Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (34 page)

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The advisory, carefully worded as it was, still served to show how wide a gap had opened between the world of political and consumer advertising, even as politicians were trying to borrow lessons from the private marketplace. Put simply, Canadians were getting business-style persuasion without business-like limits.

Moreover, in this world where consumer citizenship met political marketing, the Liberals had also gone into the 2008 campaign with another disadvantage. Dion had organized the Liberal platform around the so-called Green Shift, a comprehensive, wide-ranging proposal to wed the environment and the economy—two areas of perceived Liberal strength, if you believed the polls. But consumer politics doesn’t sit easily with environmentalism, which asks citizens to limit consumption. Nor is it easy to persuade consumer-citizens of any policy that sounds like it will hit them in the wallet.

This situation was pointedly true amid the clouds of global economic worries hovering over the 2008 election. The worldwide meltdown, as it was called, had been triggered by the collapse in the United States of the very forces that had powered the consumer-economy growth of the 1950s: the housing market and the automobile manufacturers.

General Motors and Chrysler were in big trouble in 2008, staring down a very real threat of bankruptcy, which would trigger millions of job losses in the United States and Canada, particularly in already-beleaguered manufacturing centres in both countries. To ward off this potential disaster, they were asking for bailouts to the tune of billions of dollars from the US and Canadian governments (which they would receive late that year). And this was all against the backdrop of a financial crisis gripping North America. Starting in 2006, the US was seeing a sharp increase in the number of mortgage defaults and foreclosures. Eager homebuyers had been getting into debt they couldn’t afford, with mortgages offered to them at interest rates below the prime rate. These “subprime” mortgages were sometimes offered to people who had little or no money to put down as a deposit. Banks stopped lending to each other for fear of getting stuck with bad subprime-mortgage debt. And all these bad debts for the banks started to roil the international markets, too, sending the shockwaves into Canada as well. Even as the political leaders were campaigning in the fall of 2008, the stock markets in Canada were rapidly falling in value. Voters were seeing massive losses in their registered retirement savings plans and other stock market holdings. It all put Canadians in an extremely risk-averse mood, which Conservatives used to artfully craft sentiment against Liberals: “Not worth the risk.”

Don’t Worry, Think Hockey

So whether by accident or design, Canada had a government that was conducting its affairs of state with striking devotion to the lessons that Frank Luntz had provided to the Civitas group. One could even see it as a checklist. Clear messaging, constant repetition, the framing of the government-citizen relationship in “tax” terms—check, check, check. Oh yes, and that advice about hockey? The Conservatives were already on that one.

In the summer of 2005, even before the election, word leaked of a new project for Stephen Harper: a hockey book.
Globe and Mail
parliamentary reporter Jane Taber, in her much-read column, was the first to deliver the news, saying that Harper’s hockey obsession, complete with his love of hockey trivia, had been escalated into a real, live book project. A scant five days before the election, the
National Post
reported that Harper was still committed to his hockey opus, though if he became prime minister he would have less time to work on it. In power, though notoriously stingy about sharing details of his private life with the media, Harper managed to get the news out of his visits to the hockey rink for his son Ben’s practices, and every now and then the media would get reports on the progress of the hockey book. He was apparently carving fifteen minutes out of his busy schedule each day to work on the project.

With such a hockey-loving PM, then, few people were surprised when the logo for the men’s hockey team was unveiled a few months before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. It bore a remarkable resemblance to the Conservative logo—yes, that same logo that Harper and his team had so colourfully conceived back in their opposition days. The men’s team at Vancouver would sport a large “C” on their sweaters, with a small maple leaf inside, just like the Conservative logo.

“There’s no question there’s some similarities,” Minister of State for Sport Gary Lunn acknowledged to reporters, insisting that it was just a coincidence. “In fact, I talked to the CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee yesterday and he said… ‘You know, that would never have crossed our mind.’” It was a nice coincidence, though, for a government and a prime minister who stayed ever alert to any opportunity to cast the Conservatives in the same frame as hockey.

The prime minister even found some time to write the introduction to a hockey book by Paul Henderson, the player who scored the winning goal in the 1972 Canada–Russia series. Harper’s memories of that series, as he wrote in the Henderson book, were actually a revealing glimpse into how well that series, even decades later, remained a touchstone for all those consumerist values drilled into the Canadian psyche in the postwar and Cold War periods. It remained, in Harper’s mind, the fusion of sports, politics and the military—values held dear by Tim Hortons voters. It also demonstrated how well the Vickers and Benson advertising firm had done its job back in the 1970s, searing memories into the mind of a young Toronto man—memories that remained with him forty years later, as he wrote in the introduction:

It really became a proxy for war and that puts it on a completely different level. The Cold War has been over for twenty years now and no one who was not alive in 1972, and certainly no one who was not alive during the Cold War, could know the feeling that existed between the two different ways of life in the world at the time. It was as if the freedom of Canadians versus the repression of the Soviet system was being showcased in the individualism of the Canadian players as opposed to the regimentation of the Soviet players. It was there for everyone to see.

