Politics and the power of ‘likeonomics’
So, as it turns out, Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t really hate the Canadian media.
In a remarkably relaxed interview with CBC-TV anchor Peter Mansbridge this week, Harper offered a very clearheaded view of why he couldn’t afford to get obsessed with coverage of himself or his government.
He said he lets his staff give him only an overview of the day’s news stories. What Harper gets at his morning meeting is more of an impressionistic sense of how the public sees politics — to the extent that Canadians are paying any attention at all.
“I want to get the view the public gets of media reporting. The public sees the big picture. They don’t get into every single editorial, or is every single, you know — is every single reference of me positive or negative? I don’t need to know that stuff,” Harper told Mansbridge.
“I would go crazy if I spent all my time obsessing on that stuff. I need to know the big picture.”
This fits with what Macleans magazine’s Paul Wells has written about the PMO preparing a daily “media barometer” for Harper of the biggest stories in the news.
And Harper confirmed to Mansbridge that this rather minimalist view of politics was not how he consumed the news before he got the big job leading the country.
Longtime viewers of CBC’s all-news channel, in fact, will remember that Harper was a weekly pundit for a while, churning out the kind of detailed, domestic political analysis he says he can’t watch or read now.
“Before I got into this world of being the prime minister of Canada, I was a bit of a news junkie and politics junkie.
“But I’m not interested in hearing myself analyzed inside and out. I’m sure much of it is useful and insightful but, in the end, I am not an objective judge on that kind of stuff.”
Note that last sentence. “Much of it is useful and insightful.” And: “I am not an objective judge.”
This is quite a different picture from the early days of the Harper government six years ago, when the Conservatives set themselves up as the judges of what was fair and insightful by way of media coverage and tried to unilaterally establish the rules of political-press engagement.
Now, however, with the benefit of a majority government and six years of experience, Harper is free to say aloud that perhaps the leader of the government is not exactly objective about his view of how he is covered. He might want to send out a memo to that effect to his Conservative supporters, especially on social media, who regard anything less than cheerleading as evidence of bias against their team.
SOMETHING ELSE MAY BE at work here, though, in Harper’s more relaxed view of perpetual war with the media enemy — some old-fashioned common sense newly packaged in a business-advice book called Likeonomics, by U.S. marketing expert Rohit Bhargava. Here’s a surprise: if you want to succeed in business, you need to be liked. Note: this isn’t the same as being “nice.” You don’t need to be a doormat, Bhargava stresses.
I read the book this week, to see if the lessons could be applied to Canadian politics — which, let’s face it, hasn’t really been all that likeable for a while now, dating back to well before Harper became PM.
In fact, if memory serves, Canadian politics tends to punish people who want to be liked. Good leaders are “strong” and “tough” and uncompromising and big on “discipline” — all the things that make many people cringe when they encounter such traits in their family members, neighbours or local retail outlets.
Bhargava offers businesses some insights on how not to be liked. One list, in the section dealing with truth, contains these tips on being thoroughly unlikeable: “always spin”; “embrace silence”; “no passion”; “no comment” and stick to the legal view of things.
That’s a perfect description of politics these days, which may explain why it’s so thoroughly unliked by Canadians.
When businesses practise techniques of “likeonomics,” they can actually get customers to make an extra effort, Bhargava writes. This again isn’t something we see very often from our politicians, who don’t appear capable of asking Canadians to make any effort whatsoever. Even paying taxes seems to be a bit of an imposition.
Some commentators around Ottawa — the kind Harper doesn’t read or watch, apparently — have been saying that Conservatives need a new tone; that it’s time to stop treating every dissenter as an enemy. Maybe it wouldn’t be bad, in other words, to try a little “like” here and there.
So maybe that’s what was behind Harper’s moderated view of his media critics this week. The prime minister may not have read Likeonomics, but perhaps he’s coming to the view that the unlikeable political practices are bad for the business of politics. Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star’s Ottawa bureau.