention — and aspirational goals — the theme of his recent book. But he has spoken relatively little about policy. A media consensus seems to be emerging that Ignatieff needs to fill in the policy gap quickly.

On the Globe and Mail website one-time NDP strategist Les Campbell dissents from the consensus:

“Yes, there is media pressure to ‘flesh out specifics.’ And yes, party members love to think that they are influencing the party’s priorities. But seriously, no one thinks that Michael Ignatieff lacks ideas.”

“Canadians won’t have any problem believing that Mr. Ignatieff can come up with clever strategies and complicated policies. What they need to know is who he is, and how he might react under pressure and the weight of responsibility. As Mr. Ignatieff’s recent taxation ruminations showed, rolling out policy before fully defining the party leader opens the door for other parties to use policy — out of context — to define the leader in their way. There is lots of time for policy later.”

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

The lion still roars

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

No Liberal leader since John Turner has been as interested in the mechanics of the Liberal Party as Michael Ignatieff. Both leaders were confronted with the challenge of rebuilding a badly beaten party, and followed predecessors who cared little and did less about invigorating the party.

As it happens, some of what Ignatieff is trying to do this weekend is undo, to a degree, the decentralized, highly federated structure Turner put in place. However appropriate to the 1980s, the strong provincial and territorial arms of the party have been chewing through the party’s precious resources, impeded the assembly of national lists of members and supporters, and complicated both fund-raising and the financial reporting required by law (all issues clearly, if gently, alluded to in the party’s recent report on the new 308 riding strategy).

Still, today when the media were invited in to listen to speeches from John Turner and Michael Ignatieff to the party’s Council of Presidents, it did not promise to be a scintillating event.

Turner, who turns 80 in a few weeks, does not look entirely well, and I, for one, expected anodyne remarks, followed by applause, and much the same from Ignatieff.

Instead, Turner apparently had been thinking about a few things, and decided to get them off his mind in a brief but pungent speech.

“This party has to be re-built again from the bottom up,” he began — an unremarkable enough sentiment, but then he got into specifics.

The leader shouldn’t go around appointing candidates, he said. The party-members in the riding should have the exclusive right to do that.

Now, remember that every leader since Turner has used the prerogative to appoint candidates, either to enlist “stars”, or, more recently, to increase representation by women.

That wasn’t all. Turner had a few things to say about why young people don’t get into politics these days, namely:

• they don’t want to make the financial sacrifices
• they are concerned (legitimately, he noted) about the effect on their families
• the diminishing role of the MPS
• and media intrusion into politicians’ lives.

Liberal dreams of majority…not so fast

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

Today’s LaPresse/CROP poll is a wonderful gift to Michael Ignatieff as he arrives for this weekend’s party convention in Vancouver. It shows the federal Liberals in Quebec at 37%, six percentage points ahead of the Bloc Québécois, and an amazing 22 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives.

It isn’t Christmas, but it will set sugar-plums dancing in the heads of Liberals. More specifically, it will get them thinking about the days of Liberal majorities past.

But hang on. As impressive as the Liberal surge in Quebec is, it would likely mean fewer than 30 seats for the party in the province, still behind the BQ, because of the way in which Liberal votes are concentrated geographically.

If you look at national seat projections based on recent polls prior to the release of these new CROP numbers for Quebec, they range from a two-seat edge for the Liberals over the Tories suggested by the Laurier Institute for Public Opinion, to a roughly twenty seat margin projected by tcnorris based on two recent polls, to a high of about thirty seats ahead of the Tories projected by EKOS Research Associates (with whom I am associated) whose recent national poll is the outlier on the high side for the Liberals.

If you substituted these most recent CROP numbers for Quebec into these seat projections, you’d still see the Liberals failing to get into majority territory. Doing a back of the envelope calculation, we are looking at a range of between, say, 112 and 136 seats for the Liberals nationally — well short of the 155 you need for a majority.

For the Liberals to be seriously thinking of a majority, they would need to increase their existing, already substantial, lead over the Conservatives in Ontario, or start expanding their base elsewhere.

