Party of One (3 page)

Shortly after the Halloween Convention, Preston Manning laid the foundations of Stephen Harper’s political career. Fiscal policies were central to Reform, deploring as the party did the debt and deficit run up by the Mulroney Progressive Conservatives. In Manning’s mind, Mulroney’s profligacy merely exacerbated debts
accumulated under the Trudeau government. A bright—and very affordable—economics student fit the bill to become the impecunious party’s chief policy advisor. “We asked Bob Mansell at the University of Calgary for the name of his smartest grad student,” Manning recalled, “and he told us Stephen Harper.”

Harper worked hard developing policy but threw his hat into the electoral ring at the first opportunity, running for Reform in what became the free trade election of 1988. It must have been an odd experience. He ran against his old boss, Progressive Conservative Jim Hawkes, in Calgary West. In those days, he called himself “Steve Harper” and ran on the slogan “The West Wants In.” Possibly, but it didn’t want “Steve,” at least not yet.

Although he lost his first attempt at elected politics, Harper was soon on his way to Ottawa anyway. His ticket was punched by another Reformer, Deborah Grey, who had won a by-election in March 1989. Grey needed a legislative assistant and Stephen Harper drew the assignment. They were the original political odd couple, as Preston Manning told me: “That was a case of two opposite personalities.”

As a politician trying to grow a political party, Manning paid more attention to ability than to personality. He told me that in the ten years Stephen Harper had been with him, he really didn’t know the stranger at his elbow: “I did not have a close relationship with Stephen Harper—especially after 1997. On a personal level, he keeps it close to the vest. When he first joined us, he was not married. I do remember that he didn’t care if you were married or had a wife and kids to think about.”

At first, Harper thrived on hard, purpose-driven work. While serving as the party’s chief policy advisor, he finished his master’s degree, gave a speech at a memorial event for the founder of the NCC, served as national spokesperson for the “No” campaign in the 1992 Quebec constitutional referendum, and found time
to marry Laureen Tesky. And then in the early nineties, Preston Manning decided to hire a new political strategist for Reform. Rick Anderson was a proven organizer and a former manager of Hill & Knowlton in Ottawa. He was experienced, personable, and diligent. He was also very much resented by Stephen Harper.

Harper was already having policy disagreements with his leader by this time, over matters such as the Charlottetown Accord constitutional issue and Reform’s focus for the next election. Manning wanted to run a national campaign in 1993; Harper believed the party should invest its resources in Alberta. Although Harper himself had quit the position of chief policy officer in 1992, the idea of being replaced by a Trudeau Liberal was especially galling. “Stephen was quite suspicious of Rick Anderson when he joined Reform because he had been a Liberal. The chemistry was not great,” Manning recalled. “Since those days, Rick and Stephen Harper have come to a greater mutual respect. When Rick’s daughter passed away from brain cancer [in January 2010], Stephen Harper was very deeply moved emotionally.”

Harper’s next run at federal politics came in 1993, when he again ran against his old boss, PC MP Jim Hawkes. In a moody display of his unhappiness with Reform, Harper withdrew from the party’s national campaign and concentrated exclusively on his own attempt to get elected. This time the winds of change Harper had talked about in his 1987 speech were howling. The Progressive Conservative Party was blown into political oblivion like tumbleweed. When the gales subsided, the PCs’ representation had been reduced to two seats, and Stephen Harper was the new member for Calgary West in a caucus of fifty-two Reform MPs.

Although Jim Hawkes may not have known it, he was not defeated by the rebranded “Stephen” Harper alone. Working behind the scenes was the NCC and legendary American pollster and strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who had worked for the NCC
since the early 1980s. Hawkes had raised the ire of the NCC on the subject dearest to its political heart: third-party funding during elections. The far-right organization portrayed legislation limiting the amount of money third parties could spend during elections as “gag laws” rather than a sensible attempt to make sure these contests didn’t come down to who could buy the most advertising. Finkelstein saw Jim Hawkes as Brian Mulroney’s point man against third-party spending. The NCC was locked and loaded. Careful not to say it was supporting Stephen Harper, the organization spent $50,000 to get “Hawkes’s head on a platter,” as the American pollster described his goal.

