‘DIVA OF DEFLECTION’ FINDS IT CAN BACKFIRE
Clark’s accusation of NDP hacking, belated apology are gifts to Opposition
Opposition Leader John Horgan was in an upbeat mood Friday, having enjoyed a good week thanks mainly to Premier Christy Clark having had a very bad one.
The premier had falsely accused the New Democrats of criminally hacking the B.C. Liberal Party website on Tuesday, then compounded the frame-up over several days before finally apologizing to Horgan at the end of the week.
Unable to reach the NDP leader directly by phone, Clark delivered her apology to voicemail, then suggested that reporters should check to see if he had got it, a state of affairs that Horgan milked for laughs during his own media scrum.
No, he had not yet listened to the premier’s backdown-by-digital recording, he told reporters after a lunchtime address to the Vancouver Board of Trade.
“She just created a problem for herself,” said Horgan. “She has been creating a bigger problem for herself as each day went by, and now it’s incumbent on me to get into the madness with her? Well, I’ve got other things to do.”
While assuring the media that he would get around to listening “when I have time” (as he eventually did do), Horgan joked that in the interim he might change the message on his voicemail: “Press 1 to apologize to me; 2 to apologize to the people of B.C.” — or words to that effect.
This followed on the NDP leader’s generally wellreceived address to the crowd of 150 or so representatives of the business community, whose confidence in another term of Liberal government must have been a little shaken by the premier’s antics during the week.
Some of those in the room were likely contributors to the $3-million series of attack ads that portray Horgan in unflattering terms as “Say-anything John.” Reflecting on the irony of that message in light of the premier’s vacillations, one NDP staffer quipped “I wish we had a million dollars to launch ‘Say-anything Christy.’ ”
But perhaps there will be no need for paid advertising, given how quickly the theme was being spread for free through social media over the weekend. Nor were New Democrats the only ones cracking jokes at the premier’s expense. One of the best came courtesy of Vicki Huntington, the independent MLA whose staff first uncovered the gaping lack of security on the governing party’s website and flagged the concern to columnist Mike Smyth.
The Delta South MLA initially asked for anonymity in leaving the expose of the Liberal security lapse to the Province columnist. But after Clark tried to frame her own party’s incompetence as evidence of an NDP hack, Huntington went public, first with Smyth, then with host Jon McComb on radio station CKNW.
Talking to the latter on Friday morning, Huntington aptly nailed Clark’s tendency to cover her own screwups and those of her party by trying to direct attention elsewhere. “The diva of deflection,” Huntington called her, and there’s a characterization that might stick.
Another laugh line played on the scorn that Clark had heaped on reporters earlier in the week for having the temerity to ask for evidence of her contention — made during a live-streamed interview with me on Facebook — that the NDP had hacked the Liberal website.
“I mean, honestly, British Columbians do not care about all that inside baseball stuff,” huffed the premier, invoking the jargon term for excessive attention to minutia. “I think people want to hear me talking about what my plan is and my determination to stick to it in order to build B.C. and make sure that we create more jobs.”
A classic example of the Clark media management method: mock reporters for being obsessed with details, details, when she dropped the hacking bombshell in the first place. But by Friday, when she was making the fourth attempt to sort out her own reckless accusation, one wag in the press gallery quipped: “If this story is inside baseball, it must be the World Series of inside baseball.”
Seething through all this were a number of B.C. Liberals, mindful of how the premier had detracted attention from the buildup to this week’s throne speech and next week’s provincial budget.
Between Monday and Friday of last week, the Clark cabinet, the premier’s office, and the government communications apparatus rolled out about $800 million worth of good news announcements. They ranged from the $102-million promise of 16 new operating rooms at Vancouver General Hospital, to steps forward on a $150-million courthouse in Abbotsford, and a $417-million patient care tower at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops.
All that carefully crafted evidence of the governing party’s good intentions in an election year. But it had to share space in the news lineups with the premier’s serial evasions of the truth.
Nor were there any grounds for blaming dimbulb functionaries, detail-obsessed pundits, or even Internet trolls. It was all her own work — and as Horgan put it in a Facebook interview with me on Friday, evidence of a failure of character to boot.
Whether any of this will have a lasting effect remains to be seen. One needs only to think back to the 2013 provincial election to recall how, with a tip of the hat to baseball great Yogi Berra, it ain’t over till it’s over.
Still, the premier’s bumbling performance last week should dispel notions that a fifth term of B.C. Liberal government is anything like a foregone conclusion.
I mean, honestly, British Columbians do not care about all that inside baseball stuff. CHRISTY CLARK, premier