The Strategic Two-Step #nlpoli

There's a sheet of paper taped on the underside of one of the drawers in the Premier's desk on the 8th Floor.

It's very old.  No one knows for sure how long it has been there but there are countless rings from countless coffee cups on it and more than few circles from the underside of rum bottles.

On the back, there are a couple of spots where it looks like people jotted down messages and phone numbers. You know, like someone had the sheet laying around on the desk and it just happened to be the closest bit of paper handy.

You can barely make out  "Doyle - Panama" and long string of digits including what looks like a bank account number after the word Caymans.  In another corner there's a woman's first name with couple of numbers and a note :  "Frank - call her back for Christ sake.  Gerry"  

On the other side, the words are in Courier 10 point from an IBM Selectric.

At the top, in all caps and underlined, it reads  WHEN IN TROUBLE...  The first bullet is one word:  Pander.   The second bullet is:  Pick a fight with Ottawa.

The Austerity Budget Pantomime #nlpoli

According to the Oxford dictionary, financial austerity means "difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure."

Reduce government spending.

Three key words.

The most important is reduce,  meaning to lower or to  lessen.

Keep that in mind.

The Manipulation Manipulation #nlpoli #cdnpoli

/What a difference 36 years makes.

There’s  New Democrat strategist Robin Sears in a National Post piece complaining about the way the Liberal are running their guy named Trudeau in lots of situations that give him good visuals.

“He isn’t running to be a boxer or a canoeist, he’s running to be Prime Minister, which is a different set of credentials,” said Robin Sears, who spent several campaigns in the war room for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent.

Now jump back to 1979, courtesy of the National Film Board’s documentary about the federal election in which another guy named Trudeau figured prominently.

Political Calculations #nlpoli

As you look ahead to the fall election, the bigger political addicts among you are likely trying to figure out different aspects like how the parties might run the campaign.

We got a clue this week with the debate story.  Apparently the front-runner Liberals never thought of forcing the media outlets to pool together and have one debate.  Instead they took the requests one-by-one until they hit their quota of two.  Anyone who came along after that, including the largest private radio network, were shit-out-of-luck.

The episode reveals a curious bit of Liberal political strategy but it made your humble e-scribbler think about a bunch of other calculations that we should likely all keep in mind.

Let’s look at the numbers.

For want of a nail... #nlpoli

Dwight Ball demonstrated last week how very simple things can turn into problems very quickly. He handed his political opponents a stick they can use to beat him with. The fact they really don;t have much more than innuendo and speculation doesn’t matter. He’s given them a weapon.

Ball confirmed on Friday that the Liberal Party could have released relevant information on the party’s debt repayment on Wednesday.

Ball named the three banks involved in the debt forgiveness deal and indicated the total amount involved.  On Wednesday he had balked, noting there was a non-disclosure agreement in place.

What Ball also confirmed in the process is that he and his team simply weren’t ready on Wednesday for the announcement.  That’s not the first time Ball and his team have made this kind of a simple cock-up.  The simplest way to fix it would be to re-organize the senior end of his office.  Ball needs to bring in some new people, especially ones with significant political experience.  to augment his existing team.

The little things will get you #nlpoli

Maybe someone can point to this information somewhere please.  Maybe your humble e-scribbler missed it.

But  in the past couple of days, there’s been a simple number missing from the discussion of long-term care beds in Newfoundland and Labrador.

How many do we need?

Seems like a fairly obvious question.

Both Premier Paul Davis and health minister Steve Kent pointed to the current problem with chronic care patients taking up acute care beds.  That’s been happening for decades. They used a number of 237 as the number of beds being occupied in acute care facilities by patients needing long-term care.

But that isn’t all the demand.  That’s just the stuff that they actually have right at the moment.

So how many long-term beds do we need?

Contending Political Strategies #nlpoli

Starting last Friday, the ironically-named Conservatives currently running the place started holding a series of “pre-budget” announcements.

They started with news that to deal with the massive financial crisis they would be dumping 77 and a half teaching positions in the provincial school system.  About twice that many would retire, so the school boards in the province would only hire enough teachers to fill half the empty slots.  To make that fit with the declining student enrolment,  the school boards would adjust the allowed class sizes by one student per teacher for grades 4 to 6 and by two students per teacher for grades 7 to 9.

