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Tip
O’Neill, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
for a decade — and a successful politician for a lot longer
than that — knew his way around a political axiom. Some of
the many truisms he bequeathed to the political classes include:
“Never speak of yourself in the third person” —
something certain regal and viceregal personages more than occasionally
forget. And: “Never get introduced to the crowd at sporting
events” — unless, of course, a tidal wave of boos and
catcalls is your cup of tea. And, also, his trenchant phrase:
“Any jackass can kick over the barn.”
Well, not quite.
While
denizens of the corridors of power will often suggest, with a
straight face, that negativity is unnecessary, and unpleasant,
and something that requires no special skill or knowledge, these
same spinmeisters also know that the truth lies elsewhere. They
know, deep in the fetid recesses of their tiny hearts, that negativity
and nastiness works. They also know that the practitioners of
these dark political arts are a unique breed. While they may indeed
be jackasses, they are the only category of jackasses capable
of knocking down political barns. Other jackasses merely bray
at the barn doors, uncertain about how to get the job done.
I
think I know a little about knocking down barns. Along with having
acted as an assistant to Canada’s current prime minister,
and along with the days and nights I have spent advising political
campaigns in many provinces and regions, I have, I confess, dabbled
in these dark political arts. I have helped to lead so-called
“quick-response” teams — groups of politicos who
respond to attacks and, where necessary, initiate them. I have
crashed political rallies with activists dressed up like chickens
(to mock party leaders who refused to participate in debates);
I have assisted in the creation of television ads depicting lying
politicians as Pinocchio (with the nose growing each time a fib
is recalled); and I have even arranged to fly a bottle of polluted
water by helicopter, at a cost of many hundreds of dollars an
hour (to be used as a prop in a pro-environment speech by a candidate).
In the process, I have also been described as the Prince of Darkness.
As
near as I can tell, the first person to call me the Prince of
Darkness (to my face) was Alex Pannu. Pannu is a bright lawyer
from Vancouver who, way back when, was an assistant to a former
minister of national defence, Kim Campbell. In spring 1993, I
was working as a political assistant to Jean Chrétien,
leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. At the time, Campbell
was running for the leadership of the governing Progressive Conservative
Party, which she was almost certain to win. That spring I was
a member of a small group of Liberal staffers doing our utmost
to make life utterly unbearable for Campbell, attempting to link
her to assorted scandals, leaking damaging material to reporters
and generally depicting her in the most unflattering light possible.
It was rewarding work.
As we settled ourselves in some chairs at a committee room in
the East Block, waiting for Campbell to come and speak to the
parliamentary committee on defence about yet another mess at the
department, Pannu approached me. “You know what we’re
calling you, don’t you?” he said, grinning. “We’re
all calling you the Prince of Darkness.” After Pannu retreated
to his side of the room, one of the young Liberals working with
me leaned over and whispered: “Wow! The Prince of Darkness!
Is that cool or what?”
In
political circles, people often privately react like that. They
think take-no-prisoners politicking — the kind you would
expect a Prince of Darkness to practise — is, indeed, cool.
When appearing on televised pundit panels, or when being quoted
by the print media, they know that it is not a good idea to sound
too enthusiastic about hardball politics, however. So they will
make soothing noises about the need to “do politics differently,”
and to avoid “the old politics,” or what is being lately
called “the politics of personal destruction.” They
make these disclaimers because they know it is what the voting
public wants to hear (even if it isn’t what the voting public
necessarily believes, but more on that later). Watching them,
you would think such politicos seldom would utter a discouraging
word about anyone.
But
that’s not true, quite frankly. Political people love nasty
battles with their adversaries, and people who vote love to watch.
That, in short, is what this book is about: even if no one wants
to admit it, negative politics work. This book is also about how
negative politics is done — about “going neg,”
to use the phrase popular among politicos.
Before
I became the Prince of Darkness, I was a University of Calgary
law student and a part-time newspaper reporter on the police beat.
On weekends, I would earn a few extra dollars at the Calgary Herald.
Most of the time, I would sit in the newsroom and listen to the
police radio. Whenever a drugstore was robbed or someone was murdered,
I would hop in my battered old Gremlin and speed out onto Calgary’s
freeways to learn more. If the car crashes I heard about over
the police band were sufficiently spectacular, I would also file
stories about them, and my news editor would almost always assign
a photographer to take pictures. When there wasn’t very much
else going on in the news world, we would run photos of the car
crashes.
Whenever
we did that, I was reminded of two things. First, you could publish
a fistful of photographs of African children starving to death,
corpses floating alongside an overloaded Indian ferry, or the
bombed-out wreckage of someone’s home in a war zone, and
no one would call in to complain. If they cared, they sure weren’t
saying anything about it to us.
Second,
if you ran a photo of a car crash involving locals — without
bodies, of course — you’d better darn well make sure
you had someone around the newsroom to handle the calls of complaint,
because you’d get plenty. Subscribers would call in to declare,
loudly, that we were insensitive, and ghoulish, and beneath contempt.
They would call to cancel their subscriptions. But here’s
the funny thing: whenever I was out at those accident scenes,
scribbling away in my notepad, I noticed that everyone making
their way past the orange pylons and the traffic cops — and
I mean everyone — would slow down to take a long hard look.
Every once in a while, I’d see them fumbling for a camera,
so that they could take some pictures, too.
Excerpted from Kicking Ass In Canadian Politics by Warren
Kinsella Copyright 2001 by Warren Kinsella. Excerpted by permission
of Random House of Canada, a division of Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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