Political Campaigns: Inside The War Room, The Media Unit

Published On: Thu, Apr 7th, 2011
By Massimo Bergamini, Contributor: (Written by Owen Lippert, Associate with InterChange Public Affairs, Shared With Permission)

One of the most important functions of the campaign war room is to monitor the media in real time. Every story, every clip and every broadcast is read, watched and heard and summarized.

To borrow a metaphor from the new computer lingo, the media reporting represents a cloud and clouds tend to drift and rarely, if ever, drifting back to the same position in the sky. The Media unit has to see both in detail and overall where the cloud is heading and whether it is darkening or letting more sun shine on the campaign below. More importantly, the Media unit has to make sure that the senior campaign team have the media meteorological forecast as soon as possible.

The campaign managers and the senior advisors will be doing a thousand other things and have to rely on others to keep them up-to-date. The internal e-mail traffic in the war room is unrelenting: it is not unusual to have 15 to 30 messages per minute.

In a marked difference from earlier campaigns, in 2011 new media has become the dominant tool in terms of media response. It is not just Twitter or its variations. You can set alerts into Google news, Yahoo news or even proprietary aggregation programs that will let you know when stories break. Though of course the best way is still to talk to the reporter before he or she even files the story.

The best Media and Issue Management workers “know” long before the story goes on line. If a story breaks into the news cycle, a scramble begins to counter, correct, corroborate or deny. This is where the Issue Management team kicks in. The Issue Management manager, once alerted, will unleash the researchers first. The facts have to be right – right from the start of any response. Facts in politics are extraordinarily elusive.

It is surprising at first how much of what is “known” is skewed, incomplete and just plain wrong. With a bit of experience, one quickly learns to trust nothing until it has been researched, double-checked and re-checked, and even then you need to be wary because the sources might be suspect, mistakes are made when people are in a hurry and most fatally partisan researchers will read or hear a positive interpretation into the information which can distort their report, even if the report is just a collection of web links to previous stories.

The Issue Management researchers will at best have 15 minutes to get the “facts” and the background. The emergence of the Internet has complicated matters in that time has become very elastic. For example, the story of Stephen Harper’s “agreement” with the Bloc Quebecois in 2004 or a speech in 2003 can take on a contemporary life of its own long after even the people directly involved have forgotten all but the most elementary details.

Historians will one day debate the “facts” around the 2004 “coalition” letter at length, meanwhile let’s get back to the war room and how it likely responded to Mr. Duceppe’s accusations. In that case, following the necessary due diligence, the Issue Management manager probably presented the findings to the senior campaign advisors who debate quickly their significance and formed a preliminary response. The senior campaign advisors, typically 4 to 5 individuals, will have among themselves over 100 years of experience so matters moved swiftly.

Typically then, the recommendation goes “to the bus,” the leader’s entourage. The campaign manager alone will do the call. A lot rests on his – and it is usually a “his” shoulders – it is personal, urgent, important and consequential. Frankly there is no room for mercy. None asked, none given.

With the basic response strategy agreed upon between the war room and “the bus,” the campaign advisors will craft the media messages. They will be short, terse, and consistent and pointed. The lines will then go back to “the bus” for final approval and a bit of a tweak and may be a little off because the “bus” folks usually do not have all the facts the war room folks have but believe they have the better instincts and experience– sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no.”

The leader as the one to be ultimately responsible for any media release – for which he or she will be held responsible for the rest of their political lives – has the final say. Then the pushback begins. The Issue Management managers will start with calling up the higher echelons of news editors and television producers in order to pave the way for the Media Unit personnel to start phoning reporters to let them know that a media release is due in moments. Everyone will be a little edgy. A media release can bounce well or bounce badly, or just be ignored completely.

Reporters are inherently skeptical about party communications and fearful for their reputations if they are seen to being “played.” Still the great void which the modern media apparatus has created must be filled. The spice must flow. And it does until the next issue appears on the event horizon.

Post Author: Massimo Bergamini. Bio: Massimo is President of InterChange Public Affairs, an Ottawa-based government relations and communications firm. He is passionate about social media and its potential for transforming and energizing liberal democracies.

http://govinthelab.com/political-campaigns-inside-the-war-room-the-media-unit/

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Political Campaigns: Inside the War Room

Published On: Wed, Apr 6th, 2011
By Massimo Bergamini, Contributor: (Written by Owen Lippert, Associate with InterChange Public Affairs, Shared With Permission)

This is the first of a two-part series looking at the workings of campaign war rooms from long-time Conservative insider and InterChange Public Affairs Associate Owen Lippert.