It was also interesting to see how much of the Harper marketing, like Tim Hortons marketing, was rooted in nostalgia for a Canada that existed in the 1950s through to the 1970s, when mass-marketing, the Cold War and one-size-fits-all politics was still the fashion. Like Tim Hortons, Harper had attached his brand to iconic symbols of the military, sports and consumerism. At many times, it seemed like Harper was trying to recreate the world that existed when he grew up in the Toronto suburbs—a simpler place, before the advertising and polling experts had carved up the Canadian landscape into “micro-targets” in the electorate. That nostalgic frame, a harkening back to the era when everyone wanted a car and a home in the suburbs, was being repeatedly evoked by politicians on the right-hand side of the Canadian political spectrum in the 2000s, even if the car companies and the housing markets were crashing.

Although Toronto and Canada had radically changed since the 1950s, it no doubt said something about the enduring forces of that era—heavily consumerist, heavily suburban—that the country’s politicians could use those nostalgic marketing pitches to win power. Yet however old-fashioned their pitches, these political campaigns were built on very modern tools and ideas about the citizenry, which were far less visible among the ever-proliferating images. Political marketing, thanks to technology, had become an incredibly precise science, capable of carving up the mass electorate into tiny constituencies. And like all good marketers, the Conservatives would pay close attention to building their data files about their consumer-citizens.

SLICED AND DICED

B
ack in the days when the commercial world was smaller and simpler, keeping your customers happy and loyal was largely a matter of human relations and fair pricing. Customers wanted to find what they were seeking in the stores, with courteous service and at a cost that made sense. If you knew the storeowner or the shopkeeper, perhaps as a bonus you could get some advice on what to buy, or merchandise specially obtained for you. Perhaps your local car dealer sponsored your child’s baseball team. Maybe you could even get a discount. As the shopping world grew bigger and more complex, though, it was more likely that the people in front of and behind the cash registers were strangers. So, purveyors of goods were looking for ways to make customers feel they were still getting special attention, ever-vigilant to their particular needs. To pull this off with large groups of clientele, retailers needed superhuman skills—the kind they could get with technology, particularly databases.

“In today’s world of mass advertising and ‘big box’ retail store chains, it is impossible for merchants to know each customer in this individualized fashion,” Ron Kahan, a Denver marketing expert wrote in a 1998 article in the
Journal of Consumer Marketing
. “Only with the aid of sophisticated marketing database technology can we capture, analyze and act on the same interpersonal marketing opportunities first identified in these earlier and simpler times.”

All those customer-loyalty cards, such as Air Miles and points-accumulating credit cards, started proliferating in the consumer marketplace because the private sector had realized the superpower of sophisticated knowledge about customer preferences and treating them as special clients. You, the customer, would get points, and the companies would get information about what you liked to buy and where you shopped. It was called “micro-targeting”—shaping the product not around mass consumers, or even groups of consumers, but one unique person: you, the target customer. Apple’s iPod had been a runaway success, basically killing the concept of record albums, because it allowed music lovers to build their own custom playlists and collections. All iPods may look the same, but the contents, the “brains” of the products, were as unique as the consumer. Everywhere, manufacturers were figuring out ways to customize their products, aided by the speed in technological communication and manufacturing methods.
Time
magazine, reflecting this spirit of the era, named “you” as the person of the year for 2006, designing the edition’s cover to resemble a mirror. As
Time
explained, “The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web... The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”

Consumer databases, loaded with micro-targeted information about clientele, were the commercial world’s way to keep on top of this fragmented marketplace, filled with shoppers who wanted products designed with their individuality in mind. It only made sense that this kind of commercial thinking could also be useful to political parties.

Of course, as always, Americans led the way. The Republicans, under the direction of über-strategist Karl Rove, began to explore databases in earnest after the razor-thin election finish between George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in 2000. Rove’s work in this area would earn him the nickname “The Architect” from a grateful, re-elected President Bush. Rove was reportedly skeptical when initially approached by Alex Gage, founder of a data collection company Target Point. Gage had worked with Republican pollsters such as Robert Teeter (who had also worked with Gregg and Canadian Conservatives, we’ll remember), but had left politics in the 1990s and had mainly been working in the private sector. While in the commercial realm, though, Gage saw the potential for crossover intelligence. Gage said that if Republicans could gather a wealth of consumer information, they could get a more accurate picture of the American electorate, and where potential support could be found. “Micro-targeting is trying to unravel your political DNA,” Gage told the
Washington Post
. “The more information I have about you, the better.”