Wow! Damaging political attack ads

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.