Dangerous Attack Ads in
Political Campaigns
By William Doyle-Marshall
Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical
Makeover Party of One by Michael Harris, an award winning Canadian
journalist, is a very useful publication which I recommend to the
handlers of Dr. Keith Rowley, Political Leader of the People’s
National Movement in Trinidad and Tobago. It will provide some
insight into what the People’s Partnership headed by Kamla Persad
Bissessar
is doing by employing American style
attack ads.
As I look at the disturbing amount of
over advertisements by the ruling party in T&T I begin wondering
whether Prime Minister Kamala Persad Bissessar consults with Canada’s
Prime Minister Harper whose party has been making use of Arthur
Finkelstein’s who had perfected the political attack ad. After
teaching the NCC the art of commando politics as practised in the
United States and several countries unquestionably the Conservatives
under Harper have been making use of this approach in each campaign
of its political life. Now that I am privileged to see how the PP’s
campaign is being orchestrated, I am wondering whether Ms. Bissessar
has taken over the commando politics book from her colleague Stephen
Harper.
In his book Michael Harris talks
about Finkelstein who had honed the art of third party advertising to
a razor’s edge. “The strategic use of attack ads could elect or
destroy a candidate for public office in a heartbeat,” he notes.
Should Dr. Rowley’s team take time to understand this approach, it
would emerge with a solid response to the discrediting path that the
PP is travelling.
Harris makes a very powerful
observation that PNMites should be aware of. He writes “To
Finkelstein, a negative campaign is legitimate as long as it’s not
patently untrue. It comes down to casting the appropriate lights and
shadows over your opponent; you are relentless in highlighting his
failings and you never mention his strengths. Because most people
water ski over the surface of events, they don’t want deep content
or even to know what a politician thinks. They want to know who he is
sleeping with and how many of the good human vices he has,” Harris
writes.
Talking specifically about Canadian
politics in 1988, Harris recalls “Finkelstein did a poll that
alarmed the far right, suggesting that Canadians might be on the
brink of electing NDP Leader Ed Broadbent as prime minister.
Broadbent stood at 40 percent in the polls – majority government
territory if the numbers held until the federal election looming in
the fall (of that year). Since there were difficulties driving a
scandal-ridden Brian Mulroney’s numbers up, the NCC decided to
bring Ed Broadbent’s down. They spent half a million dollars doing
it. Under Finkelstein’s guidance, the message was simple and
deadly. Broadbent the socialist, who wanted to take Canada out of
NATO and who opposed Senate reform, was ‘Scary, very, very, scary.”
There you have
it Trinidad and Tobago and Canada. That’s what you are up against.
And for the Canadian voters who are going to the polls about a month
later, to elect a new federal government, the campaign by the
Conservatives is based on attack ads and half-truths. Do what you
must to regain or retain your strong position. It would be very
shameful to be defeated by half truths and misleading advertising.