Behind Michael Ignatieff’s snappy “Jack and Gilles” one liner dismissing Stephen Harper’s coalition charges, or explanations for Manitoba Conservative MP Shelly Glover’s ”past her expiry date” comment, are dozens of Liberal and Conservative party operatives toiling in utter obscurity.

Today’s major party campaign “war rooms,” the partisan nerve centres of the 2011 election, are objects of fascination for the media but for the most part retain an air of mystery.

That not much is known about the war rooms, how they operate and who is behind the Great Oz’s curtain, is precisely how the parties prefer the situation. While the media may be invited to an initial tour in order for the party to prove it is competent and well-funded enough to have a war room, access to the sanctum is strictly forbidden once the campaign begins – other than of course for tightly scripted media briefings.

The machinery of campaigning was first portrayed in literature by James Joyce in the short story, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” In the nearly 100 years since The Dubliners, much has changed in the management of election campaigns, still the essentials remain – the division of labour into myriad small tasks, the importance of the campaign manager to bring all the pieces together and the need for a cause to motivate people to work much harder than they normally might at their regular job.

An updated view of the “committee room” would start with a basic definition of what is the purpose of the war room. It is a) the headquarters of the national campaign and b) the central office for the 308 constituency campaigns. For the party in power, the war room is the bureaucracy of a government-in-exile: for the opposition it is the bureaucracy of a government-in-waiting.

Physically, the war room is generally a floor in an inexpensive and non-descript suburban office building full of mostly young men and women with a few old guys lurking in the back. The furniture is rented and the trappings are sparse and functional. All of which raises the question why the government itself cannot be run in such a cost-conscious manner.

If you were to somehow get past the electronic keypad and the bored security guard, you could wander through the floor finding these islands of clumped work stations. The largest unit is the leader’s Tour office. Their responsibility is to make all the arrangements for the hundreds of meetings, greetings and speeches that the party leader will make during the course of even short campaign. Pressure to perform permeates the air in Tour: Either the leader gets to Saskatoon or he or she does not and the media lie in wait for such little slip ups as the leader in St. John and the luggage in St. John’s.

As the leader’s schedule can change daily and rapidly, the Tour department work the longest hours and only get a breather when they are certain the boss is in bed, with the door locked from the inside.

Next in the archipelago of the war room will be the isle of candidate support. These people liaise with the local campaigns making sure they have signs and brochures, are ready should the leader or an important speaker come to town and more or less stick to the script of the overall campaign. The latter always causes headaches.

Constant tension arises from what the local campaign thinks they need to say to win support in the constituency and what the national campaign thinks they need to say to bolster and amplify the national messages. It is the bane of the war room when a local candidate decides that what he or she heard from a cousin has more appeal to voters than the messaging for which the top campaign officials will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to write, test in focus groups and polls and most importantly convinced the leader to approve.

A party cannot afford one war room staffer for each constituency so an individual worker will cover generally 8 to 10 constituencies grouped by definable regions within the province. Working closely with the Candidate Support desks will be much smaller provincial and regional desks that look after broader political and message issues. For instance, a Quebec desk and a British Columbia desk are set up in order to deal with the insular dynamics of those duchies.

A bigger island next door will be the Media Unit. The leader’s campaign bus, plane or hay wagon will have its own elite media unit including a couple of official spokespersons. The Media Unit in the war room is well away from the spotlight of the leader’s tour (of which more will be written later).

They monitor the local media, push out media releases following up with phone calls to receptive reporters and field the hundreds of media questions that flow in every day. They also run the now obligatory party television studio which besides serving as a media centre for press conferences also produces television clips to send to local TV stations. The national television news services tend not to run these clips preferring their own tapes. However, a television station in rural Ontario is not going to send their one camera person on any leaders’ campaign bus. They appreciate a bit of unique tape to which they can add their own commentary.

Our tour of the war room is not complete, but no one spends just one day visiting the Hawaiian Islands. More to come on the InterChange tour of backroom Canada.

