Defeated politicians are too easy on themselves
is a mournful tone to Brian Topp’s postmortem on the last B.C. election, as one might expect. The NDP, whose campaign he directed, went down to defeat, though it led in every poll until the end. And yet it is not for himself or his party he weeps. It is for us.
Through its 42 carefully leaked pages, the document attempts a degree of selfcriticism. Various strategic errors are confessed. There were opportunities missed, warning signs that should have been heeded. But mostly it is a lament for the state of modern politics. What has this world come to, it seems to ask, that good people like us could be defeated?
The Liberals were reelected, he argues, because they played dirty, while the NDP took the high road. “We undertook a principled, admirable and well-intentioned attempt to conduct a positive campaign,” he writes, “in the face of an opponent playing by the right-wing populist playbook.” While the NDP made a point of avoiding personal attacks on Premier Christy Clark, the Liberals went after Adrian Dix with lusty abandon.
The lesson he draws from the experience: We should do the same. “This campaign demonstrates again that negative messages about leaders cut through and are remembered, unless they are countered in kind.” The next campaign, he writes, “must contrast the choices and remind voters of the government’s record in clear, compelling and straightforward language from the first day of the campaign,” including “engag(ing) the opposing leader by name, every day, and at every level.” Translation: attack, attack, attack.
Something of the same analysis, though without the “blood for blood” moral, emerges from Michael Ignatieff ’s memoirs of his time in politics, Fire and Ashes. Again, he confesses his own errors and omissions. But here again you find repeated references to the mean things his opponents said about him. “I have to hand it to the prime minister,” he writes. “He didn’t attack what I said. He attacked my right to say anything at all. He denied me standing in my own country.”
There is of course a great deal of truth in both complaints. The B.C. Liberals did run an intensely negative campaign, while the federal Tories’ penchant for the low blow is well known, and relentless.
But it’s just a little too tidy to blame your defeat on your opponents’ nastiness. As an exercise in self-criticism, “we were too admirably principled” sounds a bit like those insufferable types who, asked to list their weaknesses in a job interview, reply “I think sometimes I care too much.”
Topp himself lists a dozen other reasons why the NDP lost: complacency, disorganization, internal divisions, an unclear message, an uninspiring vision and, of course, Dix’s own mistakes as leader, notably his sudden mid-campaign flip-flop on the Kinder Morgan pipeline. And the NDP were not above “going negative,” especially in the latter half of the campaign, as their lead started to fade, with a massive $1.5-million media buy attacking the Liberal record.
So far as the party chose to avoid direct attacks on the premier, Topp reveals, it was entirely a tactical decision: It had nothing to do with any principled aversion to getting their hands dirty. In part it was to give them something to talk about, “to make the right’s focus on negative politics a campaign issue in its own right.”
And in part it was because of nervousness about their own leader’s most prominent piece of baggage, what Topp calls “the circumstances of his resignation” as chief of staff to former premier Glen Clark — which is to say his doctoring of an incriminating memo to provide the premier with an alibi against conflict-of-interest charges. That’s why they were so negative on negativity. The emphasis on “positive politics,” Topp writes, was “an attempt to inoculate us against the obvious Liberal attack.”
When it became obvious this wasn’t working, they briefly contemplated reversing field (“We considered pivoting the campaign and turning directly to an attack on Christy Clark”). The only reason they didn’t was that the focus groups objected. The party having explicitly and repeatedly committed to staying positive, it seemed that people expected them to keep their word. Imagine that.
I agree with Topp on one point: If you’re going to go nice, don’t make it the centrepiece of your campaign. As he writes, “parties who ask for mandates to ‘change politics’ risk sounding like they are talking about themselves instead of about the electorate.” Not only is the public more interested in pocketbook issues, but nattering on about how decently you’re behaving makes you look pious, asking to be congratulated for something that should come naturally.
Indeed, it reveals it for the tactical choice it is. So: don’t talk about it. Just do it. Show, don’t tell.
And don’t blame the public for your failings. Ignatieff complains that his attempts to make an issue of the Conservatives’ abuse of Parliament fell flat. “So instead of getting the democracy they deserve, voters end up paying for their own disillusion.”
Paying for their own disillusion — or for your inability to make it clear why they should care? It isn’t enough to say something’s a problem. You have to offer serious solutions before people will pay attention.
This is a point that eludes many people in politics. When a campaign fails, their first instinct (beyond blaming the public) is to “reposition” themselves — not to find a better way to persuade people to their point of view, but to find a new point of view.
Guys, guys: Don’t be so easy on yourselves. You’re in the persuasion business. If you can’t persuade people, probably best to choose another line of work.