There are times when I wonder if, out of some misplaced maternal instinct, we’re teaching the next generation of politicians to be cowards.

Don’t know quite what I mean? Have a look at this story in this week’s Hill Times:

” ‘At least one of you is going to get disqualified for something you put on Twitter or on Facebook. I don’t know which one of you it’s going to be but it will be at least one of you,’ ” Jenni Byrne, director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office, told a group of candidates last week, according to a Conservative source.

The problem with this sort of statement is that it gives your prospective Tory candidate the impression of only two options: either pull out of things like Facebook or Twitter altogether (which cuts you out of at least 20 percent of the potential voting audience) or get your site vetted by Tory higher-ups (which, inevitably, leads to “cookie-cutter” sites, which would make your national campaign happy (so free of controversy!) but which make you look like a mindless clone.

The thing is, your prospective Tory candidate shouldn’t need to have his/her website to be vetted. All it takes is to remember a few rules, and a certain amount of chutzpah. The rules are easy enough to remember:

1. When you publish on the Net, you publish to the world. Privacy, shmivacy — whenever you put something up on your site, it’s going to be seen by everyone — your opponents, your competition and your critics, as well as your friends, allies and clientele. Yes, that’s going to govern what gets put in, but you want that, because:
2. On the Net, your site is you. For most people, reading your website is going to be the most amount of contact they’re going to have with both you, the candidate, and you, the person. For that reason, you’re going to have to put up photos, videos, text, etc. of stuff that makes you stand out from the crowd, not just from the other candidates in your riding, but the other candidates in your party. That includes those photos of you playing at last year’s Pride parade, or dressing up for the San Diego Comic-Con. There’s lots of sites available to help your consituency voter get to know the party; but far less for the voter to get to know you — and it’s you, not the Party, that the people hope to vote for.
3. If you don’t define your public persona, your opponent will be more than happy to define it for you. Here, we’re talking about the stuff that’s out of your direct control: the YouTube video of you barfing down your wife’s shirt, for instance. That’s why you need significant, important material on your site to define you in the eyes of the public. And as for the other stuff:
4. It is reaction, not circumstance, that dictates if people will vote for you. That’s not just being able to defend what’s on your site; it’s being able to do so proudly. The job of the candidate, first and foremost, is to sell himself, not the Party to which he belongs; and the candidate crippled by shame is the politician guaranteed to be seen as cowardly.

It may not seem so, the way mainstream media tends to portray political campaigns, but the voting public understands that we are not electing saints. They want people whom they respect for representing causes and people in the face of all opposition (i.e. YOU against the world), and that function requires a high degree of shamelessness. (It’s one of the reasons why Svend Robinson lasted so long as an MP.)

It seems silly to keep hammering at this point, really, but a candidate who will brazenly defend the video of himself barfing down, say, Kady O’Malley’s jacket has more potential to offer the Canadian public than the one who’s shamed into publicly apologizing for calling Michael Ignatieff a Republican. Good politicians need healthy egos, and mastering Facebook without help from above is a good way to exercise same.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 07:51 and is filed under Blogging, Can Cons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.