Post Author: Massimo Bergamini. Bio: Massimo is President of InterChange Public Affairs, an Ottawa-based government relations and communications firm. He is passionate about social media and its potential for transforming and energizing liberal democracies.

http://govinthelab.com/political-campaigns-inside-the-war-room/

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Plagiarism allegations plague Harper

Published on Friday October 03, 2008
Martin O’Hanlon
THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA–First it was embarrassing revelations of Aussie plagiarism. Now Stephen Harper is facing allegations of Canuck copying.

This time it’s for allegedly lifting part of a speech by former Ontario premier – and fellow Conservative – Mike Harris.

The Liberals sent out a news release Friday comparing lines from a speech Harris gave in December 2002 with an address by Harper in February 2003. Three sentences are nearly identical.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that large parts of a speech Harper gave as Opposition leader in 2003 – urging Canada to join the war in Iraq – were taken from an address by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.

That resulted in horrible headlines around the world, especially Down Under.

Speechwriter Owen Lippert was forced to resign after admitting he plagiarized Howard, but he insisted Harper knew nothing about it.

The scale of the alleged intellectual theft in the Harper-Harris case is much smaller. But, as many a journalist has learned, there’s no word limit on plagiarism.

In a speech to the Montreal Economic Institute on Dec. 4, 2002, Harris said, according to speaking notes:

“Thinking about things from a new and different perspective is never easy. It takes courage, conviction and the strength to know that in taking a new and innovative course, you are making change for the better. … Genuine leaders are the ones who do the right thing.”

Two months later, in an address to the House of Commons on Feb. 19, 2003, Harper said:

“Thinking about things from a new and different perspective is not about reading the polls and having focus group tests. It is never easy because it takes courage, conviction and the strength to know that taking a new and innovative course is going to make change for the better. Genuine leaders are the ones who do the right thing.”

In an ironic twist, Harper’s speech also praised Harris.

Liberal candidate David McGuinty said it’s an example of Harper’s “lack of intellectual honesty, of any original thought.”

“It’s time for the prime minister to take responsibility for his repeated plagiarism, for passing off the thoughts and words of others as his own. Or perhaps he’ll simply find another junior speech writer to fire.”

Conservative spokesman Dan Dugas dismissed the matter as an attempt by the Liberals to “deflect attention from their lack of an economic plan.”

“It’s a stretch to say it’s the same as the Howard speech, which concerned us and which we took seriously,” he said.

“Here, they’ve identified 44 words out of a 4,956-word speech that are similar – not identical – to a speech by another conservative.”

However, Dugas refused to say who wrote the speech.

The Conservatives also initially tried to brush off the controversy over the Howard plagiarism, but were forced to do an abrupt about-face and announce Lippert’s resignation.

source: www.thestar.com/federalelection/article/511503

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Tory strategist plagiarism ‘scapegoat,’ say NDP, Liberals

The Edmonton Journal October 1, 2008

OTTAWA – The Liberals and NDP said the Conservative staffer who resigned Tuesday for plagiarizing parts of Stephen Harper’s 2003 parliamentary speech on the Iraq war was a “scapegoat” for the prime minister.

Owen Lippert, a Conservative war room strategist, abruptly resigned Tuesday afternoon, three hours after a senior Harper strategist in a conference call with dozens of journalists about the matter branded the issue a desperate attempt by the Liberals to deflect attention from a sagging campaign.

The Conservatives later dispatched a former member of Harper’s old Canadian Alliance opposition leader’s office, Ken Boessenkool, to tell journalists that neither he nor Harper had any idea Lippert had lifted parts of his March 20, 2003, speech to Parliament from a similar address by then-prime minister of Australia John Howard two days earlier.

Harper’s speech supported the U.S.-led war in Iraq, which began that day, contrasting with then-prime minister Jean Chretien, who refused to support it.

Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae started Tuesday’s chain of events in a speech that heralded Chretien’s decision and showing a split-screen video that played parts of Harper’s and Howard’s addresses that used identical language.

“It wasn’t Mr. Harper’s speech. It was a speech of former Australian prime minister John Howard that Mr. Howard delivered two days earlier,” Rae told his Toronto audience. “How can Canadians trust anything that Mr. Harper says now?”

The plagiarism allegation made front-page news in Australia on Wednesday after being picked up on CNN in the United States, something Rae said likely led the Conservatives to point the finger at Lippert. “The speed with which they found a sacrificial lamb is almost amazing,” Rae told Canwest News Service.

