They've been at it all week. Terry Prone assesses whether the politicians seeking votes and media attention have lost the plot or are just plotting
A mad virus hides in the bloodstream of every political party and comes roaring to life in the first week of a general election. Each party has its unique strain of the virus, and no matter how much planning is done in advance, the symptoms show up under the pressure of the first week.
Fianna Fáil gets showy and shirty. Fine Gael gets paranoid and pompous. The Labour Party gets conceptual and detailed. The Progressive Democrats get gimmicky and touchy.
Bertie Ahern may not call it the election virus, but he knows damn well that no matter how high Fianna Fáil generally (and he personally) ride in the polls in the months before the election is called, the moment the campaign starts, behaviours emerge to remind voters of the worst, and erode memories of the best of his party's history.
Hence his postponement of the election past the point of pain for many of his parliamentary party, who wanted to get the hell out many months ago.
That extra time allowed the Fianna Fáil media relations machine to reach such an unparalleled level of readiness that for the first couple of days after the election was called, journalists murmured admiringly that you had to hand it to the Fianna Fáilers. They were clear, well organised, with everything planned and everything on time.
Before the end of the week, that opinion was turning sour. The media were happy enough to be offered tasty tidbits, but didn't want P.J. Mara & Co sailing up and down their alimentary canals dictating the manner of digestion.
Scuttlebutt began to circulate about repeated and strongly persuasive phone calls directed to journalists, particularly to TV journalists. In a 36-hour period, efficiency was repositioned as manipulation.
Fine Gael, meanwhile, started the campaign in arguably the best position of all. The party has been the subject of such sustained media attack that the fair-mindedness factor was beginning to kick in. It was nearly kicked back out by a version of the Hillary Clinton "vast right-wing conspiracy" accusation. Michael Noonan seemed to suggest that several influential journalists were little more than glove puppets with Fianna Fáil hands deeply inserted in their working parts.
The Labour Party hung a great evocative poster down the front of Liberty Hall and then wasted 70 per cent of their broadcast time getting into foothery detail about macroeconomics.
Even on the rights-based disabilities legislation issue, where theoretically they should have been home and dry, they managed to squeeze the humanity out of it and make it sound like a civics lesson.
The Progressive Democrats got gimmicky to little purpose. Dragging the media to Prosperous for a roadsign is one of those bright ideas that, in a brainstorming session, get respectfully recorded on the flip chart for later reality-testing.
Likening Bertie Ahern to Ceaucescu didn't deserve to get even as far as the flip chart. Not only was it never going to stick, but it begged the question of how Michael McDowell, who's in the running for the title of Brightest Man in the Universe, could have missed for five years the fact that he was sharing a parliamentary bed with a version of an Iron Curtain dictator.
What Martyn Turner did to the photograph of Tánaiste-and-tumbril underscores the danger of getting too fancy with your visuals, although the Progressive Democrats had at least given thought to providing TV with pictures. Fine Gael's empty hospital was also a visual agenda-setter.
One of the difficulties about visuals is exemplified by the posters. Fine Gael's posters have a strong creative visual theme running throughout the series. It's the sort of theme which must have looked superb, viewed on a desk in HQ. It's a blue wave or wall, going in a curve from left to right. To the upper left of the wave is the candidate.
However, the candidate's picture, in most cases, shows the individual right down to their waist, as opposed to the cruder head shots in the Labour and Fianna Fáil posters. The problem is that this extra artistic endeavour is counter-productive. The face of the candidate in an FG poster occupies perhaps 25 per cent of the available space, whereas in the other parties' posters, the face occupies up to 80 per cent, allowing fast recognition by drivers and even an approximation of eye contact.
Underestimating the importance of visuals and over-reacting to words seems to have been behind one of the scuffed-over controversies of the week, which had RTÉ denying that Fianna Fáil was bullying it. The fact is that all parties pounce on the media during an election for perceived lack of balance, and most of the time, they worry too much about the words the reporter says.
President Reagan's media-handlers copped on that if they put him in a hard hat and corduroys on a building site, joshing with the working stiffs, it didn't matter a toss that the voice-over was announcing a drop in building start-ups. The picture carried the message.
Oddly, Clinton's people forgot that lesson. They devoted immeasurable energy to countering attacks on their man, never fully appreciating that his capacity to connect with the American people through TV outweighed all other media.
Bertie Ahern, when he's on song, has the same capacity. Throttling back on the media management machine and letting him at it would be no harm.
On the other hand, Fine Gael's machine, rocked by the reversing of the bus into John Bruton's car, nevertheless came through beautifully in response to the pie-thrower. The leader was in the bus within minutes and back out on the street restored to dapper good humour in remarkably short time. The quotations from the FG people who caught the perpetrator were compassionate.
And if any of us hope that was Custard's Last Stand, I fear we may be over-optimistic.
Terry Prone is an author, media analyst and director of Carr Communications in Dublin