KCCCC Day 7: it’s the weekend, dammit

— 08.08.2015 08:16 AM

  

  • Up at the cabin FOR MY LAST WEEKEND AS A SINGLE GUY IN CANADA, so I’ll keep this one brief. You don’t pay me for this stuff, you know. 
  • Eastern Dipper Sinks Western Dippers: It’s hard, running a truly national political party, and Linda  McQuaig has reminded us why. From her perch in Deepest Rosedale, it seems Linda wants Tom Mulcair to (a) conduct the election campaign on a bicycle and (b) sink every NDP candidate in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Not smart. 
  • Fed-Prov Slugfest! The Wynne/Notley vs. Harper grudge match is something, but it ain’t something new. Remember Danny Williams vs. Paul Martin? Mike Harris vs. Jean Chretien? Several Dozen Premiers vs. Pierre Trudeau? These grudge matches happen all the time, and they aren’t usually in any way relevant. I don’t know of many Queen’s Park staffers (Liberal or PC) who have taken leaves of absence to work on the federal campaign.  That should tell you plenty. 
  • And the winner is…: No one! Those of us in the punditocracy love to declare winners – and hate it when we can’t. But the fact is there was no clear winner in Thursday’s leader’s debate: every one of them had ups and downs. Leaving the commentariat in a quandary, and leaving citizens to – SHOCK AND HORROR – make up their own minds!
  • Survey says: Per my theory that not as many people watched the Great Debate as you might think, I did a survey of my staff – at a, you know, political consulting firm. A quarter of them didn’t even watch it. With politically-inclined pals, the numbers – accurate 19 times out of 20 – were even higher: most watched the Jays sweep the Twins, or went to see Tom Cruise at the movies, or whatever. By the time the 2015 Long March Campaign™ is over, no one will remember that single debate, either. 

Comments (66)

KCCCC Day 6: the big debate

— 08.07.2015 07:26 AM

KCCCC5

 

    • First things first: you and I are weird.  We like politics.  We pay attention to politics. Normal people don’t.  And studies have been showing that debate audiences have been declining for decades.
    • Most people watch clips on TV, Facebook and Twitter, and think that is enough.  Based on last night’s show, they’re probably not wrong.
    • Three key things to remember before I provide you with my own tweeted clips.  
    • One, if very few people watched the debate, it will probably have very little long-term effect on attitudes.
    • Two, it came so early in the 2015 Long March Campaign that no one will remember it at the end.  (That’s a shame, given that it’s possibly the last time all four leaders are together.)
    • Three, it wasn’t very exciting.  It was pretty dull, in fact.
    • That all said, here’s my take on each leader, along with tweets about the proceedings.

Stephen Harper: When three professional politicians are attacking you for a couple hours, the best you can hope for is to keep the puck out of the net.  Harper did that.  He missed several opportunities to clobber the others, true, but he was effective hammering Trudeau on his position on terror, and bashing both Trudeau and Mulcair on their collective desire to talk about the Constitution.

Tom Mulcair: He wasn’t Angry Tom – he was Medicated Tom.  He. Talked. Like. This.  As such, you got the impression he was condescending (he was) and arrogant (he is).  His equivocation on ISIS/terror was sickening; his qualifications on unity were pretty despicable.  He was braggy about shutting down Parliament, rewriting Charters, and his eyes were scary-ola.  If there was a loser last night, it’s him.

Justin Trudeau: He was a drama teacher, once, and it sure showed.  He stuck to his lines, and he had clearly had been preparing for months.  There were slips, however, such as when he bizarrely referred to himself as “Mr. Trudeau,” or when he said “the Liberal Party has been very clear” on ISIS and terror. (Um, not quite.) His startling statement that the Liberal Party was “naive,” quote unquote, on foreign policy will be replayed in CPC and NDP attack ads from now until the end of time.

Elizabeth May: She was winning.  She was winning, big time, in fact.  For most of the debate, she was the most effective – seemed to know her facts, had the right tone, sounded the least doctrinaire.  She lost the pole position at the end, however, when she rhapsodized about Mu’ammar Qaddafi, and she suggested that ignoring ISIS will make them just go away.  In those segments, she was dishonest and reckless and had a truther-like weirdness.  A disappointment, because she’d been winning.

Sample tweets about each, gratis:

 


 


 


 

 


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Keef on the Fabs

— 08.06.2015 02:03 PM

I’m sure you’ve already heard the news today, oh boy – STONES’ KEITH RICHARDS DISSES SGT. PEPPER – but his actual quote is so wonderful, so Gallagher-brother-like, I had to post it here. It may come as a shock to all of you, but there’s nothing I love more than people prepared to smash all idols, defy the conventional wisdom, etc.  My favourite quote of all time, thusly, is this from Brendan Kennelly in The Book of Judas: “If you want to serve the age, betray it.”

