Captain Dildo, Dwight Ball, and the New Approach to Old Stereotypes #nlpoli

Last week, the Premier’s Office sent out a picture of the Premier standing next to the mascot of a town in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Nothing odd about it until you realise the mascot is called Captain Dildo and the Premier named Ball is standing to the left of the figure, which is slightly taller than him.

A dildo and a ball. 

Easy pickings for the jokesters out there. 

At least he is not Da Wight Ball, a wag observed.  No, came the reply, he is Da Weft Ball.

Some people might struggle to understand how the Premier and his staff could be beweft themselves,  beweft… err.. bereft… of a stwategy….

No, stragedy.

Umm.

Strategy.

Lacking a communications strategy such that the office Twitter account pumped out a picture that makes the Premier the easy target of jokes.

Well, they aren’t lacking a strategy, at least in the way that term tends to be popularly used. 

They are not just randomly acting.  

There *is* is a rationale for the behaviour and it is worth looking at that rationale to understand the wider implications of the actions.

Let’s start by making it clear what some words mean.

Strategy versus Tactics

There’s a popular book on political communications that uses a popular marketing term to describe what is supposedly the way political communications works in Canada these days.  The major problem is that the book goes 36 pages before it vaguely suggests what the term means.  Then it gets all the way to the end without clearly distinguishing how the behaviour that supposedly reflects this term is different from behaviour before now. 

Words matter.  Meanings matter.  So let’s get meanings clear from the start.

These days, you will be hard-pressed to find a person in the communications world who does not claim to be a strategist.  That’s one of those words like “world-class” or powerful. Paris never calls itself a world-class city.  Powerful people never broadcast their power and influence.  The people who call themselves strategists usually aren’t.

In the same way, “strategy” is like “brand” in that it is a word everyone uses and hew seem to understand. They think a strategy is simply things you do to achieve an outcome. If I get in my car and drive to the store to buy food, I am not being strategic.   I am just shopping.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that a strategy is “a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.”.  So it is a “plan of action”.  It is doing things.  But notice the time-scale in that definition:  long-term.  Remember that.

Also remember that a strategy has an aim.  It has an objective, an outcome, or an end-state that someone desires. 

Here’s where things get interesting.  Implicitly, to know where you want to go, you need to know where you are or what condition you are in right now.  You also have to understand what it is about the current state that is unacceptable so that you have to change.

You have to understand *why* certain actions are necessary.

Strategy tells you who does what to whom, where, when, and how often, but most importantly, strategy tells you why something is happening.

And because it long-term, strategy usually involves not just one action but a series of actions that are either similar or related.  Strategy tells you why those things are related and how they fit together in time and space.

Shopping for groceries isn’t a strategy.  But changing your lifestyle to be healthier is a  goal that would be achieved by, among other things, getting more exercise and proper sleep and buying healthier food.

Just for good measure, let’s throw in the idea of tactics.  Tactics are the specific actions to implement a strategic goal.  So that buying groceries thing would be one tactical element in the strategy plan of healthiness.

Organisations communicate with people interested in what they do to gain and maintain their support.  Communications isn’t an end in itself.  It is an activity that goes on throughout the organisation to help achieve goals. 

Strategic goals.

Strategic communications.

What’s popular?

For the past 15 years,  and especially for the last five,  politicians in Newfoundland and Labrador are driven by the need to align themselves with what is popular.  Their goal is to be aligned with popular sentiment.  Some of them get elected to office.  Sometimes, enough of them of one party get elected and form a government.  They draw a cause and effect conclusion perhaps best expressed by the Danny Williams crowd with the argument that William was right because he was popular and popular because he was right.

The key indicator of popularity is the horse race polls conducted by two or three firms and released publicly.  The one that gains the most media attention and therefore that drives most political calculations is the quarterly omnibus by Narrative (formerly Corporate Research Associates).

A secondary indicator of popularity (or discontent) is found on Twitter and Facebook.  Coincidentally, this is also a major news source for local media, which reinforces the political perceptions of popularity.

Political parties apparently believe that the only way they can change public opinion is by adjusting political statements to match public sentiment.  Thus, Danny Williams and Dwight Ball both abandoned necessary changes to government spending in order to boost popularity. Dwight Ball endorsed reductions to the number of seats in the House of Assembly because it was perceived as popular, despite the anti-democratic implications of both the reduction and the way the politicians carried it out.  The Liberals and new Democrats did not oppose the expropriation of measures in 2008 because they were proposed by a popular government.  Similarly, they did not oppose Muskrat Falls while it and the government behind it appeared popular.  And after the most recent election, both opposition parties supported the government’s budget – one tacitly, the other openly – based on the perception that the public wanted parties to act harmoniously.

August

While Narrative/CRA is no longer the only polling game in town, its influence lingers in the way government organised its communications after 2003 to push positive news about government when Narrative is in the field.  That makes August a hot month for government announcements despite the fact the public is largely disinterested in politics.

It also means that politicians, especially the incumbent party, will capitalise on any opportunity to attach itself to positive news that occur sin polling months. The Jimmy Kimmel bit is an example of a politician taking advantage of an opportunity.

Dwight Ball has displayed a particular belief about the decisive influence of social media.  One of his earliest staff decisions in the opposition office was to hire someone who had a Twitter account to run the opposition office communications.  Having a Twitter account apparently meant the person had all the required skills to manage communications.  Thus began the string of short-term communications staffers in Ball’s office.

