Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (8 page)

Still in the glow of Expo ’67 and Canada’s centennial year, the Liberals turned in 1968 to find a new leader—one who would also come to symbolize the heady, youth-fuelled spirit of the times. Pierre Trudeau, a hip, bilingual bachelor, was chosen to replace Lester Pearson at the party’s 1968 leadership convention. Almost immediately, this cerebral, very private intellectual became a consumer product himself—a sex object for swooning female fans and a consummate performer at mass rallies. Canada’s emerging consumer society had been handed a leader who was a politician and a fashion. Turnout at this election, though not at the Diefenbaker high of 1958, was still a healthy 75 percent.

The Big Blue Machine

With Trudeaumania in full force and the Liberals with a comfortable hold on power in Ottawa, the Conservative advertising men were plying their trade mainly in Ontario, where their party appeared to have “natural governing” status. Ontario had been led by Conservative regimes since 1943—all the way through the postwar boom in Canada’s largest province.

Camp and Associates was going strong, but gradually, over the years, as Dalton Camp got more involved in politics and journalism, his brother-in-law Norman Atkins assumed greater control over the advertising end of things. And when the new Ontario Conservative leader Bill Davis came calling in 1971 for the ad men’s help, it was Atkins who oversaw the operation. The product of that work would be dubbed the “Big Blue Machine”—the Conservative advertising and strategy team that vaulted Davis into a fifteen-year-long dynasty in Canada’s largest province. Some of the machine’s methods would be imitated by successive generations of political operatives, of all stripes.

The Big Blue Machine came up with the idea of an ad “consortium” to oversee political operations. Rather than dole out work to just one ad firm, they would assemble a group of sharp ad minds from a variety of agencies. Atkins called his group, fittingly enough, “Ad Hoc Enterprises,” though it was more often simply called the “media group” or the “creative group.” Their efforts in the early 1970s reflected the expansiveness of the time; it seemed no expense would be spared, no method untried. It all felt a little American, too, including the red-white-and-blue colour scheme they embraced for the Davis campaign. They brightly painted and decorated the Greyhound buses they had rented, an artistic inspiration that the bus company would adopt for its own purposes later, proving that good ideas were travelling back and forth between the private and public realms. Ad Hoc enlisted the services of a cameraman to meticulously follow Davis on his travels and film “man-in-the-street” interviews with the Ontarians he encountered. These film clips, which resembled nightly news segments in style and format, would become standard fare of election advertising. The ad guys, led by Atkins, also went to some lengths to surround Davis with old-time political razzle-dazzle—lots of streamers, buttons and stickers. They even commissioned a song for the 1971 campaign, called “Keep on Goin’,” which was used as background music in commercials but could also be jazzed up to a Dixieland-style tempo for the big rallies.

“The Tory advertising campaign unfolded by Norman Atkins in the early days of the [1971] election campaign was the most spectacular political sales job the country had seen,” Jonathan Manthorpe wrote in his book on the Ontario Conservatives,
The Power and the Tories
. “It was highly sophisticated in its organization and the material it produced, but there was nothing subtle about the message. It was Davis, Davis, Davis. Davis in living, breathing colour. Davis barbecuing hamburgers. Davis, his back to the camera, walking pensively on the beach by his cottage in the evening sunlight. Davis among crowds of supporters. Davis walking through woods with his wife, Kathy. Davis with his family. Davis, Davis. Davis.” The narration for these ads was supplied by a professional announcer, and Atkins’s ad team deliberately played down the politics, mentioning the Ontario PCs only in a flash of small print at the end of the commercial spots.

The slick professionalism of the ads caught the Ontario Conservatives’ opponents off guard, and they complained that US-style politics had arrived in Canada, that Davis was being sold “like a can of tomatoes.” Actually, that last part was true. Leading up to the 1971 campaign, in addition to Camp and Associates, Davis had retained the services of a thirty-two-year-old sociologist named Martin Goldfarb, who was just starting his own public-opinion consulting business.

