Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (28 page)

Harper had also been struck by an old story about Ronald Reagan and his understanding of how images worked in politics. Back in the 1980s, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl had gone back through Reagan’s public appearances, posing with disabled athletes or at a nursing home, and shown viewers how the pictures were direct contradictions of the president’s deeds, particularly cuts in funding to these very constituencies. It was a tough piece, and Stahl expected the White House to be furious with her. But they were not. In fact, Reagan’s staff was delighted. “Nobody heard what you said,” Stahl was told. The pictures were all that the viewers remembered. Harper took that lesson to heart, and his staff would learn to pay as much attention to the staging of his announcements as to the substance within them. He found himself a makeup artist to keep on staff. And even though his tastes didn’t run to beer or coffee, Harper would market himself as the kind of guy who would be happy to linger over a double-double at Tim Hortons or knock back a few ales after a hockey game. If everything else in the Conservative camp was getting a marketing makeover to suit the consumers, so would the leader. People would only remember the pictures anyway.

“Stephen Harper was probably the first true, modern communications prime minister. He was born in the TV era. He grew up in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s. He spent a lot of time following politics,” Muttart said. Harper had also dabbled in some marketing himself. His stint with the National Citizens Coalition from 1997 to 2001 had taught Harper a thing or two about how to lob political ideas into the marketplace. From its humble beginnings as Colin Brown’s protest against government spending in the 1970s, the NCC had grown to be a powerful grassroots ally to conservative politicians in Canada. The NCC and the Taxpayers Federation had been wildly successful at driving home to Canadians the idea that they were consumers of government services, and cranky ones at that.

“Throughout my time with him he would personally reference [NCC] campaigns that he ran,” Muttart said. “He ran an organization that was in the business of erecting billboards, running direct-mail campaigns. So I don’t think we’ve ever had a prime minister who had direct, personal experience being a marketer.” This, Muttart said, was the crucial difference between Harper and any of his predecessors in the job—he was Canada’s first marketing prime minister.

Much of his marketing knowledge came from on-the-job training. When he first arrived at the NCC offices, Harper had wanted to tone down some of the hard-sales tactics of the coalition, to make it more of a think-tank and less like an advocacy group. That tug of war, or the bargaining between institutional and consumer politics, was still going on in his mind, in other words. He changed the name of the NCC’s newsletter, from “The Bulldog” to “Freedom Watch.” Harper didn’t like personal attacks on politicians and he wasn’t fond of NCC’s “pigs at the trough” campaign against MP pensions. Gerry Nicholls, who worked at the NCC as Harper’s vice-president, tried to persuade Harper that the high road often went right over people’s heads—or at least the people the NCC was trying to reach. At one point, Harper turned his own hand to writing a radio ad, which went on for over two minutes and included a scattergun of attacks on Liberal corruption and election laws that limited third-party advertising. “It was a mess,” Nicholls said in an interview. Harper was eventually persuaded to keep the NCC radio ads to thirty seconds and one main idea. He had learned, in other words, what Muttart knew about the eighty-two-word limit for television and the three-second rule for direct mail.

Gradually, Harper also started to come around to hard-sell marketing, Nicholls said, especially when it came to attacking the Wheat Board and Elections Canada. In August 2001, he sent out a “personal letter” (actually drafted by Nicholls) that started, “The jackasses at Elections Canada are out of control. Please excuse my language, but when I learned Elections Canada’s bureaucrats have pressed charges against a Canadian citizen, I just blew my cool. That is the exact language I used.” The letter was a protest against a citizen who was facing fines of up to $25,000 for prematurely posting election results on his website. “And no, it wasn’t part of a criminal conspiracy, or luring children toward violent pornography. It was actually something government officials seem to believe is a lot more dangerous—information.”