Like its founder, Colin M. Brown, members of the NCC vigorously resisted any limits on their “freedom.” Brown was a millionaire life insurance salesman from London, Ontario, who didn’t approve of medicare. The motto of the NCC was “More freedom through less government.” Brown had adamantly opposed hospital insurance, medicare, and the expansion of social welfare during the Pearson and Diefenbaker years. Both Preston Manning and his father, Ernest, were ardent supporters of the NCC, sharing its values and vision. Brown himself quit the PC party in 1975 to personally fight the National Energy Program and the so-called gag laws. He assisted the pro–free trade campaign by the business coalition in the 1988 election, which outspent its opponents four to one. At its peak, the NCC took in $2.8 million per year in donations. The organization fervently believed that citizens and organizations should be able to spend as much of their own money as they wanted in election campaigns—a right in the United States that has turned politics into the sport of kings and wealthy kingmakers.

Arthur Finkelstein was crucial to the NCC’s plan to turn Canada blue. In 1982, the lobbying group hired this brilliant and secretive political consultant who had perfected the political attack ad. His job was to teach the NCC the art of commando politics as
practised in the United States and several other countries where Finkelstein operated. Finkelstein, who knocked down incumbents like bowling pins in US politics, was the most sought-after neo-conservative political strategist in the world. A Libertarian in his personal politics, his first success came in the 1970 Senate race in the US, in which he got James L. Buckley, brother of William F. Buckley, elected. As a member of the Republican caucus, Buckley became the lead petitioner in the Supreme Court decision that shaped new campaign finance law in the United States, striking down limits on spending in Congressional races. (On behalf of the NCC, Stephen Harper took the same issue all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where he ultimately lost in 2004.)

In 1988, Finkelstein did a poll that alarmed the far right, suggesting that Canadians might be on the brink of electing NDP leader Ed Broadbent as prime minister. Broadbent stood at 40 percent in the polls—majority government territory if the numbers held until the federal election looming in the fall. Since there were difficulties driving a scandal-ridden Brian Mulroney’s numbers up, the NCC decided to bring Ed Broadbent’s down. They spent half a million dollars doing it. Under Finkelstein’s guidance, the message was simple and deadly: Broadbent the socialist, who wanted to take Canada out of NATO and who opposed Senate reform, was “Scary, very, very, scary.”

The campaign virtually sidelined Broadbent, and free trade, not leadership, became the key issue in the 1988 election. But there was still a problem with promoting free trade, because the man who was advocating it, Brian Mulroney, was not popular. Arthur Finkelstein was not deterred, as Gerry Nicholls reported in his book
Loyal to the Core
. Finkelstein told his colleagues at the NCC, “We have to convince Canadians to drink pig piss.” They did. Brian Mulroney won a second majority government on the issue of free trade, despite serious doubts about his government’s integrity.

Finkelstein would have an enormous influence on Stephen Harper’s political career. He worked only for conservative candidates and always tried to get a benefit for Israel out of any of his campaigns.
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But, according to his associate Gerry Nicholls, he was not a mercenary and wouldn’t work with a candidate he didn’t agree with, or for the biggest paycheque. But there was a striking exception to that practice. Although gay, Finkelstein helped to elect Republican candidates all over the United States who thought homosexuality was immoral and who opposed gay marriage. He managed to keep the contradiction between his professional and private life secret until 2005. Meanwhile, according to a CNN report on Finkelstein in 1996, his abilities were almost magical: “He is the stuff of Hollywood, a man who can topple even the most powerful foes, yet so secretive that few have ever heard of him.”