Here’s Keef:

“The Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles,” Richards said. “But there’s not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the Sixties, you just get carried away – you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties – ‘Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.'”


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KCCCC Day 5: the numbers must be tighter than we thought (updated twice)

— 08.06.2015 06:10 AM

  • You can always tell when things are tightening up in a campaign: stuff that party war rooms/partisans had been holding back starts to seep out, like primordial ooze. With the first debate being held today, too, partisans have more reason to get out material that throws the other side off their message for the day.  It’s an important day, after all.
  • Thus, the email I got in the middle of the night, from a real person: “I ended up with a close [redacted] advisor in my house two weeks ago for a night. When I invited her I didn’t know but when she arrived she brought with her a quantity of what she insisted was “freebase” – but was to all intents and purposes crack. She smoked this 6 or 7 times in my presence.”
  • I’ve redacted the name of the party leader, and asked the correspondent for the full name of the staffer, which I now have. I’m checking it out. Suffice to say, however, such a revelation in Week One would be damaging, to say the least.
  • Another example is found with this photo of Justin Trudeau a topless female. It was sent to me last night.  I was immediately suspicious about the photo, given that it was posted by a fierce critic of Trudeau. In my Twitter feed, photographers weighed in, saying they too thought it might be fake.
  • Apparently it wasn’t. It was shot at a Pride parade last year. It’s real, and I have been informed by a senior editor that Sun News Network even showed it on-air last year.  (Sigh.) Is the issue, then, that a young woman was topless? Of course not.  That’s been legal and proper for two decades.  Is the issue, instead, Justin Trudeau’s judgment – that a guy seeking the post of Prime Minister needs to be thinking twice about placing himself in situations that suggests to voters that he’s “not ready?” Of course it is.
  • More evidence of that came over the midnight transom was another photo, from this year’s Pride. To me, the photo is completely innocent, and no big deal.  But the objective in leaking this kind of stuff isn’t ever to get into the heads of guys like me – it’s (a) to get into the heads of some older, more-traditional voters who may be leaning Liberal, but aren’t quite sure yet, and (b) to generate some social-then-mainstream media heat, and thereby throw Trudeau off his big day.
  • The irony in all of this? Trudeau’s team have probably been hurt already – by themselves.  After weeks of skillfully lowering expectations for the debate, they this morning have reversed whatever they achieved with the boxing room stunt – and now look cocky and arrogant (and juvenile) in the bargain.  As one senior Liberal ministerial staffer told me on Facebook: “Wow!! Not sure I can verbalize more than that…visions of Stock Day on his jet ski are flashing before me!!!”
  • Exactly.  Thus, the irony: all of these leaks of pictures with topless women, and tales about crack-smoking staffers, aren’t as damaging to the candidates as what the candidates do to themselves.  Self-inflicted wounds in politics, I always say, are always the ones that cause the most damage.

UPDATE: Aaaand…it worked. Congrats, anonymous war room.

UPDATER: The woman in the photo at World Pride is no supporter of Trudeau, apparently, and seemingly posted it herself to do him some damage. Which should have persuaded Trudeau’s staff never to let the photo happen in the first place.


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KCCCC Day 4: master debaters

— 08.05.2015 06:00 AM

  • I can always tell when it’s an election, because reporters call guys like me, and pretend that we have insights to offer. Here’s a sampling.
  • On so-called negative ads: Former Alberta Wildrose leader Danielle Smith interviewed me on Calgary radio, here, and she did a pretty good job. Me: “They may not like it, but it is the advertising they remember. It is the advertising that motivates them, and it’s the advertising that changes their minds.” So why won’t Trudeau do any? Beats me.
  • On what to watch Thursday night: The GOP freak show or the Canadian leaders’ debate? Me: “I’ll be doing what everyone else will be doing — jumping back and forth and then when I get sick of Donald Trump I’ll stick to Canadian programming exclusively.” Others polled here.
  • Debate stories: There are a lot of them today, the debate being tomorrow. So, let’s interview folks who lost debates, like in  this one! Interview those who won their respective debates? Don’t be silly. Now, where’s that beer and popcorn?
  • Line of the campaign so far: Hands down, it’s this. Since they’re nothing but consistent, watch for Team Trudeau to speak about nothing else for two full days, and to issue an ad featuring  Justin saying: “I’m Justin Trudeau, and the Conservatives want to talk about my pants. But I want to talk about your pants.”
  • Premier opponent: It’s a proud Canadian tradition: when all else fails, attack another level of government! Does it work? Of course it does. When your opponent is insufficiently cloaked in sin, go after a Premier/Prime Minister of another stripe who is.  It’s an all-Canadian pastime!

Comments (51)