Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (20 page)

Canadians seemed to like this top-down, heed-the-president approach when they were shopping, but they didn’t seem to be in the mood for top-down government. All around, Gregg’s polling was showing him that Canadians were no longer so keen to see government in charge of public businesses. “In the past, governments created airlines, broadcasting systems, oil companies. Experience has now persuaded Canadians that running businesses is a task better left to the private sector,” Gregg wrote in his 1990 book, co-authored with Michael Posner,
The Big Picture
. That book, part state-of-the-nation, part soothsaying for the decade ahead, contained a generous mix of consumer and political wisdom, garnered through those Decima quarterlies:

In the political realm, we may see a candidate for office who maintains that he or she doesn’t believe in conventional politics, will not speak to partisan audiences and will declare all conflicts of interest. In the world of advertising, we may see commercials that do what they have seldom done—tell the truth about their products… In the past, leadership was a calculated balance between empathy and deference. Canadians needed to respect and revere their politicians, their clergymen and their captains of industry. But we also needed to have some sense of personal character—of what they’d be like to have to dinner. In the 1990s, deference will be obsolete… The only thing that will sell—apart from performance—is empathy.

Consumerism and politics were well-enmeshed by the 1990s in the United States, too. Ralph Nader, an outspoken consumer advocate, was even starting to take some serious runs for the presidency. His 1992 campaign manifesto made specific reference to “citizen consumers” and the rights of all Americans to more control and information about their democracy. Nader believed in an educated, engaged consumer—not the disengaged, checked-out voters that Reagan and Thatcher had courted.

And if Americans had believed Reagan to be a master marketer, they had yet to encounter Bill Clinton. The Clinton campaign represented a new milepost in marketing’s merger with politics, as Bruce Newman would explain in his 1994 book
The Marketing of the President
:

The Clinton campaign organization resembled the best-run marketing organizations in this country, such as Proctor & Gamble, McDonald’s, Quaker, and others. And as in these finely tuned marketing-driven organizations, Clinton’s campaign organizers kept their finger on the pulse of the consumer, the voter. Just as McDonald’s uses marketing research to decide where to open up new restaurant locations, Bill Clinton’s pollsters used the same technology to determine which states to target with commercials. Just as Quaker uses focus groups to decide which new products to bring to the marketplace, Bill Clinton’s researchers used focus groups to decide on how best to communicate their message of change about the economy to the American people.

One of the pollsters conducting those focus groups was Stanley Greenberg, the same man who had studied the Reagan Democrat phenomenon in the 1980s. Greenberg found that these people were coming back to the Democratic fold without much enthusiasm, but more out of disaffection with the status quo. Greenberg was starting to see the shape of the post-partisan world in North America. “They have not re-embraced the Democratic Party,” Greenberg told the Associated Press in 1992, as Clinton was nearing his White House goal. “They switched then because they felt sold out by the Democratic Party and now they feel the same way about the Republicans.”

In the foreword to
The Marketing of the President
, Jagdish Sheth laid out a series of conditions for marketing’s true arrival in democratic politics in the 1990s. First, he said, was the triumph of capitalism in the Cold War and the subsequent elevation of democratic
choice
as the only option for governments. The second factor cited by Sheth was the end of elitism and any notions that people had to be educated or sophisticated about politics to vote. Technological innovation was the third factor—proper marketing requires databases allowing political parties to target individual voters, just as the private sector could turn its focus to individual customers. “This is similar to what other service industries have recently implemented; for example, mail-order catalogue stores (L.L.Bean), airlines (frequent flyer programs), long-distance telephone companies (MCI’s ‘Friends and Family’ or AT&T’s ‘I’ plan), and others.” The fourth and most important factor for marketing to be merged with politics, Sheth wrote, was a prevailing mood of cynicism within the public—“to the extent that
caveat emptor
(buyer beware) is regarded as a safer approach to choosing parties and candidates than relying on the opinions of leaders, the press, party, or other institutions. In other words, the average public believes that they must personally take charge and even become vigilante voters.”