It is possible that the Liberals will get a lift elsewhere in the country, particularly if they are perceived to be more competitive in Quebec than they were in the 2008 election. It is also possible that we are seeing a delayed “honeymoon” for Michael Ignatieff — delayed because his accession to the leadership came as such an anti-climax last December after the election and the “coalition crisis” that ensued. And honeymoons don’t last forever.

The arithmetic of majority is extremely difficult in the current four- or five-party configuration of Canadian politics. Liberals can always dream, but if they are serious about governing again they should also be thinking seriously about how to govern with a minority, which remains a much more realistic prospect — and still a very uncertain one at that.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

True Patriot Liberal

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

Liberals travelling from Central Canada to Vancouver for the party’s convention will be pleased to discover (as I did) that the flight offers more than enough time to read Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Land.

The book sandwiches the story of his distinguished Canadian ancestors on his mother’s side between his own reflections on nationalism in general, and Canadian nationalism in particular.

Read as a purely political document (which in fairness, it is not), the book is not just an attempt to soften his image as a lifelong expatriate by emphasizing his Canadian roots. It is also aimed at re-staking the Liberal party’s claim to be the one, true wholly Canadian party. Ignatieff tries to re-inject energy into the Liberal national brand by reviving the good old-fashioned word “patriotism” – long in disuse here in Canada.

Michael Ignatieff has spent a significant portion of his life ruminating on the meaning of ethnicity and nationality, and their cousins, nationalism and patriotism. In fact, he can claim to be one of the two or three most important interpreters of the festival of nationalist rape and murder that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

His conclusion from the Balkan conflicts, simply put, was to reject ethnic nationalism but to embrace a civic nationalism, based on a set of common civic values, the rule of law, and tolerance of different ethnic, religious and linguistic traditions. Writing now about Canada, he emphasizes the role of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, our social safety net, and our openness to diverse languages and cultures.

He also adds a vein of romanticism about the history and geography of the country – different from Jean Chrétien’s sentimental speeches about the grandeur of the Rockies mostly in its articulate expression. Finally he talks about the importance of a common hope and vision for a shared future.

Politically, it makes a lot of sense for Ignatieff to set his sights on reclaiming the Liberal Party’s role as the repository of national feeling. Having lost its grip on the West as early as 1957, and on much of Quebec way back in 1984, the Liberal Party has seen its claim on many ethnic and cultural communities slipping away as well. Far from being a “national” party, Stéphane Dion’s Liberals were truly competitive in only a little more than half the country in the 2008 election, and of course, carted away just over a quarter of the votes.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives had begun to develop an alternative nationalist vision, featuring a more robust military, a less multilateralist foreign policy, and a renewed commitment to the North among other things. For a while they seemed to be on their way to displacing the Liberals as the federalist alternative in Quebec, and they continue to chip away at the Liberals among many ethnic communities, including, notably, Jewish- and Chinese- Canadians, for example.

Michael Ignatieff’s Canadian patriotism, as he defines it in the book, is smart, modern, well-considered, and at the same time likely to evoke memories of the Liberals’ long-standing claim on Canadians’ sense of nationality.

However, that only takes us so far.

His book, like much of what he has said lately about Canada in other venues, surveys the country from such an Olympian perspective that it provides only vague clues as to what he hopes to do in government. In the book, he chews away at that hoariest of issues, interprovincial trade barriers, calls for an East-West energy grid, high-speed passenger trains in Central Canada and upgrades to the Trans-Canada Highway. All sensibly related to his Canadian “patriotism”, but well short of a program for government, or the shared vision of the future he talks about.

There is little clue in his book to his approach to the economy, beyond these infrastructure projects and a now-conventional mixture of market economics and modest government interventionism. There isn’t a word on global warming. Nor on Afghanistan – an issue about which he has apparently thought deeply, but on which his public pronouncements lately have been difficult to follow.