Canada didn’t have many of its own polling gurus yet. Although the federal Liberals had been using polls for about a decade, the Liberals’ pollster of choice up to 1971 had been an American. Goldfarb, as the 1970s dawned, was slowly building up his political clientele and was still calling himself a “researcher” or “sociologist”—not a pollster. He was doing psycho-social research for Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and Manitoba Liberal leader Izzy Asper. For Davis, Goldfarb was conducting what he called “sensitivity sessions” with small groups of ten to fifteen people each, trying to explore what the voters wanted or needed to hear from the Ontario Conservatives. Today, we’d call these “focus groups.”

In an interview with Canadian Press in May of 1971, Goldfarb rather flamboyantly—and infamously—compared the selling of politics to the sale of tomatoes: “It’s a matter of choice. There may be twenty cans of tomatoes on the shelf and the consumer has to choose one. Well, it’s really the same in the voter marketplace.”

Davis saw the article and phoned Goldfarb. “Tomatoes?” the premier asked, incredulously. Goldfarb brushed off the wounded feelings. It wouldn’t be the last time that he encountered a politician who felt slighted by the product comparison.

Despite his early work with Davis, Goldfarb would end up where his political heart really rested, with the Liberals. These were days when advertising and marketing traffic, not to mention friendships, spanned party differences. Liberals and Conservatives were intensely competitive, but they didn’t let that stand in the way of business or socializing, for the most part. And they also shared an approach to this new business of selling their political wares like soap (or tomatoes), aided by the rising dominance of TV. The people who understood that voters were far more easily moved by images, their emotions and their feelings about leadership would be at the vanguard of political salesmanship in the coming years.

But just as people had grown skeptical and wary in the 1950s of over-saturation from commercial ads, North Americans were stirring in these decades to the reality that hard-sell techniques from the private sector were invading the political sanctum. Joe McGinniss, a journalist at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, decided to follow closely the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon to see what was being bought and sold among voting Americans. The result was a milestone in the chronicles of political-marketing history: his book,
The Selling of the President
. With the co-operation of Nixon’s image consultant, Roger Ailes, McGinniss was treated to an inside view of the packaged world of Republican politics, circa 1968. Ailes had been a producer of
The Merv Griffin Show
, and micro-coached the Nixon campaign into the television age. Nixon, after all, had probably been the first politician burned by TV, when his five o’clock shadow and sweating countenance helped make him the loser in TV debates with Kennedy.

In
The Selling of the President
, McGinniss minced no words. He wrote that Nixon relied on television “the way a polio victim relied on an iron lung.” The cover of the book was made to resemble a cigarette package, with a figure of Nixon at the centre of it. “Overnight, it made Theodore White’s campaign book seem wan and dated,” Dwight Garner wrote in the
New York Times
, where the McGinniss book rocketed to the bestseller lists. But like the 1961 Ted White book, called
The Making of the President
, it would also be an accurate forecast of the style of politics to move north of the forty-ninth parallel in the coming years.

At the Big Blue Machine, Norman Atkins initially rejected criticism that Canadian politics was getting Americanized. Welcome to the television age, Atkins would say. “TV does it. It’s not American. It’s a product of TV. It’s the leader-oriented society… The leader is important. Trudeau proved that was right.”

The leader-centrism style had been a fixture of the Conservative campaign approach going back to Diefenbaker’s election. But in the 1971 election in Ontario, it became systematized—and marketing-friendly. Atkins was the brains behind a system that helped centralize the advertising message among the local campaigns, to make them more leader-dominated. It would turn out to be a template for many election campaigns at the federal level in future. The result was called the “Candidate Service Centre,” run by another ad executive with offices not far from Camp and Associates. Conservative riding organizations were urged to send in their proposed advertising material for an “upgrade” and assessment by the experts in Toronto, and then they would be sent back all kinds of red-white-and-blue paraphernalia prominently featuring the leader. Customized posters, proclaiming the candidate’s support for Davis, would also be tucked into the return package to the ridings. It was an unsubtle way to ensure that all campaigns revolved around the leader, and thus all candidates owed their election success to him. Politicos learned a valuable lesson: you could achieve a kind of control over your caucus through advertising that you couldn’t through charisma, charm, discipline or any other traditional tool of leadership. All you needed was a unified “message,” with everyone speaking from the same script, with the same pictures.

