The ideal election for party handlers is one they prepared earlier - but it looks as if some are not getting their way this time, writes Fintan O'Toole.
In retrospect, it looks like one of those small but telling moments when two ways of conducting general elections came into conflict and a fundamental shift in our political culture was revealed. The date was November 22nd 1992, and the outgoing taoiseach, Albert Reynolds was almost at the end of what had been, for him, a nightmarish campaign for re-election.
He was doing what generations of Irish politicians had done before him, standing up on the back of a lorry outside Macroom cattle mart, belting away. A group of local farmers approached a figure at the foot of the lorry, Reynolds's amiable and astute press secretary, Sean Duignan, wanting to talk about headage payments. It was, give or take a few details of the subject matter, a scene from almost any Irish election for the previous century.
Elections bring the mighty down to ground level, and the plain citizens use the opportunity to bend their ears. The drama might be played out in the mass media, but votes were still won and lost at marts and shopping malls, at church gates and on doorsteps.
Except, this time, there was a disturbance at the very heart of the system.
Fianna Fáil had brought in a young Englishman called Stephen Hilton from the ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, to help mastermind its campaign. Hilton is now the British Conservative Party's director of strategy, so influential that the Daily Telegraphhas called him the real deputy leader of the party and so famous that a character in the BBC satire, The Thick of It, is transparently based on him. Back then, though, Hilton was a 22-year-old tyro, fresh from Oxford and Tory central office. The idea that Fianna Fáil had to hire a callow young Tory to tell it how to run a general election in Ireland was, for those steeped in the party's culture, almost as disturbing as it was astonishing.
And, at the end of a campaign in which Hilton's magic had been more Tommy Cooper than David Blaine, something snapped.
Approached by the farmers, Sean Duignan, as he recorded in the diary reproduced in his wonderfully engaging book, One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round, had an irresistible attack of divilment: "Insanely, I point them in the direction of Stephen, who had just told me he had never been in Ireland (never mind Macroom) before. Charlie Bird and I can see them surrounding the poor hoor and still haranguing him five minutes later. The two of us rolling around like bold children. Doesn't even occur to me that it'll probably cost Albert votes."
This kind of delightful farce doesn't happen any more. The use of professional election strategists, who run campaigns across the globe, is now so well established that it is scarcely noticed. American consulting firms are now as central to Irish elections as back-slapping and promises.
Fianna Fáil has retained Shrum Devine Donilon since before the 1997 general election. Fine Gael has consulted Mark Feierstein, of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, since 2002. And it is inconceivable that party handlers would now be inclined to indulge in a bit of anarchic fun, or indeed do anything else, without thinking that it might cost precious votes.
That 1992 election, in which Fianna Fáil's campaign spun out of control and Dick Spring's Labour gathered a sudden but unstoppable momentum, can be seen as something of a watershed. All the major parties learned lessons from it, and the result is the kind of slick, media- driven campaigning that Enda Kenny reflected on this week when he told RTÉ radio that "Times have changed in politics . . . Things are much more sophisticated now. A lot more of the paparazzi are around. Communications are much more instant."
When, at the start of the 2002 campaign, Fianna Fáil's director of elections PJ Mara declared "It's showtime!", he meant it literally. The ideal election for the handlers and strategists is one that they prepared earlier. It is a series of stage-managed events, all calibrated to fit into a pre-scripted narrative. The handlers are not naive enough to believe that everything will proceed precisely as planned, but they do believe that they can control the overall agenda. The show may go off the road now and then.
It may get stuck in neutral, as the Fianna Fáil campaign discovered this week when new revelations about the Taoiseach's personal finances seemed to let the air out of his tyres. But, in the handlers' world, the destination is always a preconceived victory.
