End of an era for the Leader’s Tour
Lyndon Johnson finagled a helicopter from a rich oil pal in his 1948 Senate campaign in Texas. It transformed politics there and across North America for the next six decades.
The ability to cram in as many as a dozen events a day with a few select reporters on board was unheard of. Campaigns were conducted serenely by private train, maybe three or four whistle stops a day, with a carload of hard-drinking reporters in back.
Dwight Eisenhower flew across the U.S. in a turboprop filled with journalists and staff in ’52, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the idea took root in Canada in four back-to-back elections from 1962 to ’68. This launched modern high-speed campaigning with leaders often covering thousands of miles for breakfast, lunch and night events in distant provinces.
The Leader’s Tour worked for the parties and for the press. The Leader had a guaranteed senior press corps with him always and the media — generously fed and watered day and night — never worried that a missed plane meant a missed story.
The Tour, its refinement and its flawless execution became a high political art. Keith Davey, Harry Near and Cliff Scotton competed on who could offer the best meals, the best events, the best staff sup- port for the media on whose good humour they depended. Trapped in planes and hotel rooms for 57 days, careers — and marriages — were made and broken in a high testosterone competitive daily scramble.
Much alcohol and many cigarettes were consumed from bleak 6 a.m. starts to 1 a.m. slogs to your room.
Early computers — famously Radio Shack’s dreadful iPhone-sized TRS-80 — began to undermine the logic of paying thousands of dollars a week to have reporters risk becoming Stockholm Syndrome victims. Mobile phones put another nail in, but it was the Internet and social media that were the death knell for the Tour.
Reporters can tweet in mid-air, file stories every15 minutes and pass tips to their colleagues, so why be trapped on a coast-to coast flight? The 2015 campaign will cost your employer $50,000 for the privilege!
They will still stage the Tours this year but the party is almost over. Politicians like the control over where the media go and what they see and hear. The fear of not being there when disaster strikes in northern B.C. or a leader is attacked coming out of a late night rally will keep the media pack grumpily in harness one more time. But not for much longer, I suspect.
The costs are too high and the restrictions too irritating for most struggling news organizations. In future they will pool report and staff campaigns on the ground region by region, filling the gaps with tweets and Vine video clips snatched from anywhere. It’s too bad. As ritualistic and artificial as they often were, the Tours had ancillary benefits our politics will lose with their passing.
It’s hard to be viciously insulting to a politician or a colleague you will be sitting beside for weeks ahead. It’s harder still to construct and believe ridiculous stereotypes about the politician who lent you her cellphone to call your daughter when your phone is on the bus, or the colleague who corrected your story, avoiding a career-damaging gaffe.
Small-town Canada got to see the leaders and big-league media got to hear what they thought of them. Elections are much about judging character, looking behind the artifice the political handlers spend months and millions crafting. Assessing character in how a leader treats his staff, hotel employees at midnight, and in the voter encounters he didn’t plan anyone to witness, happen every day on the Tour. Judging a leader’s soul, her ability to cope with incredible stress and fatigue, is much harder on a remote laptop screen.
Like soldiers returning from combat, Tour veterans would swap war stories for years.
One of my favourites concerns Jimmy Carter and the New York Times. There is a Tour hierarchy, big media get the best treatment.
Carter never loved the Times and hated their habit of arriving late. As their limo raced across the tarmac later than everyone else, Carter stood in the doorway of the plane. He turned to the steward and said, “Shut the door. Now. We’re leaving.” The pack bellowed their approval. The Times was never late again.