The Conservatives released a statement in which Lippert said he was “pressed for time,” and “overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech.”

Lippert, who holds a PhD in European history, worked at the Fraser Institute, a right-wing economic think-tank, where he wrote research papers and books, including one on intellectual property, directly related to the question of plagiarism.
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.

source: http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/decisioncanada/story.html?id=2f140a40-4dd5-40a6-99a7-65405d9b066b

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Harper speech plagiarized; Tory staffer resigns

CTV.ca News Staff
Published Tuesday, Sep. 30, 2008 7:39PM EDT

A campaign worker for the Conservatives has resigned, after the Liberals showed a 2003 speech by Stephen Harper that plagiarized sections of an address by then-Australian prime minister John Howard.

“In 2003, I worked in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. I was tasked with — and wrote — a speech for the then Leader of the Opposition,” Owen Lippert said in a press release issued Tuesday. “Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech. Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the Leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so.”

Lippert, who also became a senior policy advisor for the Canadian International Development Agency in 2008, apologized to “all involved.”

Just hours before Lippert’s resignation, Liberal candidate Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing almost half of Howard’s speech, when Harper was opposition leader of the Canadian Alliance

At a press conference, Rae showed video of Harper giving a speech in Parliament on March 20, 2003 — the first day U.S. forces began bombing Baghdad.

The video is contrasted with a speech two days earlier from Howard, in which he gives a strikingly similar address.

Much of Harper’s address matches Howard’s virtually word-for-word.

Rae released transcripts and videos of both speeches and suggested they serve as evidence that a vote for the Conservatives is akin to voting for a “Republican-Conservative” government.

“This is a disgraceful performance by the leader of a political party there for all the world to see, and all the world is going to see it. They need to see it because they need to know what we’re dealing with here,” Rae told CTV Newsnet.

“I would say 35 to 40 per cent of the speech is the same, word for word, statement for statement, paragraph for paragraph, as the speech that was given a day and a half earlier by Mr. Howard.”

Meanwhile, the Tories are dismissing the allegations saying the “speech was given by a person who was leading a party that doesn’t exist anymore,” CTV’s Graham Richardson reported Tuesday.

Richardson, discussing what was discussed in a conference call Tuesday with the Tories, said the party has no explanation for where the speech came from.

Tory officials said there’s been a 100 per cent staff turnover since the speech, suggesting they don’t know the source, said Richardson.

They’re also saying they won’t answer the question because it’s “irrelevant,” he said.

The Tories further dismissed suggestions that Harper received talking points from the Republicans in the U.S.

Rae, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, said the revelation raises questions about whether Harper’s foreign policy views can be trusted.

“On this critical issue, on this issue on the world stage, this is a man who chose to parrot and to mimic and beg, borrow, steal someone else’s voice,” Rae said.

He added: “In law and journalism, in politics, if we can’t speak with an authentic voice, who the hell are we?”

Rae said even Harper’s opponents at the time acknowledged that the speech was eloquent. But he questioned how Harper could have dealt with such an important issue, using someone else’s words.

“He made that choice so blindly and carelessly that he ended up delivering a word-for-word repetition of someone else’s words and thoughts,” Rae said.

CTV’s Roger Smith called the revelations “the Liberal play of the day, the Hail Mary” designed to hurt the Conservatives’ election campaign.

“The Liberals are using this to show that Stephen Harper is totally in lockstep with the coalition of the willing, with George Bush and his Australian allies on the war in Iraq and that his foreign policy is copycat policy of Washington,” Smith said.

“Bob Rae went on to say Stephen Harper would have been expelled from high school for plagiarism.”

source: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080929/election2008_speech_080930?s_name=election2008&no_ads=587

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Harper’s 2003 Commons address mirrors Australian PM’s speech, Rae says

CBC News } Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 5:04 PM ET
Comments 1005 Recommend 426

A staff member has apologized for plagiarizing a speech read by Stephen Harper in a 2003 address in the House of Commons as leader of the Opposition.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, left, is seen on a television screen addressing the Australian Parliament in March 2003, alongside an image of Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, right, speaking two days later. (CBC)”Pressed for time, I was overzealous in copying segments of another world leader’s speech,” Owen Lippert says in a news release sent out by the Conservative camp on Tuesday afternoon.

“Neither my superiors in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition nor the leader of the Opposition was aware that I had done so.”