Nicholls was a fan of the communication school of Arthur Finkelstein, a Republican strategist famed for attack ads in the United States that featured a lot of repetition, demonization of opponents and name-calling. “Punchy, short on substance and long on emotion”—that’s the formula for a good ad campaign, Nicholls believed. And Harper, by the end of his tenure at the NCC, was getting more comfortable with the hard, blunt and simple method of communicating. In the 2001 provincial election in Alberta, the NCC ran radio ads against the Liberals that starkly stated, “You have a simple choice in this election. You can either vote for the Liberals or you can vote for Alberta.”

So by the time Harper came to leading the Conservative party into the 2005 election campaign, he’d been well seasoned in the art of the political attack—on the receiving end, more than the giving end, however. In the 2004 election campaign, the Liberals had pulled together a whole series of ads organized around the idea that Harper and his Conservatives were scary. The advertising came from the Bensimon Byrne agency, the firm responsible for the Molson rant.

The most powerful Liberal attack ad featured a female narrator, her words set against a background of ominous music, intoning about all the frightening things that would happen to Canada if Harper were the prime minister: troops in Iraq, US-style health care, a rollback of abortion rights. As the camera zoomed in on a picture of the Canadian flag, the narrator said, “Stephen Harper says that when he’s through with Canada we won’t recognize it.” And then, as the flag began to burn, came the final thrust: “You know what? He’s right.” Jack Bensimon was later quoted as saying never “in all my marketing experience [had I] witnessed as powerful an impact for a single ad.” Not long after the ad was launched, the Liberals began to rally from a downward spiral in the polls and in the end eked out a minority victory over the Conservatives. Even among some Conservatives, negative impressions of Harper lingered. The always-fearless John Crosbie, formerly a top minister in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet in the 1980s, told the
National Post
in 2005, “Among our friends, the women think he’s scary.” One of Muttart’s main objectives going into the 2005 election, then, was to somehow erase this “scary” label that had been successfully affixed to Harper.

Muttart also had a staunch ally in Doug Finley, the gruff, Scots-born campaign chief for the Conservatives. Like Muttart, Finley had dallied with the Liberals in his past—as well as with Scottish nationalists in his native land. When Finley was nineteen, he helped in the campaign that elected the first Scottish National Party MP to Westminster. Finley moved to Canada in 1968, just in time to see Pierre Trudeau elected prime minister. With his degree in business administration, he got a job with Rolls-Royce, moving up to director of corporate planning and business development. In his spare time, he volunteered on Liberal campaigns in Quebec, including the 1974 election. He then moved on to Winnipeg with his second wife, Diane, and stayed out of politics for a while. It was only after he moved to southern Ontario in the late 1990s that he drifted toward active Conservative politics, first at the provincial level, then with the Canadian Alliance. Finley obviously impressed Harper when he was running the Perth–Middlesex by-election campaign for the Conservatives in 2003, because when Harper ran for leader of the newly merged Conservative party in 2003, Finley was his campaign manager. And when Tom Flanagan stepped back from his role as campaign chief overall—after the unsuccessful Conservative campaign in 2004—the reins were passed to Finley.

Finley was notoriously fond of organization and technology and campaigns he had run included lots of high-tech bells and whistles. This was largely a product of his business and sales background, according to Muttart. “His business life was spent in sales and marketing for large corporations, so he actually had experience with client-contact-management systems. He had experience with marketing collateral. He had experience making sales presentations,” Muttart said.

Pantazopoulos, the pollster, also had a keen eye for marketing techniques. After his early years working with the Reform Party, he had gone to the United States to work first with Frank Luntz and then with a company called Market Strategies Inc., where renowned consultants Fred Steeper and Alex Gage became his mentors. Gage would turn out to be a highly influential force in the Republicans’ early efforts to turn consumer data into political intelligence and the resulting transformation of American campaign methods in the twenty-first century. Pantazopoulos, meanwhile, also liked to use consumer analogies when he was framing political situations, which was probably in part a product of his bachelor’s degree in commerce from Carleton University. He had read carefully and absorbed the sales wisdom contained in Robert Jolles’s book
Customer Centered Selling
, especially the insights about “decision cycles.” Over thirty years selling computers for Xerox, Jolles had come up with an eight-stage system to anticipate and eventually meet consumer needs, over and over again. Pantazopoulos saw how this approach could be transferred to the political world, if the strategists could present a political platform or politician as the answer to voters’ needs and problems. It would be Pantazopoulos’s job, then, to identify those needs and problems through extensive on-the-ground surveys. It would be Harper’s job to present himself as the reply to consumer-citizens’ demand.

