Advertocracy
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
As the current Canadian federal election campaign kicked off, the Liberals and the New Democrats announced that they wanted an "election of ideas." The first idea Paul Martin had was to imply that Stephen Harper was a fifth columnist working for the Americans, and before the week was out Jack Layton was accusing Mr. Martin of mass murder.
Those are ideas, I suppose, in the same sense that the notion that World War II was started by aliens from outer space who were trying to corner the world market for gorgonzola is an idea. And they're what should be expected, I guess, from two parties which long ago lost track of the principles and interests they were supposed to represent. But what about the party of ideas, the one party that has a clear political philosophy? That is to say, what about the Neo-Conservative Party of Canada?
Surely, you must think, as soon as the bell rang to start the battle of ideas, a party as ideological as the Alliance – whoops, I mean the Conservative Party of Canada – would be out in the middle of the ring landing quite the number of the old body blows.
Nah. The Conservatives have decided to attack Liberal mismanagement and waste. Their "idea," though, is: Liberals waste and mismanage, Conservatives don't. Well, yeah. The Conservatives don't waste and mismanage because they've never been in power. Except provincially, of course, where the government of that neo-conservative clone Mike Harris succeeded through responsible management in manoeuvring Ontario into a $5.6 billion dollar deficit while simultaneously reducing government services, increasing the production cost of electricity, and finding a nice cushy job at TV Ontario for Ernie Eves' main squeeze.
Stephen Harper also wants to restore accountability. Our crack professional press, though, has yet to ask him how accountable Peter McKay is to David Orchard.
And there's the real problem with the notion of a battle of ideas – neither the press nor the public is interested in one. When politicians start throwing around words like accountability, we could ask them what the hell they're talking about. We could, but we don't. We'd rather write and read about poll results. In announcing a battle of ideas, politicians are simply using a standard marketing ploy – flattering the public that they're above cheap appeals to the baser instincts and too smart to be bribed with their own money.
So you end up with the Battle of the Promises. Paul Martin has apparently found an old pair of pants whose pockets he'd forgotten to empty, because all of a sudden, after years of crying poor, he's got billions of dollars to throw at everyone in sight. Stephen Harper is promising a subsidized drug program, bigger armed forces (with extra added aircraft carriers), and low, low, taxes! Meanwhile Jack Layton is promising better pensions, better child care, better health care, lower university tuition, and balanced budgets! No payments till 2010!
In other words, the parties' political commercials end up like Bad Boy commercials without the charisma. Well, perhaps I am painting with too broad a brush. Jack Layton's commercials are more like Docker ads, as Jack poses in his impeccable casual wardrobe while listening closely to concerned Canadians. Paul Martin's ads resemble those Standard Life ads in which employees of Standard Life assure us that they'll always treat us well and you can believe them because what possible reason could they have to mislead us? (© Robert Klein, 1973) And Stephen Harper's ads are like the Sleep Factory ads without the mattresses or the funny sheep or the attractive spokeswoman.
Well, if that's what floats the people's boat, eh? Which apparently it is. The Canadian people, as we've learned recently, have difficulty naming the prime minister. Only half of us can name the first prime minister of Canada and only a fifth of us can name the first francophone one. But boy do we like to get stuff cheap! You show us a bargain, and we'll buy it! Tell us we're going to have an election of ideas, but give us bargains, bargains, bargains!
There's only one flaw in this approach, and that is that the federal Elections Act says that election promises are not enforceable. If the Brick misleads you about the price of a refrigerator, it gets charged. If politicians mislead you – say, about whether they're going to raise taxes – they get elected.
If we're going to insist on election campaigns modelled on retail advertising, we're going to have to insist on the same protections that we have against retail advertising. A few convictions for misleading promises would at least make politicians more careful about what they promise. No more grand gestures for the cameras signing "pledges" not to raise taxes without first considering the possibility that the government you hope to replace may have implemented a poison pill in the form of an unexpectedly huge deficit.
The most likely result would be the end of hard-sell political advertising. No more promises of big, big programs paid for by low, low taxes, no more comparisons of the competitor's product to a knife pointed straight at the nation's heart. Instead – soft sell!
Political ads would attempt to associate party preference with agreeable emotions – we'd see Jack Layton in the kitchen helping Olivia bake cookies, Paul Martin offering sage advice to his sons about running Canada Steamship Lines while the federal ethics commissioner watches and applauds, Stephen Harper and family lovingly preparing his hairpiece for the next press conference.
Canadians would probably not stand for that for long. They don't like soft-sell advertising to begin with, and even a nation that's unsure where its capital is knows irrelevance when it sees it. And so the political parties, unable to sell either soft or hard, would be forced to discuss… ideas!
So if we're going to have an advertocracy, let's have one with protection for the consumer. Being protected from the possibility that Ron Popiel might unfairly take $150 from us for a faulty Showtime Rotisserie and not being protected against a whole raft of politicians who forcibly extract huge proportions of our income from us every year (or every quarter for many of us) is simply a glaring and unjustified inconsistency.
But don't hold your breath. For the Election Act to be changed would require a mass movement on the part of the Canadian people, who normally only engage in mass movements during commercial breaks from American Idol. And in a perverse way Canadians do get considerable benefits from the current system – if politicians didn't lie and fail to keep their promises, the range of humanity we could feel morally superior to would be drastically reduced. For that is the chief function of politicians these days, to serve as a scapegoat and a vehicle for satisfying emotional ventilation of one's belief in one's purity. And because politicians are demonized, people are reluctant to take part in them evil politics. And politicians understand the functions they serve, which is another reason they'd rather portray their opponents as quislings or murderers than actually debate their opponents' ideas, which they seem not to have anyway.
If there were a God, I'd pray for him or her to help us all.
Related article Posted June 3, 2004
Advertocracy © Coolth, 2004
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