Contrast, for example, that shambolic 1992 Fianna Fáil campaign with the way the party coasted to victory 10 years later. In 1992, the big episodes were already media moments: Reynolds disputing a Miriam Lord report that he had incited a crowd of supporters to use the word "crap", his promise in an interview on RTÉ radio to "dehumanise" the social welfare system, his reference in the same interview to John Bruton as "John Unionist". All of them were images of a man at sea. By 2002, a different kind of imagery, ubiquitous posters of Bertie Ahern looking positively presidential, dominated the political as well as the physical landscape. Pat Rabbitte's complaint during the campaign that "the Taoiseach's face has been more in evidence this last month than Kylie Minogue's backside" was the plaintive cry of the defeated.
The Taoiseach's face was everywhere, however, not because it had quite the same sex appeal as Kylie in gold lamé hot-pants, but because it took the place of his voice. To limit the opportunity for gaffes or controversies, his media appearances were strictly rationed, with photo-opportunities taking the place of set-piece speeches, press conferences, debates and interviews. Fresh footage of the Taoiseach out and about shaking hands was available for every big news bulletin. But when the horde of attendant journalists were not wanted, they were told that the Taoiseach was taking a lunch break, only to find that he had instead been off somewhere the handlers didn't want him to be seen.
FIANNA FÁIL'S EFFORTto control the media was modelled on the "message management" strategies developed in Bill Clinton's War Room and adapted by New Labour's notorious spin machine. There were early-morning press conferences, timed to make RTÉ's Morning Irelandprogramme and set the agenda for the day. (Fianna Fáil came up a new variant on this strategy this week by giving a number of media outlets what each thought was an "exclusive" preview of its stamp duty proposals, hoping to knock the Taoiseach's personal finances off the front pages.) There were "pre-buttal" strategies to anticipate announcements from opposition parties and get its retaliation in first. (Fianna Fáil liked the idea so much that it repeated it even before the present campaign got underway, releasing a document to rubbish the Fine Gael/Labour joint economic strategy on the morning before it was published.)
There were also successful strategies for flying under the media radar with guerrilla advertising, such as the stroke of paying An Post to stamp mail with the slogan "Fianna Fail - The Republican Party: A Lot Done, More to Do".
That slogan itself was brilliantly conceived. In the words of Paul Hughes, of Rothco advertising agency, it "gave people a simple reason to vote them back in, without actually saying an awful lot". Not saying an awful lot had become a campaigning virtue, and the signs are that Fine Gael has adapted it to Enda Kenny's campaign this time, keeping him on the move and away from press conferences.
The same shift can be seen in a more truncated form in two images of Mary Harney, who led the Progressive Democrats into the last two election campaigns. What people would remember of her from the 1997 campaign was a near-disastrous press conference in which she unveiled a plan to change the social welfare system to "encourage" single mothers to move back into their parents' homes. As a piece of traditional campaigning, it was brave and, whatever its merits, it showed a willingness to try out new ideas. As a piece of campaign theatre, though, it was a thoroughly bad show, far too complex in its reasoning not to be easily caricatured as an exercise in reactionary social engineering.
It alienated some voters (including members of the PDs' socially liberal base) without attracting others. It also browned off the Fianna Fáil machine, who were by now far too astute to risk anything as dodgy as a new idea in the midst of a campaign.
Fast-forward five years, and what was the dominant image of Mary Harney in the 2002 campaign? Not a press conference, or an interview or a controversial statement, but a self-consciously staged photo-opportunity.
Coming towards the climax of the campaign, Magillmagazine claimed that the Flood tribunal had demanded that Harney open her financial records for inspection. The PD campaign of 1997 would have called a press conference to rebut these false allegations, and the party leader would have ended up giving complicated explanations and looking defensive. The 2002 campaign knew better, and turned a problem into an opportunity by staging for the cameras a little melodrama in which Michael McDowell placed a copy of the offending magazine in a bin.
Mary Harney the hammer of single mothers was now Mary Harney the wronged woman.
