Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
John Ivison, who's hardly a Liberal media guy, wrote about what I touched on. We may be seeing the signs of a hard turn in this election:
Mr. Harper would never have risked mixing with people who had not been pre-vetted. All Conservative photo-ops are carefully arranged and people at rallies must be on a list. Part of this is because he is running a low-risk, front-runner campaign, where you limit the number of opportunities to slip on the inevitable electoral banana-skin. The assumption is that people will vote for you, if you don’t irritate them into voting against you.
But it is more than that. Mr. Harper is simply not a happy electoral warrior and he has never been comfortable kissing babies and hugging pregnant women. When it comes to communication strategies, his need for message control has led to a testy relationship with the media. As Prime Minister, he has managed the flow of information to the media from his MPs and ministers, controlled the environment in which he faces journalists and rationed press conferences and interviews.
In Halifax Thursday, he attempted to carry those tactics into the election campaign and journalists rebelled, complaining they were corralled behind a fence 40 feet from the Conservative leader and limited to five questions a day.
Relations are threatening to spill over by all accounts. Conservative supporters are now making personal attacks on reporters, with one Conservative on Twitter calling two senior press gallery journalists “pathetic” and another approaching scribes to ask if “you guys are reporting the news or making it.”
No wonder Mr. Ignatieff is in good humour. A Nanos poll Thursday suggested the first possible shift of the campaign, with Conservative support holding steady at 39% but the Liberals rising four points to 32%, at the expense of the NDP. The Liberal campaign to this point has been unambitious – sticking mainly to big cities where they know they can draw a crowd. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...-for-campaign/ |
Similar to this, here's an article from the Herald:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Ha...225/story.html
You have to wonder if this strategy is going to cause trouble as the campaign goes on.