Bruce Anderson on Political Spin

 

I’ve no quarrel with governments advertising to make people aware of programs and services, to encourage socially useful behaviour, and to build knowledge around important national issues.

 

But these days the government seems addicted to spending our money to shape our mood. They want voters to feel good about the way things are. And worried about how they would be if another party was running things.

 

There is no truth in politics. 

 

There is framing, there is messaging, there is crisis response, but these things are all about controlling the narrative.  Theoretically, politics is Socratic; everyone speaks their spin and between the messages presented, people can discern the truth.  It's a little bit like saying laissez-faire capitalism is the best way to solve poverty.

 

If you are a political operative - particularly a successful one - this reality is gospel, so deeply engrained as to be subconscious.  The truth doesn't matter; what the people believe and doubt does.

 

There's a great quote from the favourite movie of a former leader: A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.

 

Don't feel too resentful about this.  The truth is, politics wouldn't be that way if we demanded more of it.  But to demand more of politics requires us to be more informed, more engaged, more involved and frankly, we just don't have the time.

 

Here's the problem.

 

Politics is about winning, not about governing.  Governing has become about winning, too - feeding the short-term cycle of narrow focuses and picked fights that accrue half-policies and quarter-commitments over time.

 

Our democratic system has been dying from a thousand cuts for some time now, and by disassociating ourselves with the process - government is employees, paid for by our tax dollars, don't you know - we have been self-inflicting these wounds.

 

We're seeing the impact of this societal abuse now.  The platform is catching fire.  Yet still, we point fingers, call for heads and never ask why the problems persist no matter who is in power.  We can keep getting mad at the people who have become so disconnected from mainstream society that they cannot see the consequences of their choices, but that accomplishes nothing.

 

Answer me this, though: how can they keep from spinning unless the public chooses to ground them?

A Million Points of False Advertizing

My Million Jobs Act will deliver legislation that will help provide our young people with training in the skilled trades that are in such demand.  We will bring opportunity to the university or college graduate whyo is looking out west for the life she wants, and it will tell her that it is right here... here in her own backyard.

Picture a well-lighted boardroom somewhere in downtown Toronto.  Around the table and with a few voices chiming in through conference call are Tim Hudak and his senior planning staff.  A gruff voices lays out the facts:

"This is your last shot at this, Tim.  Do you want to be remembered as the guy who lost to both McGuinty and Wynne or do you actually want to be Premier?"

"Okay," Hudak says with empty authority.  "Go through it one more time."

"We all know that jobs are the ticket.  That and cutting government.  We are not going back to picking on immigrants or prisoners, so we gotta throw something positive into the mix.  It's gotta be big, it's gotta be bold.  

"So we go with The Million Jobs Act.  What's not to like about that?  Cut government, cut taxes, trade deals or whatever - but a million jobs.  It gives people something to believe in.  You will be the man to bring a million jobs to Ontario."

Heads nod around the table.  One junior staffer clears their throat, dares to raise their voice.

"Um... should we really be promising to deliver a million jobs?  I mean, unless we go out and sign up eight years worth of written commitments from actual employers, isn't that a magic number we have no way to guarantee?  It's about setting expectations, right?"

Said staffer is never invited to such a meeting again.

How can a man who believes government should be out of the employment business promise a million jobs?  The truth is, he can't.  The only way to guarantee those jobs would be to guarantee a million hires himself - as we know, he's not going to do that.

Nor does he have written guarantees from employers to back up his promise.  In fact, he has nothing to back up his promise except for spin and ideology.  Hudak is now to job creation what Stephen Harper became on transparency.

But look at it from where he's sitting - does it really matter?  Hudak's only does have one last kick at the can, and he might as well go big.  If he wins, well, ideally he's got four years to put promises behind him.  It worked for McGuinty with the "I won't lower your taxes but I won't raise them either" bit, right?  Eight years is a long time.  People will have moved on before two have elapsed, but he'll still be Premier.

This is where Hudak's planners have made their fatal miscalculation.  They're used to looking at people from a sales perspective; voters are consumers and it's all about shaping the product they think they can buy.  Agency is a tagline, nothing more.

Too few political people understand just how disillusioned, desperate and frightened the people have become.  Parents carry the burden of knowing the world they leave their children is one of diminished opportunity.  Youth are failing to see the value in anything that isn't about selling themselves and scoring individual wins.

