You don’t have to look too far to see where the Conservative, NDP, and yes, Liberal, strategists believe the is key to scrapping some of the polish off of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s shine in the polls. A brief glance at some of the front pages of the major newspapers tells the story.
Playing on the nice hair theme, the opposition parties and their teams are taking every effort to paint that picture in people’s minds before the next federal election cycle comes around.
With previous Liberal leaders, the well-oiled and well-financed Tory attack machine were able to set their own hooks to bring them down by getting in early and planting the seed that could then be nurtured into a poll winning strategy.
In that manner, Stephane Dion, a bona fide Canadian hero with a reputation as a paragon of integrity, a man who kept the nation together during one of its darkest hours during the Quebec referendum, was painted as a fool who would lead the nation into penury through his ill-advised strategy of combating climate change. Then the big guns turned on his successor, Michael Ignatieff, a man with a towering global reputation as a thinker who, like so many other Canadian icons, had built much of his fame in academia, and overseas. He was painted as a selfish glory seeker who was simply “not in it for you.”
This strategy of attack ads setting the narrative backfired when it came to Justin Trudeau because, unlike his predecessors in the crosshairs, Canadians already had a long standing narrative to fall back on. Many of us had grown up with him, he had a winning smile, and yes, great hair, but he also followed a strategy of hope, a belief that we could find a better, more quintessentially Canadian way of approaching challenges. Sunny ways.
This played so well against the angry old stock male persona that Canadians had come to associate with the Harper government that, once they started to pay attention, resonated in the Canadian psyche. Of course, it helped tremendously that the polished, very accomplished political warrior that is NDP leader Tom Mulcair lost credibility by attempting to be Liberal-lite, some might even suggest Tory-lite in the end (not to mention that his Angry Tom played poorly against his own predecessor Jack Layton’s Smiling Jack version of sunny ways).
Deep in backrooms of the various party headquarters (perhaps in an atmosphere no longer heavy with cigar smoke and the smell of expensive scotch, but still well shrouded in shadows), strategists have poured over the entrails provided by focus groups and targeted polls to settle on where the best traction can be found.
So for the foreseeable future, expect more stories of the prime minister hanging out with well-heeled old family friends like the fabled Aga Khan (a pall bearer at Justin Trudeau’s father’s funeral) because, well, how else to convince the electorate that Trudeau the Younger is not in touch with their daily travails? The lightweight-nice hair mud just didn’t have much sticking power. Apparently we kinda like our leaders young, hip and stylish.
On the other side of the ledger, between now and the next federal election, expect to see a lot more of the prime minister connecting with “ordinary” Canadians and criss-crossing the country on campaign-style junkets. Because the Liberal strategists know through their own focus groups and polling that this is where the answer to their opponent’s gambit lies.
Sadly, the new political reality seems to be focussed solely on facile stratagems conducted for a celebrity, reality television driven world, and we in the fifth estate seem destined to play the enablers to this deplorable waste of time. Because in a celebrity, reality television driven world, those stories sell.
We can only hope and pray that those headed into the next round of focus groups and polling responses identify policy initiatives and sensible long-term planning as the government of the day’s Achilles Heel. Perhaps then we can have government’s totally focussed on the job at hand, because, in a phrase coined by the late, great Liberal ‘Rainmaker’ Keith Davey, in politics—perception is reality.