Executives at the NCC tended to see elections as wars, as did Stephen Harper. Finkelstein had honed the art of third-party advertising to a razor’s edge. The strategic use of attack ads could elect or destroy a candidate for public office in a heartbeat. Donors to the NCC not only got to support or attack a candidate; they also received a tax deduction. Finkelstein’s modus operandi was always the same: pinpoint polling aimed at exposing a weakness in an opponent; then use a trenchant, repetitive advertisement to exploit the candidate’s Achilles’ heel. The right fifteen-second spot on TV or radio could end an opponent’s career when the attack ad followed the formula of Arthur Finkelstein, nicknamed the “Merchant of Venom.” His specialties were upset victories and close races. According to “Finkel-Think,” 80 percent of the vote in the US is decided before parties even begin to campaign—evenly split at 40:40. The election is taken by the party that wins the close races in the remaining 20 percent of the swing vote.

Not much is known about Arthur Finkelstein—by design. He almost never grants interviews, and he never appears as a talking
head on any of the network gabfests. His advice to clients is almost always delivered face to face—as it would be to Stephen Harper in 1998. But while speaking to a private university in Prague in May 2011, Finkelstein was recorded, and the audio ended up on YouTube. It was an
ex gratia
lesson from the master strategist about how to win in modern politics and about where the world was headed. In a smooth, calm, intelligent voice, he talked about his work in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Eastern Europe, and about the nature of politics. Sounding a little bit like a political reincarnation of philosopher George Berkeley, Finkelstein told his audience that what they perceived to be true was true—as distinct from the objective truth.

An old philosophical chestnut: perception as reality. Good politicians will first tell you things that are true and only later begin to mislead you, Finkelstein said. If they tell lies to you first and get caught out, they will always be disbelieved. Money is important because it determines who gets to hear what, he continued. As for political candidates, apparently looks and size matter. Finkelstein offered his audience an interesting statistic: the taller candidate wins 75 percent of the time. “An ugly person could not be elected now,” he said. And if you were female and wanted to get into politics, Finkelstein had some advice: look mannish, strong, and wear a pantsuit. If the economy is a mess, he pointed out, the electorate looks to business people as leaders. The most important resource for any politician is time, both to raise money and to build an identity and image. He noted that 60 to 90 percent of the vote in every election is decided before a candidate ever hits the hustings.

He also talked about different types of campaigns, including ones in which the goal is to get people
not
to vote for a candidate, just as Finkelstein and the NCC had done in the contest between Jim Hawkes and Stephen Harper in 1993. The trick is to create a totally negative vote against an opponent while not
showing your own candidate. Surprisingly, Finkelstein said that issues don’t matter—people will vote for you if they like you, the way Americans liked John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Finkelstein explained that the current world economic crisis is worse than it feels, claiming anger is rife at the base level of society. Young people will take to the streets when the realization sinks in that their future holds not fame and fortune, but penury. As a result, nervous societies will rely more and more on authoritarian regimes led by people who are capable of ruling with an iron fist. Finkelstein also thought that the future could include the rise of another Hitler if unemployment got any worse. Scapegoating would take place around the world as sovereign nations looked for someone to blame for their reversal of fortune. In Hungary, it’s the fault of the Roma, he noted, in France the Muslims are to blame, in the United States, it’s Mexicans. These groups will be accused of taking jobs from native citizens and destroying their way of life.

But every crisis has a political silver lining for strategic thinkers. Finkelstein advised that the riots in Greece—the economic basket case of the European Union—could be used to discredit the socialist campaign against austerity. Fear is a political superweapon in the power wars. “Politics is a three-dimensional game of chess,” he said in Prague. There is you and the other candidate, and then God steps in: Bin Laden is captured; there is an earthquake or a tidal wave, an ever-changing backdrop that affects the game on the board. In chess as in politics, a good player is always ready to react with the right move.

Finkelstein told his audience that humour is important, especially in advertising. If you make the advertisement amusing, everyone will want to see it, creating resonance. And the medium is the message. He reminded his listeners that in the 1960 presidential debate, those who saw it on television thought Kennedy won; people who listened on the radio gave the nod to Nixon.

Finkelstein pointed out that politics had changed drastically since his days with Nixon, largely because of what he called “fragmentation of information.” Today, more information is available about smaller things. People are capable of knowing more and more about less and less. They have turned away from the big things and immersed themselves in the distracting diversity of information on the internet purely of interest to themselves. They are not wired in, but wired out.