Attack ads, framing and Michael Ignatieff: A suggestion

The Tories have launched a series of ads on television which refer to a website and which contain printed extracts of past writings or sayings of Michael Ignatieff, and also actual videos of past interviews during the time he was in the USA.

In particular, one video has Ignatieff talking to Americans and calling himself an American.

Liberals are rightly disconcerted by the advertisements, because the Tories effectively using Ignatieff's own words against him, and because they remember how the Tories managed to hammer into the ordinary conversation of ordinary Canadians the themes they chose with respect to Dion.

That is clearly what Harper wants to happen with Ignatieff, and judging by the timing of the television ads and the press and media reports, he has made a good beginning.

The problem of Liberals is that they have made a mistake in labelling the new Tory ads. Both in blogs, in speeches and in articles by the media, the Tory ads are called 'attack ads'. The Tories are assailed for launching 'attack ads'.

The difficulty with the Liberal label is that it misses the thrust of Tory policy.

Using Ignatieff's own words against him is fair game. Drawing erroneous conclusions from his own statements should be exposed and attacked. Drawing possibly correct conclusions from his own statements is less open to effective attack.

And, above all, attack ads are an accepted and acceptable part of political discourse in 2009 in Canada. Liberals themselves will use attack ads against the Tories, the Bloc and the NDP, both before and during formal election periods.

We, as Liberals, must understand what the Harper Tories are doing with their Ignatieff ads. They have started their election campaign, expecting an election some time this year, or perhaps next year. And the ads are simply one of the two election strategies they are now (and will continue to) adopting.

Harper has been enormously successful in defeating two Liberal leaders in the past few years by fighting on two fronts.

They have successfully managed to convince the Canadian voters that the major fight in the elections is on the issue of leadership, and that Harper is the better leader. And, at the same time, they have engaged in micro-targeting, offering trinkets to a wide range of carefully selected voters, and basically avoiding 'grand theme' policies.

Harper has trounced Martin and Dion in the leadership stakes. The Tories managed this because they successfully framed Martin and Dion as ineffective leaders of their own party, and of the country. And having used this frame, they have also successfully framed Harper as an effective, decisive leader.

The new 'attack ads' (as the Liberals are calling them) or, more precisely, 'framing ads' (which is what they are) launched against Ignatieff are part of the same framing strategy, and are designed to set up in the minds of Canadians certain troubling questions about the validity of Ignatieff's quest to become prime minister. Having done this, the Tory attack will then move on to contrast the now-framed Ignatieff with the decisive, positive Harper figure, and so turn the next election into a question about the two leaders and not about the policies of the two parties.

Ignatieff is a relatively blank slate to most Canadians (as several polls have shown). And so the Tories have a wonderful opportunity to colour him in, with crayons of their own choosing. If they wish, they can smudge his outlines a bit, move the picture a bit to the left or right, and make him seem to be what they want in this pre-campaign part of the election.

And how should Liberals respond to this?

Firstly, by choosing their own battlegrounds, and forcing Harper and the Tories to fight on them. And the main attack should be against the Tory strategy of making the next election a quasi-presidential one of choosing a 'Canadian president', rather than an election of political parties with differing policies.

Liberals need to add colour to the blank Ignatieff slate.

And the best colour they can use is one which speaks to his positives as a person, and which moves the battle to policies and not just a choice between two men.

If Michael Ignatieff wishes to avoid the fate of Martin and Dion, he needs to bring to the battle which is now engaged his own personality, armed with a vision of where he will take Canada.

And that vision needs to be one voters can identify with him. Not all that matters is the man, the man must also have a plan.

Ignatieff will not win if he simply allows the Liberals to cobble together a hodge podge of poorly linked issues as the Liberal platform, and then drop this on the electorate a few weeks before the next election.

Ignatieff will win if he brings forth a strong Liberal platform, with his own stamp on it, and delivers it to the voters now, articulating where he will take the country over the next decade.

By doing so, he will have coloured himself in, rather than let Harper do that, and will force Harper to talk policies, and not just resort to framing one man in order to win.

It will be interesting to see if Ignatieff confronts the very real threat to him posed by the Tory framing, and succeeds in dictating the battleground. Both Martin and Dion failed in this, and went down to defeat. In this respect, Ignatieff's position is very different from that of any previous Liberal leader, who lived and fought in Parliament and out, and who were not colourless politicians in the eyes of most Canadians. Because of his absence from Canada, Ignatieff has to establish that he does indeed speak for Canada, and can be trusted to be prime minister. And he has to do this in a very, very short timeframe.