Other than that, no change in staffing.

On Monday, the finance minister announced that the massive financial problem the government is facing led the government to cut the public service by zero real people.

The Poster Child for Useless #nlpoli

One of the rationales the provincial government has used to justify Muskrat Falls is the idea that the island will have electricity shortages starting in 2015 and by 2020 there’ll be blackouts, brownouts or some sort of unspecified catastrophe.

If you missed it, here is one official version, from The Economy, 2011:

After years of planning and analysis, Nalcor’s subsidiary, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro (Hydro), determined that developing Muskrat Falls is the least-cost solution to a looming electricity shortage in the province, which is expected in the next five to 10 years.

In 2015, Newfoundland and Labrador will reach a capacity deficit when, at peak times, capacity needs may not be met. By 2019, the province will experience an electricity deficit, where the province’s overall electricity demand is greater than what is available.

It’s the worst kind of fear-mongering but it is what they’ve been saying. 

The solution to that looming crisis is pretty simple, according to the provincial government.  Again, here’s what The Economy 2011 lays out:

Hydro assessed the options for new generation sources to avoid the capacity and electricity deficits. The Muskrat Falls project, coupled with a transmission link project to the island, was determined to be the least-cost option.

So with all that as prologue, consider this question posed by Dean MacDonald stand-in Dwight Ball in the House of Assembly on Tuesday:

… what is the government’s plan to those energy blackouts that residents will experience between 2015 and 2018?

You can guess what the answer was from natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy.

Mr. Speaker, the answer to the question is quite simple. What will prevent the brownouts and the blackouts between 2015 and 2020? Muskrat Falls.

If you are not either banging your head against the table or crapping your pants with laughter at this point, then you are just not paying attention.

This is funny stuff.  You could not possible script a more ridiculous line of questioning at this point in the public debate over the hydro-electric megaproject.

You could not make this stuff up.

Given the Premier’s penchant for telling us that Nalcor is filled with geniuses of other-worldly origins, one might more sensibly ask how it could be that the rocket scientists at Nalcor managed to let the island get into the state where we are on the verge of catastrophe.

After all, that is the logic of their argument.  In 2010, they noticed that the power needle was flirting with the edge of the red zone and the Big E. 

How in the frack could they have missed so obvious a thing?   After all, it is their job to keep an eye on that stuff.  They are supposed to make sure the people who pay their bills have a stable, reliable and low cost supply of electricity.

Now, as a politician, you’d ask the aggressive question because it shows pretty clearly that what Kathy Dunderdale says about Nalcor and  their actual demonstrated managerial competence are two different things.  After all, an opposition political party is supposed to ensure that the government accounts fully “for the management of the public affairs of this province…”.

By contrast, Dwight Ball asked questions  on Tuesday that would normally come from a Tory backbencher sucking around for a promotion to cabinet. For the leader of the Opposition, the questions  were amateurish and reeked of incompetence.

The other questions that Ball asked on Tuesday, like pretty well everything he’s done so far this session, have shown Ball to be the poster child for everything that is politically useless and ineffective. With only one exception, the rest of his caucus have been no better.

Small wonder that the Tories spend all their political energy attacking the province’s New Democrats. The Tories know that the Liberals are more a political threat to themselves than they are to anyone else.

-srbp-

How to win without news media

Texas governor Rick Perry won re-election without relying on conventional news media.

Perry shunned editorial board meetings, for example.  Those are sit-down sessions with the entire editorial staff.  It’s a traditional way to garner an endorsement and that is traditionally seen as a key part of any major political campaign.

The reason is pretty simple politics:

Mike Baselice, Perry's highly skilled pollster, acknowledged Wednesday at a public forum sponsored by The Texas Tribune that the campaign asked primary voters in Texas whether a newspaper endorsement would make them more or less likely to vote for Perry. Only 6 percent said an endorsement would make them more likely to support Perry, while an eye-popping 37 percent said it would make them less likely (56 percent said it made no difference).

In other words, for all the energy conventional thinking would have you put into sucking up to editors, the average Texas voter didn’t really give a rat’s derriere one way or the other. And with almost 40% taking an endorsement as a bad thing, that pretty much clinched the deal. 

