National Post (National Edition)
O'Toole gets last laugh over tempest in beer can
TWITTER IS FULL OF ANGER LOOKING FOR SOMEPLACE TO GO.
— TASHA KHEIRIDDIN
Poor Erin O'Toole just can't catch a break. On Friday night, the Conservative Party leader tweeted a snap of himself in a ball cap and sweaty blue T-shirt, holding a can of Legion Lager, captioned, “Starting the long weekend off right. Rebecca had a cold one waiting for me after my run. Wishing everyone a safe and relaxing long weekend.”
Twitter, start your engines.
As of Tuesday morning, over 3,000 people had “liked” O'Toole's post. Another 1,500, however, preferred to take time from their long weekend to post such comments as:
“Keeping women suppressed and controlled starts in the home. Be careful.” “Misogyny at its best.” “You guys still in the '50s.” “Is this part of the `make him more relatable' campaign cause it's not working.” Sigh.
To top it off, the French version translated “a cold one” to “une bonne froide.” This phrase garnered attention because it, um, doesn't actually exist in French, outside of Google Translate.
O'Toole's response was tongue-in-cheek. On Sunday, he tweeted a shot of himself offering his wife a glass of rosé on a silver tray adorned with flowers. This prompted even more “likes” (over 7,000) and comments (more than 2,000 at last count), mostly along the lines of:
“I'd rather have equal pay.” “Stop embarrassing yourself.”
“This just made your first tweet worse.”
And, my favourite,
“Those are NOT Roses! Those are yellow tulips! For gods sake! #NeverVoteConservative”
Perhaps this comment, and many like it, was due to the lack of an accent on the “e” in “rose.” Scrolling down to view the picture in the tweet was too much effort, apparently.
Apart from the obvious takeaway that Twitter is full of anger looking for someplace to go, this weekend's tempest in a beer can merits a closer look for what it reveals about the political process — and how Twitter mobs can be manipulated with 11 little words.
At first blush, from a communications perspective, O'Toole's tweet misses the mark. It's not clear who he's talking to: anyone fitness-conscious enough to go for a run at 9 p.m. on a Friday night probably isn't capping it off with a beer, and anyone who's happily quaffing lager at that hour likely hasn't just sweated through a 5K. If this was a voter-targeting exercise, it appears to be an epic fail.
That is, until you consider the reference to his wife having a beer waiting for him. That line was not gratuitous, but designed to poke a hornet's nest of progressives happy to light up the internet at a moment's notice. The theory goes: Cue the tweetstorm. Cue the backlash. Cue the votes.
O'Toole is appealing not just to a “red meat” base, as his critics contend, but to the broader crowd that thinks left-leaning voters have gone off the deep end when it comes to feminist issues. When progressives interpret a kind act by one's spouse as a harbinger of the Handmaid's Tale, people start to wonder — and to tune out.
Then there's the hypocrisy. Losing your lunch over O'Toole's lame tweet when the government of the day is mired in multiple military sex scandals is disingenuous to the extreme. It is far more eye-rolling to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's staff deflect questions on the Vance affair than to see O'Toole mugging for the camera with a beer.
Finally, tweet-storms have another effect: boosting name recognition. One of O'Toole's biggest issues is that, unlike Trudeau, he's not a household name. The Victoria Day antics got him modest media coverage, mostly on talk radio and social channels, when he otherwise would have had none. If no-press-is-bad-press is your school of thought, then O'Toole came out ahead.
In other words, Twitter, you've been had. The biggest takeaway isn't that a Conservative government would take Canada back to the 1950s. It's that politics has become hyperbolically partisan and minutely manipulated. Those who think they are playing the game, all too often, are just being played.