When Ignatieff became leader, there was a lot of talk about holding a “thinkers’ conference” to re-define Liberalism. He is, after all, a thinker himself, and his 2006 leadership campaign was awash with policy. (It was he, not Dion, for example, who resurrected the talk of a “carbon tax”, which has had toxic implications for the Liberal Party ever since Trudeau’s National Energy Policy).

But he decided — perhaps wisely from a tactical point of view — that a vigorous policy discussion among Liberals, followed by the adoption of hard policy planks, would give the Conservatives too much to shoot at. The Liberal convention this weekend in Vancouver will be practically uncontaminated with policy – unless Ignatieff brings it up.

But at some point, this weekend, this summer, or during a future election campaign, if Ignatieff’s current political momentum is to be sustained, he will need to leave the lofty heights of philosophy, romance and history, and tell us what it all means to those of us living down here on the ground. His political goals need not be as elaborated as Dion’s “Green Shift”, which ended up strangled in its own details.

But it will have to be more than he has given us so far.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Welcome back

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

This began last September as a federal election blog – Campaign Perspectives – written by faculty and students at Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication. Now a few months later we’re back with a new name – Political Perspectives – but still written by faculty members at Carleton,  joined later in the year by some of our students. There’s one more change as well, we have a new url –  www.cusjc.ca .

We begin the revived blog with two posts from Paul Adams just before he heads off to the Liberal convention in Vancouver, where he will blogging to the site all weekend.

We welcome comments.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief, national editor and associate editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

The 308 strategy… and why the Liberals won’t find it easy

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

Michael Ignatieff is enjoying a belated honeymoon after his anti-climactic accession to the Liberal leadership last December.

A new book. A party convention in Vancouver this week. And a warm gust of approval from the public, that has put the Liberals ahead of the Tories for the first time since last October’s election – nearly seven points ahead in the recent EKOS poll.

One striking aspect of Ignatieff’s leadership so far is that he has probably paid more attention to the internal organization of the Liberal Party than any leader since John Turner.

Recently, the committee on party renewal he appointed published a report called “The 308 Riding Strategy.” The central thesis of the report is that the Liberal Party should model itself after the successful Howard Dean/Barack Obama 50-state strategy south of the border.  By competing everywhere in the country, the party hopes to restore its image as the one true national party, stretch the resources of its opponents, and expand the areas of the country in which it can be truly competitive.

But even a cursory reading of the renewal committee’s remarkably candid report makes plain how difficult it will be for the Liberals to compete in every nook-and-cranny of the country in an election that may come as soon as this summer or fall.

We all know that the Liberals have been slow to adapt to fund-raising laws that make all parties more dependent on small donors. Well, the report lays out many of the party’s other problems in their awful splendour:

While the 2006 convention of the party agreed for the first time to have a fully-integrated single national membership system, it hasn’t happened because of “lingering, differing viewpoints among provincial and territorial associations,” as well as their differing methods of managing membership lists.

Negotiations over how to distribute revenues from membership fees since 2006 were “particularly challenging” and ended up with different agreements being struck for different parts of the country – an unsustainable pattern.

Liberal Party headquarters, which was supposed to take over the bulk of administration from provincial and territorial associations under reforms mandated in 2006, failed to do so.

As a consequence, the provincial bodies haven’t done their newly assigned job of becoming the focal point of voter outreach and organization.

These provincial and territorial bodies are still gobbling up a quarter of the money received from public party financing, even though their roles still aren’t sorted out in practice.

The Liberals aren’t even doing the little stuff right, according to the report. Tax receipts don’t go out in time, and — believe it or not from the party of bilingualism –you can’t phone up party headquarters and automatically expect to get service in French.

That’s just the internal stuff. The report also mentions that the Liberal Party, which it calls “the party of multiculturalism,” is not reaching out to ethnic communities the way it once did. (Congratulations Jason Kenney, in other words.)

