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.