Canada met all those conditions in the 1990s, as Mulroney and the Conservatives had been learning to their peril. Capitalism and choice were thriving in the consumer society. Anti-elitism was rampant, as the public rejection of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional accords had proven. Deals hammered out by “elite” politicians were toxic in Canada. Cynicism was also on the rise. Databases were starting to take shape, with the early work done on the “prospecting” front by the Conservatives and the imminent arrival of a national, digital voters list. So Canada was ripe for marketing-style politics.

With Sheth’s conditions in mind, let’s look at how the decade unfolded in political-marketing terms for Canada. On some fronts, the 1990s presented some bold steps forward in the merger of consumerism and citizenship. Yet in other areas, Canada remained rooted to a more traditional, institutional form of politics.

Red Rebranded

The lead-up to the 1993 election and the campaign itself gave the country some marketing milestones. Allan Gregg accurately predicted that the Liberals, with their new leader Jean Chrétien, would probably benefit from the consumer-citizens’ desire for authenticity, while his own Conservative party, with the smooth-talking Brian Mulroney, might not. With people souring on the whole idea of politics, Gregg was fond of saying that Canadians had stopped looking for great men and women and would settle for plain-old good ones, even if they were a bit rough around the edges. Albertans had already proven this by electing Ralph Klein as their premier—a straight-shooting former mayor of Calgary who made no efforts to hide his fondness for smoking and downing a few beers at the bar. Chrétien, with his mangled English and slightly rumpled image, also appeared as a politician with those kind of everyman credentials. But it would take more than the right leader to win. The Liberals too were a major Canadian political brand at this point in their history, and this was to be a decade of “rebranding” in politics.

Chrétien was elected as Liberal leader at a June 1990 convention in Klein’s hometown of Calgary. Literally at that same moment, the same day, the Meech Lake constitutional accord was collapsing in failure. Chrétien didn’t have much of a honeymoon in the new job he’d fought so long to attain. Almost immediately, he was written off as out of touch with Quebec and the modern, fractious state of the Canadian nation. The Liberals would be sorry, critics predicted, for choosing a relic of the Trudeau years, a time synonymous with big government and out of touch with the more corporate style of governance in the modern era. Liberals would regret, the critics also predicted, their failure to choose the more business-friendly Paul Martin, former head of Canada Steamship Lines, who had supported Meech. For a while, the critics looked like they were going to be proven correct. Chrétien’s early performance as a leader was shaky; he made some major gaffes, such as arguing that Canada should only engage in military action in the Gulf War until the shooting started. Even more recklessly, in a slip that would haunt him, Chrétien the opposition leader had promised that the GST would “disappear” if he took power, even though he had spent his entire leadership campaign being far more cagey about his plans for the tax.

So the Liberals started applying some marketing lessons to their own beleaguered brand. The first efforts were less than successful, to put it mildly. Chrétien started using a teleprompter, which made him look even more unsure of himself, and wooden. “What happened to the old Jean Chrétien?” was the headline on a story by Southam News reporter Joan Bryden in November 1990: “Accustomed to taking oratorical flight without aids, Chrétien’s delivery rarely gets off the ground when he’s anchored by a text. And the teleprompter, used for all his major speeches now, can’t disguise the fact that Chrétien is being scripted. The passion, the humour, the endearing fractured English—all the trademarks that have for years made Chrétien one of the country’s most colourful and popular speakers—are missing.” The lesson? There’s smart marketing and dumb marketing.

In 1991 Chrétien’s office got a shakeup, with a new chief of staff—former Quebec City mayor Jean Pelletier, who brought an elegant form of discipline to the operation. As well, Chrétien found a new communications director named Peter Donolo, who had been working for Toronto mayor Art Eggleton and had attracted favourable notice for his speechwriting skills. Smart, funny and an astute observer of cultural and political trends, Donolo was also young—just thirty years old: young enough to have grown up in a political age saturated with television, commercials and consumerism.