Another person who would end up doing a lot of marketing for Harper was Dimitri Soudas, who also had found his entree into politics through the Liberal party. Part of the Greek community in Montreal, the son of a single mother, Soudas had started dabbling in politics when he was fourteen years old, as one of a young band of volunteers working for local Liberal MP Eleni Bakopanos. He fell out with the Liberals when he applied to do an internship on Parliament Hill and learned that the positions went to relatives of high-ranking party members. Stung by the rejection, Soudas went looking for a new political party to support. His best friend Leo Housakos had been involved with the Progressive Conservatives in Quebec but had migrated to the Canadian Alliance, running as a candidate in 2000. Although Housakos didn’t make it to Ottawa after that campaign, his friend did. Soudas moved to Ottawa in 2002, not long after Harper had come back into politics as leader and when the Canadian Alliance was in strong need of bilingual, Quebec talent.

Soudas and Finley weren’t the only former Liberals in Stephen Harper’s circle, either. Mark Cameron, who had worked in the office of Stéphane Dion, had slowly migrated over to the Conservatives during the Canadian Alliance years. Cameron and Muttart had penned a devastating memo to Harper and Flanagan after the 2004 election, dissecting the anatomy of the campaign failures, especially in the domain of communication. They believed the Conservatives had to get far more serious about political marketing, paying attention to market research and strict message discipline.

Harper was impressed enough with the memo to put Muttart in charge of upping the Conservatives’ marketing game for the next election. Jason Kenney, who had left the Taxpayers Federation in the late 1990s to enter elected politics, said that when Muttart started to make his marketing presentations to staffers, “you could hear a pin drop” in the room.

Kenney, like Harper, had been well schooled in the arts of grassroots politicking and direct marketing through his work with an advocacy organization. He had learned that hundreds of plastic pigs on the lawn of Parliament would garner more attention than hundreds of pages of text. And Kenney had also migrated to the Conservatives from the Liberals—he had even worked in the 1980s in the office of Saskatchewan Liberal leader Ralph Goodale.

The presence of former Liberals around Harper, not to mention his own early dalliances with other parties, would not be an insignificant factor in the Conservatives’ marketing approach to politics. These were people who knew a thing or two about the floating-loyalty phenomenon that was now a crucial factor in a “flexible” Canadian electorate. All of these allegiance-shifters had watched what the Liberals had done right (and wrong) in the marketing realm, and were ready to take some of those lessons to another level.

The Conservatives’ decision to forget about Zoe, for instance, was actually another leap forward using an old strategy of political-marketing efficiency. Patrick Muttart, by deciding where election-campaign efforts should be directed, was merely following in a straight line from the strategic wisdom that Keith Davey, the ad guys and Martin Goldfarb brought to the Liberals back in the 1960s, and then Allan Gregg, with his “typology” demographics and ridings, brought to the Conservatives in the 1980s. Where the previous marketing-savvy politicos advised that resources be directed to winnable geographic regions, however, Muttart was simply focusing more precisely: to winnable
individuals
. With the benefit of far more refined polling techniques, and thanks to improvements in technology over the decades, the Conservatives could “hyper-segment” the Canadian electorate beyond vague regions, into pockets of individual Canadians, organized largely around lifestyle and neighbourhood. It didn’t hurt either that the Conservatives had a pollster, Pantazopoulos, who had been working in the United States with some of the pioneers in analyzing consumer and political data in micro-segments. This approach was arriving in Canada as “politics by postal code”—something the consumer-marketing world had learned many years earlier.