Nobody trusts a policy wank
Back in 1993 the top Conservative strategist Allan Gregg, who had previously spent a stint working for the US Republican party in order to study their techniques, launched what was at the time the most insulting negative TV ad in Canadian political history. It made fun of Jean Chretien’s facial deformity, and happily public opinion was united against the ad. That year the Conservatives went on to be reduced to a mere two seats in Parliament (for that and other reasons).
Those kinder, gentler days would appear to be over, as the Conservatives launched a vicious attack website last night, complete with a Facebook spoof, a blog from his dog, Kyoto, and a Flash game which lets you assemble B-roll footage of Dion from the Liberal leadership debates to create an attack ad of your own. The French content is a little thinner, but it’s not bad either. The site’s slick, and probably took a team of two to four people about a month to put together. There’s lots of footage of Ignatief, showing they were ready to focus an attack on him too. And people wonder why politicians all use teleprompters these days — when a gaff or slip of the tounge can be made into the focus of an attack ad within hours, you simply can’t afford a mistake. Only May of the Greens speaks from memory at press events, and frankly nobody takes her seriously enough to assemble those clips into something insulting her. (It wouldn’t be hard; she’s no brilliant orator.)
Also last night, the Liberals released scandalpedia.ca, which sticks a few press releases into a lame Wikipedia theme — I or anyone else in my department here could have done better working alone in a single day. (And if we’d done it the search function wouldn’t be broken.) The Globe had a front-page feature about another new website of theirs called “This is Dion” featuring him cross country skiing, hiking, and otherwise proving he’s a manly man, but as far as I can tell it’s not actually live. (Pop quiz: which leader do the Globe editors endorse?) For now they’ve just put up a photo on his bio proving Dion was just as much of a dork at age 12 as he is today. I’m starting to feel sorry for this guy, who only ever wanted to be an academic and policy wonk before Chretien pressured him into running for office.
We at the NDP are not planning to resort to personal insult, of course, and as usual will be sticking to policy and the strong leadership qualities of Jack Layton. The web content we’re working on here is mostly focussed on social networking, which is all the rage these days, as you can tell by the Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and FriendFeed links on ndp.ca (I’d never heard of that last one either). We’re ignoring MySpace because other than band websites it’s not widely used in Canada.
Meanwhile, Gregg has since remade himself as a non-partisan pollster and pundit fond of giving speeches to journalism students about why negative campaiging is a bad idea. As you might guess, he’s no longer employed by the Conservatives.
The meal plan for campaign staff here started yesterday, meaning I’ve now been eating much better. But it also means I no longer have to leave the office to eat, so I spent 15 hours here yesterday without venturing further from my cubicle than the staff kitchen. Maybe I should take up smoking so I can get more fresh air.