These techniques left Labour and Fine Gael (who didn't even have a centralised media operation in their election headquarters in 2002) floundering. The stage- managing of the campaign became even more effective because, with the media ceding control of the agenda to the dominant parties, the election turned into a kind of meta-election. The campaign was not about the next five years in Irish society, it was about the campaign: Fine Gael's unfortunate Celtic Snail posters, Bertie Ahern's convoy breaking the speed limit and, above all, opinion polls. With almost every poll overstating Fianna Fáil's eventual vote, the polls ceased to reflect opinion and began to shape it by making it clear that Fine Gael were no- hopers. The campaign shifted from a contest between the outgoing government and opposition to a campaign by the PDs to stop their Fianna Fáil partners getting an overall majority. The key moment was not a policy announcement, but another photo- opportunity: Michael McDowell clambering up a lamp-post in Ranelagh with a poster proclaiming "Single Party Government? No Thanks". It worked perfectly and it showed how much the government parties had learned since 1992.
The lesson that has been absorbed is somewhat paradoxical. It may seem, on the surface, that election campaigns should matter less than they used to. Many of the big wedge issues that long defined the Irish political battleground have lost their divisive power. There is a broad consensus on the shape of Ireland's economic model. Five different parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Democratic Left and the Progressive Democrats) have been in power since the mid-1990s, and all can claim some credit for the Irish economic miracle. Parties such as Labour that used to be sceptical of multinational corporations now fully accept their role in the Irish economy. Parties such as the PDs that used to be sceptical of social partnership now sing its praises. Northern Ireland is no longer a passionately divisive issue, even for Sinn Féin. The so-called liberal agenda on matters of personal and sexual morality has lost its sting, except for the question of abortion, which no major party sees as an election issue.
It is also true that elections, including this one, are no longer really decisive events. The era of coalition politics that has been with us since 1989 is one in which it is no longer strictly true that the voters elect a government. They merely deal out the hands that particular parties will have to play in post-election negotiations. Facing into this campaign, voters know not only that it is virtually impossible for any one party they might vote for to form a government, but that it is quite likely that neither of the stated coalition options will be able to do so either.
When no one really knows what the ultimate effect of a vote might be, why should election campaigns matter at all? Yet the less passionate the divisions between parties, the more crucial the campaign itself becomes. Tribal politics, with their predictable succession of loyalties from one generation to the next, have declined. Gone are the days when, in a famous television sequence, Neil Blaney could stand on a hill in Co Donegal, point to house after house and predict with confidence how each household would vote. Party loyalties have not disappeared but they have fragmented, turning a two-and-a-half party system into a five-party system between whose cracks a healthy crop of Independents has sprouted.
IN A PERIODof sustained prosperity and extreme political stability, moreover, fewer citizens seem to engage deeply with politics between elections. What happens during a campaign therefore has a greater effect than ever. Parties know that if they want power, they have to make a show of themselves. It is just possible, though, that in Ireland and elsewhere, voters may be hankering for solidity and substance rather than slickness and spin.
Certainly, the stray signs from the first week of campaigning and the long phoney war before the election was formally called seem to suggest that the marketing strategists may not be quite as much in control as they like to think they are. Fine Gael's attempts at a negative advertising campaign was so ineffective that it had to be abandoned. The PDs put up billboards that, rather delightfully, had the names of Michael McDowell and Liz O'Donnell emblazoned in giant letters but spelt wrong.
Fianna Fáil planned to repeat the successful trick of the last two campaigns by making everything about Bertie Ahern. Even its constituency posters carry his image with the names of the actual candidates nestling in relative obscurity. But the strategy backfired this week when the media seemed anxious to talk about nothing else except the troubled Taoiseach. And whoever booked the big posters of an avuncular Bertie beaming down on the grateful youth of Ireland forgot that many of them went up on the new kind of swivelling billboards, where one image dissolves every few seconds into the other.
They must not have been too pleased to find the Taoiseach's image alternating from moment to moment into a PlayStation ad consisting of white letters on a black background spelling out the question: "Is This Living?"