The Big Blue Machine’s methods attracted many admirers, including Richard Nixon’s Republicans in the United States, who flew to Canada to observe the machine in action. It was one of the few times that Canadians were imitated by American politicos rather than vice versa. In the
Wall Street Journal
in the 1980s, a Republican pollster was quoted as saying of the Big Blue Machine that its operatives were “very good at retail politics—identifying their vote and getting it out—probably better than most organizations in the US.”

Rival Liberals paid the Big Blue Machine the immense compliment of imitation. History would repeat itself—just as the federal Liberals saw and watched the success of the Diefenbaker campaign and put it to use in the 1960s, so too would the Liberals go on to borrow some of the Big Blue Machine’s methods in the mid-1970s.

Red Cap Nation

Trudeaumania faded in the early 1970s. Hobbling along with a minority government after the 1972 election, Trudeau himself was emerging in the public eye as a haughty, even aloof character—a far cry from the populist leader he’d appeared to be when he first vaulted into power.

In the spring of 1974, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal minority government staggered to an end and the country was plunged into an election. At this point, the Liberals’ affection for advertising was turning into ambivalence; the 1972 ad campaign had been a bit of a disaster. The team from MacLaren had come up with the slogan “The Land Is Strong”—a slogan that became more of a punchline than an effective sales pitch for the Liberals. Keith Davey had also fallen out of favour with Trudeau and the inner circle; a cloud fell over his reputation because his legendary organizing skills had failed to win majorities for the Liberals. Trudeau was also permanently wary of professional backroomers, and of the whole Toronto Liberal crowd. At a dinner at 24 Sussex in 1973, he’d told them he wasn’t sure why they were involved in politics—where was the fire in their bellies?

For all these reasons, the 1974 election loomed with only lacklustre Liberal enthusiasm in the advertising hub of Toronto. Although Davey had been put in charge of the national campaign committee, and some bridges had been rebuilt between Trudeau and Toronto, things were not going all that well in the city most pivotal to the Liberals’ fortunes. And that’s where Jerry Grafstein, a long-time Liberal supporter and a good friend of Davey’s, came to play his part in the fusion of Liberal politics and advertising.

Grafstein, a lawyer, was part of the “new guard” of Toronto Liberal partisans, a skilled and sophisticated thinker about consumerism and the media. Grafstein had served as a special adviser in the establishment of the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs when it was set up in 1967. He was also one of the founders of the CHUM Radio empire and in 1972 he co-founded the wildly successful upstart station CITY-TV with Moses Znaimer. Grafstein also founded
The Journal of Liberal Thought
in the 1960s.

So if any Liberal understood the new media and advertising landscape of the 1970s, it was this Toronto Liberal. And for the 1974 campaign, he was chosen to be in charge of ad strategy. Grafstein, who had been watching the success of the Big Blue Machine, knew exactly what he had to do—set up a consortium of the best minds in the ad business. And because of his experience with CHUM and CITY-TV, he knew who these people were. He collected them from MacLaren and from Ronalds Reynolds, also a leading ad firm of the time. Rounding out what came to be called the Red Leaf consortium was a man named Terry O’Malley, then thirty-eight years old and already seen as one of the most creative minds at Vickers and Benson.

A proud native of St. Catharines, Ontario, O’Malley had grown up playing hockey and spending his idle hours glued to AM radio broadcasts from Buffalo. He was mesmerized by the world that opened up to him through his table-model Addison radio—through its broadcasts, O’Malley was plugged into a consumers’ paradise where you could get Converse running shoes, Double Bubble and Bazooka gum, and Milk Duds. He didn’t know then that through those ads, he was also seeing his future.