The efforts to make Chrétien into a new product reminded Donolo of the “new Coke” fiasco—a reference to Coca-Cola’s disastrous effort to update its iconic product in the mid-1980s. Facing a steadily declining lead against Pepsi over fifteen years, Coke’s executives decided a bold move was needed. So it whipped up a new recipe, did taste tests against the old one with thousands of cola consumers and unveiled the testers’ favourite as the “new Coke.” The public backlash was large and immediate. What Coke had not appreciated was the emotional bond with the product. It was a powerful marketing lesson: it’s the
idea
of the product, not just the material object itself. People felt that their old memories and attachment to Coke were being tossed aside, as well as the old formula. Coca-Cola was forced into retreat, reissuing its old product as “Coca-Cola Classic.”

There was indeed a direct connection here to the political realm. A politician, maybe even more than a mere cola drink or product, carries the freight of people’s emotions and memories, too. He (or she) is a “brand.” And when the Liberals tried to cook up a new recipe for Chrétien as leader, citizens—especially Liberals—started to wonder what happened to all they’d invested in and expected of the old Chrétien, the man they thought they knew. It was as Gregg had predicted—emotion and authenticity were becoming crucial to Canada’s consumer-citizens.

The solution? “Chrétien classic.” Under Donolo’s suggestion, Chrétien was outfitted in an ordinary guy’s denim shirt, and the portrait was plastered on posters and pins to play up his “little guy from Shawinigan” reputation. Or, as Donolo would put it, “to make a virtue out of his rough-hewedness.” To demonstrate that Chrétien was not “yesterday’s man,” that he was vibrant and fit, Donolo arranged for a camera to capture a picture of Chrétien water-skiing at his cottage.

The Liberals also decided at this point to amicably part with Martin Goldfarb as their pollster, and went shopping for another one. In strode Michael Marzolini, a far more subdued character than the larger-than-life Goldfarb. Marzolini earned Chrétien’s seal of approval by promising blunt candour in private and a low profile in public. Marzolini had taught himself computer programming at night while working at a Toronto technology firm. Like Gregg, he made forays to the United States, to study the methods of Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin. Goldfarb was a hero to Marzolini, but while the former pollster liked anthropology, the new pollster was more of a military aficionado, preferring to pepper his presentations with talk of “carpet-bombing” polls. Marzolini did believe, however, that you could learn a lot through anthropological observation. He once embedded himself for a week in the low-income community of Regent Park in Toronto, because he didn’t believe he was learning enough about that demographic slice of Canada through telephone polling. He also did a lot of his thinking and reflecting while smoking cigars on the sundeck of his upscale Yorkville office, watching the shoppers below on the sidewalk. Marzolini, taking over from Goldfarb, knew that he would be giving very different advice. Canadians had lost their appetite for grand visions or promises and were far more disposed to politicians who would promise to save their money, get on with the job of governing and leave them alone.

It was at a big conference the Liberals held in November 1991, just across the river from Ottawa in Aylmer, Quebec, that the Liberals would actually recast their policy and focus. The lead-up to the “Alymer Conference” was pitched by the media as a tussle between the traditional left and the new right. Somehow, the party had to shake off the impression, certainly sealed in the 1988 election, that the Liberals were anti-trade and anti-modernization. The Liberals invited Lester Thurow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to lecture the Grits on economic matters such as innovation, technology and globalization. Each pole in the Liberal party had its champion at Aylmer. On the left was Lloyd Axworthy, former cabinet minister and brother of Tom Axworthy, Trudeau’s principal secretary, while Roy MacLaren, founder of
Canadian Business
magazine, was the leading voice for the people who wanted to shift the party in a more rightward direction. By the end of the Aylmer conference, the Liberals left little doubt about where they were tacking their sails. Chrétien called protectionism “passé,” and globalization “a fact of life.” Roy MacLaren was gleeful, summing up the Aylmer gathering as a victory over the old left wing: “Eat your heart out, Lloyd Axworthy.” That quote, more than anything else, was broadly circulated as the result of this rebranding conference.