06 Nov 2010, 2:47 am
Political media narratives never cease to amaze me. They're oversimplified, filled with contradictory details and holes one could drive a truck through, and sometimes just downright wrong and rather obviously so.
Take, for instance, all the people who have reputations as political "bad boys". Karl Rove has such a reputation and I think he desrves it, but he took great stride to hide it and work in the shaddows so that only people preceived as "leftwing lunatics" thought of him as a greasy backroom operator.
Now contrast this with Rahm Emanuel. This guy swam in the reputation as an effective Machiavellian backroom operator. Some of his extravagent actions were downright stupid and obviously attention-grabbing - such as his whole yelling out "DEAD, DEAD, .... DEAD" and listing various political opponents.
The problem with such antics and the presented media narrative that guys like Emanuel are backroom operators is that REALLY good backroom operators don't draw attention to themselves or play up to such an image. Only attention-grabbing politicians without the ability to do REALLY effective Machiavellianism need to go through such measures, as admiting to it sort of undermines the whole operation.
This brings me to Warren Kinsella - an Ontarian political personality who was noted for his involvement in the (successful) 1993 Liberal Party of Canada election campaign and in the (sucessful) 2003 Ontario Liberal Party campaign. Warren Kinsella wrote a book about his experiences, which I haven't read (well, I read a few pages and that was enough to confirm it's content-free sensationalist claptrap) about his work - called Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics.
What really struck me is "why would an effective strategist be sharing his secretes so openly"? And I realized, he's not really that effective so much as a man with an inflated public image as some sort of grand master strategist.
It's not often that I quote a rightwing rag like the National Post, but I think Paul Wells is spot on here:
Fun facts: Mr. Kinsella was not “the architect for the Grit victory.” He was not “the master” of the war room. In private moments, he has even been known to admit as much. (Full disclosure: We had lunch in a swishy Hogtown bistro last week, our second lunch date in three years.)
The election was won by a smallish army of Grits whose distinguishing feature is an aversion to self-promotion. The main campaign organizer was John Rae, a Montreal lawyer so self-effacing most Ottawa scribes couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup. Mr. Rae would chair morning campaign meetings with a stern warning that nothing said around the table could leave the room. The first thing he did when the staff moved into campaign headquarters was to hang signs on every floor: “When losing, say little; when winning, say less.”
The “war room” — the communications and quick-rebuttal side of the campaign operation — was run by John Milloy, who is on TV even more often than Mr. Kinsella ...
Under Mr. Milloy’s organization, the campaign message was honed by Francie Ducros, Mr. Chretien’s much-maligned communications director. She was helped by Ken Polk, a speechwriter who came up with most of the funny lines that get attributed to Mr. Kinsella; and by the campaign’s undisputed MVP, a bespectacled Albertan named Kevin Bosch.
Mr. Bosch was responsible for opposition research against the Alliance. He showed up at Liberal HQ toting a pile of briefing books taller than himself, each crammed with quotations from every important Alliance official stretching back more than a decade. He is said to have the sort of eerie memory that allows him to remember everything Stockwell Day ever said, when he said it, and in which context.
He was a devastating weapon. “I don’t know that I can say enough good things about Kevin,” another war-room denizen told me yesterday.
Mr. Kinsella? He was designated a “floater,” which means he had no specific job at all. He was there because of Jean Chretien’s personal affection for him. He chipped in, as everyone did, at idea- generating bull sessions. He went on TV because the other Liberals, terrified of Mr. Rae’s gag order, wouldn’t.
And what do you remember about his TV appearances? Precisely: the Barney the Dinosaur toy he hauled out of a gym bag to mock Mr. Day’s beliefs about creationism. Except the Barney analogy wasn’t his. It came from Sophie Galarneau, yet another near-anonymous Grit. Mr. Kinsella only acted it out.
A funny thing I noticed about most inflated media "Machiavellians" is while they tend to talk tough or display a lot of partisanship - Rahm Emanuel's various antics against the political oponents, for instance - they tend to be ideologically moderate. Emanuel, for instance, didn't support challenging the Bush Agenda - especially on foreign policy - when Chairman of the Democratic House Caucus. Warren Kinsella, likewise, really hasn't supported anything substative like workplace relations reform.
