Why writers/journalists make lousy politicians
One take is found here. It’s well done, but I think it misses the key point.
And I say this as (a) someone who ran and (b) someone whose writings figured in my loss: writers and journalists and commentators make for lousy candidates because they have left a written record that can be used against them.
One sunny day in the Summer of 2009, I stood in the boardroom in room 409-S on Parliament Hill, which – until Ignatieff came along – had always been occupied by Liberals or Conservatives, but never New Democrats. He approached me, and we chit-chatted.
The $4 million “Just Visiting” barrage hadn’t started yet, and Ignatieff was in a voluble mood. I wasn’t. He asked me what I was worried about. I pointed through the window of 409-S at the hulk of PMO’s Langevin, across the street.
“See there?” I said. “There’s a hundred little Tory bastards in there who have digitized and catalogued every single thing that you ever wrote or said on the BBC or anywhere else. And they’re getting ready to use it against you, and I don’t even know what they’ve got.”
Ignatieff was unconvinced. There’s a statute of limitations on such things, he suggested. “Some of that stuff is twenty years old!” he said.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “A good war room will take something that happened twenty years ago and make it look like it was said yesterday.”
And so they did. They took old Iggy statements and destroyed him with them. There is, as I later told disbelieving Liberals, no statute of limitations on “fucking stupidity.”
And that’s why writers/authors/journalists/commentators make lousy candidates: they have a past, they have a record, and it’s more easily-accessible than ever before. In order to be any good in the media game, of course, they have to say something that is controversial, at some point. And that’s where guys like me get them: we dig it up, drop it in someone’s lap, and their former colleagues/best buddies will go at it like sharks to chum dropped off the side of a boat. Guaranteed.
Wanna be a perfect candidate in the modern age? Don’t ever write or say anything.