One element of party organization around which the report dances more gently is the existence of party “commissions” – that is, auxiliary bodies for women, seniors, aboriginals and young people. Although these commissions consume resources that might otherwise be available to the larger party, it is not at all clear that they are consistently effective in either organizing the constituencies they purport to represent, or representing those interests to the larger party. (They do come in handy for generating delegates to leadership conventions, sometimes through so-called “paper clubs” that appear out of nowhere and then vanish just as suddenly.)

Though Ignatieff has shown impressive energy in addressing many of the party’s debilitating long-term structural issues, it would be foolish to think that the kind of reforms the report identifies can be fixed in time for an election this year.

The modernization of the Liberal Party is going to be a job for the long haul.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Obama’s Magic Software

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams
Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

The Ignatieff Liberal Party is trying to capture a bit of that Obama magic.

Barack Obama said nice things about Ronald Reagan; Michael Ignatieff phones Brian Mulroney on his birthday.

Obama had a 50-state strategy; Ignatieff has a 308 riding strategy.

Obama spent inordinate amounts of time in Elko, Nevada, of all places; Ignatieff goes to Alberta, of all places.

The latest bit of magic the Ignatieff Liberals have imported is the voter contact software used by the Obama campaign. The so-called Voter Activation Network (VAN) software was developed by a company based in Massachusetts staffed by people who — judging by their bios — appear to be simultaneously political wonks and computer nerds.

The software is not, in fact, a product of the Obama campaign. VAN is almost ubiquitous in U.S. Democratic politics at all levels. So it is tried and true and tested, and the Liberals are probably wise to go out and buy it.

In an article about the software last week in the Globe and Mail, the Liberals’ president-designate, Alfred Apps, is quoted as saying: “I can tell you, we’re going to be a hell of a lot more competitive [in the next election] than we have been in the last three elections.”

But hang on.  The Liberals do seem like they will be better prepared next time round…but the software isn’t likely to play a large part, not this time, not if the election occurs as soon as many people think it will.
Software – any software – is a vessel into which you pour information.

I may be using the same word-processor as Alice Munro, but, well, judge for yourself….

The Liberals’ problem is not that they haven’t had software. It is that they have not, to date, been effective in assembling and organizing information about supporters, members and potential donors – information that needs to go into the software before it can do them any good.

The software the Liberals are purchasing is intended to connect information about voters, including demographic and political information, to the party’s membership and fund-raising lists. But it will only be as good as the data that’s input.

The Liberals’ membership lists are still a mess (see previous blog). And their direct-mail fund-raising, which is perhaps their single most crucial disadvantage compared with the Conservatives, is barely underway.

Moreover, until the Liberals mobilize their on-the-ground organizations for the next election campaign, they are unlikely to be able to collect voter data as systematically or in sufficient volume for it to be an effective political tool. Barack Obama, remember, launched his presidential campaign on December 7, 2007 – 23 months before the election.

Nearly two years of campaigning allowed Obama organizers to collect data – emails, addresses and phone numbers — at every rally, every bake sale, and on every web-contact, which could be used by on-the ground organizers to recruit workers and to raise money.

In this country, the Conservatives have been the runaway leader in this technology. They have had a software system called CIMS (Constituency Information Management System) since 2004. The critical element of CIMS, as the one-time Conservative organizer Tom Flanagan explained in his book, Harper’s Team, was that it was accessible both locally and nationally, so that a voter identified as a supporter by a Tory door-knocker in rural Saskatchewan could then be approached by direct mail for a donation, perhaps even on an issue he or she was known to feel strongly about.

Having been at this for five years, the Conservatives have been able to hone their database, in particular for fund-raising. No more letters going to people who have moved, or who have moved on politically. No more begging letters to deadbeats.

Even once the Liberals have assembled robust lists of members and supporters, they will need to be tested and culled before they will be effective for fund-raising. That requires an investment of time and money by a party that doesn’t have a lot of either. Tory organizers tell me that it took CIMS more than a year of operation before their direct-mail starting making money for them.

No reason to think that it would take anything less for the Liberals to get their software working effectively for them. By that time, most folks seem to think we will already have been through another election.
Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.