In the Kimmel episode, Ball jumped in with an invitation to Kimmel via Twitter:

Hey @jimmykimmel , what are you waiting for? How about I extend an official invite to come check out our incredible province. August is too hot in LA, and you need a break from that terrible traffic. I promise you’ll fall in love with Newfoundland and Labrador!

This was not part of a larger tourism plan by the provincial government, although some people did think this was the case.  Kimmel’s bit came out of his own staff’s process for finding humorous segments for the show.  While Ball’s invitation fit into the superficial tourism messaging about the province, it was obviously a hasty invitation likely to have little real impact on Kimmel or his plans.

As it turned out, the show carried out its own plan with a producer showing up and organising some remotes for the show from the community.  They built some hype about a campaign for mayor, clearly without knowing the community was unincorporated. In its own opportunistic coverage and reporting, the major private broadcaster in the province sent a reporter to Los Angeles and managed to work that into the show.

That may have worked for the private broadcaster, but ultimately the Kimmel segment was a segment that was poking fun at the name of the town.  The residents happily obliged the show’s producer and played along, right down to organising the Screech-in that the Premier participated in.  What worked for the community or a private company in the short-term would not necessarily fit into the government’s tourism messaging, nor was there any effort to align the two.

Of cliché and stereotypes

Ball’s participation in the Kimmel stunt is essentially the typical opportunistic behaviour of a recent politician in Newfoundland and Labrador. He pushed his invitation and his picture via Twitter since that is a medium he believes works.

Ball clearly learned the lesson of the criticism he received for not capitalising on the popularity of Come From Away.  Ball’s tweet invitation to Kimmel came within 24 hours of the initial segment. While the audience for the show was across North America,  Ball’s audience was within Newfoundland and Labrador. 

There was no apparent strategic objective beyond polling results that will be seen in early September.

Nor does there appear to be any appreciation of the potential for wider strategic impact on other issues.  After all, strategy is about the relationship between different actions over time. 

The image national audiences have of Newfoundland and Labrador currently is shaped largely by reports of  the province’s dire financial situation.  There is some residual impact from Come From Away, which is now playing in Toronto again, as well as overseas in London and Melbourne. 

But the dominant media story is enormous public debt, an ageing, declining population, now compounded by the impact of the Muskrat Falls disaster.  As a result of the Kimmel episode and Ball’s participation in it, there is now a reminder of the sort of buffoonery that shaped popular Canadian images of Newfoundlanders for decades.  

This might just be a passing blip.

Then again, it might not be.

These spur-of-the-moment decisions sometimes have a way of coming back to haunt.  Imagine a time in the very near future when the federal government in Ottawa is Conservative, with a Liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador that still does not have the financial aid from Ottawa local politicians of all stripes have been counting on to deal with Muskrat Falls.

It is almost as though the stereotype of “Newfoundland as a poverty stricken, hardscrabble place from which all the best people rush to escape” has come back 15 years after then-Macleans editor Anthony Wilson-Smith dismissed them as well beyond its expiry date.

As your humble e-scribbler wrote in 2005,  when another Premier was presenting the province to a national stage in a less than complimentary way, anyone who has been around this place over the last 30 years can't help but notice the changes, especially in St. John's. But the changes - economic, social and attitudinal - are also found in most of the major centres across the island and in Labrador.

We have had the sort of low-rent local Punch and Judy show, filled with stock types to be trotted out for easy laughs. The humour was in their outrageous accents, jokes based on stupidity or laziness or a yearning for a mythical golden age of the past. To make the entire spectacle complete, someone would inevitably don rain gear and wield a codfish and rum bottle, like orb and sceptre, to bestow honorary "Newfie" status on mainlanders during "screech-in" ceremonies. The provincial government, under Brian Peckford, used to print up elaborate certificates for these little minstrel shows and give them a semi-official blessing in the process.

This may be exaggerating just a bit, but to be honest, anyone who grew up in that time, it was hard not to resent what amounted to rendering down the varied local cultures across the province to a series of caricatures. To add to the injury, the caricatures were usually generated by townies or mainlanders, not by the people being parodied. Newfoundland and being a Newfoundlander was limited to what was presented by these Professional Baymen, with their "Lard t'underin' Dynamite" accent and colloquialisms buried behind a tongue-defying local "dialect".

“What it seems many people have missed is that the place has changed. For most Newfoundlanders and Labradorians,”  SRBP noted, “their pride and self-respect is not found in these overt and exaggerated displays” of artificial uniqueness and colourfulness. “It is in the individual and collective successes. It comes from rejecting the sort of make-work schemes and grandiose megaproject failures of the old days in favour of sound planning and good financial management of government [that] other provinces might envy.”

The year before that Macleans piece,  there was a national interview by another Premier who ignored the strategic for the tactical.  He left his audience with the image of “a bunch of poor, laughing drunks, complaining about having no money, who apparently can’t manage their own affairs, and yet who want to build grandiose megaprojects and kill seals.”

In the period right after your humble e-scribbler wrote those words, we collectively took a turn back to the past and paid a horrible price for it. 

Going back to the unsuccessful, embarrassing past – yet again - hardly seems like a successful strategy to face the future.

-srbp-