Lippert worked for Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, when the speech calling for Canadian troops to be deployed to Iraq was written.

Lippert, a former policy analyst for economic think-tank the Fraser Institute, has announced his resignation from his current position working in the Conservative campaign headquarters.

The apology came hours after Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae accused Harper of plagiarizing from the Howard speech.
Tory camp dismisses issue as irrelevant

At a campaign appearance in Toronto in the morning, Rae played video showing Howard speaking to the Australian Parliament on March 18, 2003, alongside video of an address by Harper two days later in Ottawa.

The two speeches, which the Liberals posted to their website, appear to have lengthy duplicate passages, according to a comparison of the two parliaments’ Hansard transcripts.

Earlier in the day, Harper’s spokesman, Kory Teneycke, dismissed the issue as irrelevant, saying the video’s release was an “act of desperation” by the Liberal campaign on the eve of the first leaders’ debate.

“I’m not going to get into a debate about a five-year-old speech that was delivered three Parliaments ago, two elections ago, when the prime minister was the leader of a party that no longer exists,” Teneycke said.

“We’re going to focus on the economy, which is the No. 1 issue Canadians want to talk about. We’re not going to be distracted by attacks from the Liberal war room.”
‘Shocking’ duplication: Rae

In an interview with Don Newman of CBC’s Politics, Rae called the Conservative party’s earlier attempt to brush off the issue “totally pathetic.”

He described the 2003 address as Harper’s “big coming-out speech as leader of the opposition.”

Immediately following the speech, then-foreign affairs minister Bill Graham praised Harper for his “thoughtful and powerful presentation of his party’s case.”

Rae called the apparent duplication “shocking,” saying it reveals the ideological approach of the Harper government in shaping Canada’s foreign policy and indicates the party’s own voice on foreign policy issues was weak.

“How does a political leader in Canada’s Parliament, on such a crucial issue, in fact an issue that in many ways defined our foreign policy for a generation, end up giving the exact same speech as another country’s leader?” Rae said earlier in the day. “Let alone one who was the key leader of George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing.’ ”

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion earlier in the day called for Harper to be expelled from the House of Commons over the affair.

“It matters a lot, tremendously,” he told reporters at a campaign stop in Gatineau, Que. “Canadians want that their country [to] speak with its own voice on the world stage. It’s true for the prime minister; it’s true for the Opposition leader.”
Australian leader ally of Bush government

Howard was a stalwart ally of the Bush administration in the Iraq war and deployed Australian forces to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003, which other world leaders, including then Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, opposed.

Rae pointed to Chrétien’s decision as a moment that “made us proud to be Canadians.”

“The Liberal party has always believed that Canada must have its own voice on the world stage,” Rae said. “He did the right thing and said, ‘No.’ ”

The Liberals said they noticed the similarity between the two speeches only recently, when one of their staffers was searching for a copy of Harper’s editorial on the Iraq invasion published in the Wall Street Journal, the CBC’s James Cudmore reported from the campaign trail.

The staffer entered a portion of Harper’s comments into Google and came up with a link to Harper’s remarks and another to Howard’s. The party said it then ordered a video copy of Howard’s speech.

The revelation came as the federal party leaders were scaling back on campaign appearances to focus on preparing for this week’s debates ahead of the Oct. 14 election.

Segments of speeches

In one segment, both leaders are heard saying:

“It is inherently dangerous to allow a country, such as Iraq, to retain weapons of mass destruction, particularly in light of its past aggressive behaviour. If the world community fails to disarm Iraq we fear that other rogue states will be encouraged to believe that they too can have these most deadly of weapons to systematically defy international resolutions and that the world will do nothing to stop them.”

The clips then jump to Howard saying:

Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says the similarities between the two speeches show that the Conservatives’ foreign policy cannot be trusted.Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says the similarities between the two speeches show that the Conservatives’ foreign policy cannot be trusted. (Canadian Press)”As the possession of weapons of mass destruction spreads, so the danger of such weapons coming into the hands of terrorist groups will multiply. That is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent. Possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people.”

According to the Hansard transcripts, Harper said:

“As the possession of weapons of mass destruction spreads, the danger of such weapons coming into the hands of terrorist groups will multiply, particularly given in this case the shameless association of Iraq with rogue non-state organizations. That is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent. Possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to the world, including to Canada and its people.”

source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/story/2008/09/30/rae-harper.html

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