Predictably the news media slagged Perry.  That only increased his standing in the eyes of voters, especially the 37% who said they would look unfavourably on a candidate who had a news media endorsement of any kind.

Perry also didn’t do the usual things associated with a conventional campaign, like lawn signs or direct mail.  Instead, his campaign used social media, paid television and “field operations” – face-to-face work by campaign volunteers.

- srbp -

Being too negative

cbc.ca/nl takes a look at negativity and local politics in a report by provincial affairs reporter David Cochrane and a commentary by Randy Simms.

They are both worth checking out if for no other reason than they raise issues that are worth considering and worth debating.

A couple of quibbles:

First, negativity of this type isn’t something new.  In the current local version, this penchant for attacks goes back about a decade.

Second, Randy Simms is in the right neighbourhood when he mentions the recent mid-terms in the United States.  Politics in this province for the past decade or so demonstrate the very effective use of American political techniques  - including an ideological element - on a local level.  The lines used are similar to ones employed elsewhere in Canada, provincially and federally, and in the United States. While they use paid advertising in other places, here the slagging is done using other vehicles. 

When you are done with the video stuff, pop over to the Telegram and check the Wednesday editorial.  It points out the hefty price the Williams administration paid for a recent decision about a Facebook comment:

Why? Well, ask yourself what the circulation numbers are for one person’s Facebook page. Maybe hundreds; sometimes, thousands. In Pardy Ghent’s case, 1,109. 

Then, ask yourself this question: what’s the combined circulation of the Canadian Press, Yahoo News, MSN.ca, Troy Media, and the Reuters news service, just to name a few?
All of those sites carried the story of Pardy Ghent’s firing, under the not-so-pleasant headline “Facebook flap over Danny Williams’ penis.” 

It made newspapers and websites across Canada and the United States.

It even made the website of the India Times, half a world away. 

Yep — Skinner took a small fire, and unsuccessfully tried to put it out by pouring on the largest amount of gasoline he could find. 

Ignoring the status line would have made the whole thing a 15-second wonder that reflected far more poorly on Pardy Ghent than on anyone else. 

Instead of a handful of people shaking their heads, there are now thousands. Well done.

Two additional points:

First, the Telegram’s account of costs don’t really go far enough.  The CBC news stories and all the comments on this issue that are circulating under these and related media stories point out the extent to which negativity is now an issue that can cut the ruling Conservatives at least as sharply as it cuts anyone else.

Going negative this early definitely has its costs.

Second, Shawn Skinner didn’t do this on his own. Well, odds are he didn’t.  Like Kevin O’Brien, he was likely following orders.

Take out of all that what you will.

- srbp -

*edits for caps, spelling and sentence structure

Anger Management: Conservative version

Former premier Roger Grimes makes some solid observations in the Tuesday Telegram about the idea of building Muskrat Falls on its own, as the latest iteration of the Lower Churchill goes.

“It makes ... absolutely no sense to finance the smaller part of the project that, of and by itself, can’t make any money,” he said.

What’s way more interesting in the current context, though, can be found in the comments section. 

Just note the number of comments, likely all Conservative partisans, attacking Grimes personally for having the temerity to offer an opinion. Notice how many of them appeared before 8:00 AM.  That is some serious anger-management issues going on there, people.

As you read the comments – if you can stomach them – remember that this is polling month.  As usual, people in the province are being treated both to an orchestrated series of happy-news announcements.  But what makes this month stand out is the connection to the assaults by the Fan Club. 

The Fanboys.

The Greek Chorus.

The Pitcher Plants.

The last time this crew deployed in such an organised and indignant manner was when some people dared to notice that the Premier had heart surgery. Their anger is aimed, not surprisingly at Liberals and if reporters step into the line of fire the media will be added to the list.

Anger  - and we are talking some major-league bile here - aimed at liberals and the news media.

Sounds just a wee bit familiar.

Dontcha think?

It gives a whole new meaning to the term anger management.  The real question, though, is will the strategy that worked before continue to work just as well the next time.

- srbp -

Thin-skinned or what?

It’s the “or what” you need to think about.

- srbp -