The Tea Party, Occupy and Idle No More are no passing things; they're symptoms of a societal malaise that is only worsened by crass retail politics.  Everyday folk are past the point of believing in leaders with clever, alliterative turns of phrase; they want substance.  That, or retribution.  Increasingly, nothing in the middle will suffice.

It would be a different story of Hudak explained the exact math behind his Million Jobs number and provided clear metrics along the way.  Were Hudak to promise in writing and over his grandmother's grave to resign if he should fail, people might give him some leeway, but he won't do that.

After all, politicians don't have to worry about being accountable - that's the opposition's job.  Right?

It's time our politicians and their planners wise up to the fact that it's no longer a matter of puffing up their partisan brands and slinging mud on their opponents'; it's the system itself that people no longer believe in.

Kicking the bums out of office is one thing, but when it's the office itself people want to turf, we have a problem. 

Jesus, Rob Ford and Stephen Colbert Walk Into a Polling Booth...

Stephen Colbert is a satirist.

Through the TV persona he uses on his comedy show, The Colbert Report, he lampoons the stereotypes of the White Right Male - angry, ignorant, superior, flippant, antagonistic, bigoted, functionally fixed.  He is Rush Limbaugh, he is Glenn Beck, only with a sense of irony.

As in the best tradition of parody, Colbert's intent is to show how ridiculous these tropes become when faced with reality.  Case in point:

"Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags.  Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants.  Oh, and everybody's high!"

There's gotta be part of Colbert that thinks he's been one-upped by Rob Ford; what Colbert has done in measure to right-wing media pundits, Ford has done in spades to actual right-wing politicians.

I know what I did was wrong, and admitting it was the most difficult and embarrassing thing I have ever had to do.  Folk, I have nothing left to hide. (Which didn't quite prove to be true...)

We live in a democracy and on October 27 of 2014, I want the people of this great city to decide whether they want Rob Ford to be their mayor.  Again, I sincerely, sincerely, sincerely apologize.  God bless the people of Toronto.  Thank you very much. 

Rob Ford has abused the people's trust, but still talks about accountability.  He maintains his "tough on crime, don't hug a thug" positioning even after he's confessed to consorting with criminals and patronized the sort of illegal activity that ruins and ends lives.  No matter how many times Ford apologizes, he keeps on keeping on in his own variant of Reservoir Dogs' Commode Story.   

Ford's assuming that if he just sounds and looks confident enough he won't get caught in his bad behaviour, can spin his way out if he does get caught or that people simply don't care, so long as their taxes are low and someone's sticking it to The Man.  He's an extreme, but hardly alone in this approach.

DUIs?  We've got pols at every level who've been caught in the act, gotten away with it and continue to talk tough when it comes to judging the behaviour of others.  Wasting taxpayer dollars for partisan gain?  Same thing.  How about sanctioning criminal behaviour, abusing public trust, abusing public dollars, bald-faced lying and sticking to carefully-crafted talking points that they clearly don't believe themselves?

We are rightly disgusted by the extremes of Ford's behaviour; other politicians, even some of his former allies have called Ford's actions out as unacceptable.  The fact is, though, Ford had a point when he said his political colleagues live in glass houses.  

While we and our political representatives are rightly outraged at the extremes of Rob Ford's behaviour, we tend to look the other way at misdeeds of our own that rest on the same spectrum, so long as the consequences to us personally aren't that dire.  That, after all, is one of the key reasons Rob Ford won in the first place - he was deemed to be a closer reflection of the common man and therefore more likely to behave as any of us would behave should we hold high office.

Rob Ford isn't an unprecedented political anomaly; if anything, he's a caricature of modern politics on the whole.

We are constantly told not to question the political sausage-making process, to pay no attention to the cynical political manoeuvres behind the curtain.  As bits and pieces of the behind-the-scenes reality of politics emerges, it's not hard to see why.  The partisan factories where spin and policy get squeezed into sound bites are festering with dirt and harmful bacteria.

Case in point?  At this very moment, there are politicians and political operatives positioning themselves for the next election, pulling from the exact same divide-and-conquer playbook that landed us with Ford in the first place.  Worse, they do this at the same time as deriding the cynical techniques they themselves are using.

They clearly don't care if they're pouring oil on our burning political platform - why should they?  We clearly don't care, either.

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

Stephen Colbert is a satirist.  Rob Ford is a parody.  In both cases, it's the collective, selfish and short-sighted us that's the punchline.

God bless the people of Toronto, indeed.