One party’s negative opinion poll may not be the other party’s vote-winner
Unpunctual, unclean, uncivil, uninterested and unproductive employees go unchallenged because a manager can’t summon up the courage to tell them to get their act together. They go for their annual review and come out morally glowing and monetarily richer, leaving behind a manager who believes some hard truths were told, whereas in fact, any hard truths were packaged in so many layers of bubble wrap that their impact was muffled at best.
On the other hand, we’re mighty at negative feedback as long as we don’t have to do it face-to-face.
Give someone access to a phone-in radio programme and stand well back while they spew over a minister, minister of state or opposition spokesperson so recklessly that Joe Duffy begins to murmur that a) he’s sure the speaker didn’t really mean the last libellous point and b) even if they did mean it, RTÉ doesn’t stand over it.
Better than phone-in radio for free-range negative feedback are opinion polls.
The poll in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post is a classic example.
Not just because it was negative for the Government, and especially (although not precipitously) for Fianna Fáil, but because it confirms a trend, which, in Orwellian terms, is: FF/PD bad, alternative good.
The poll will set at least part of this week’s news agenda. Government spokespeople will be asked by media to react to its findings. Fundraising for Fine Gael and possibly the Greens will get markedly easier in the coming months.
Nobody wants to give money to no-hopers, but it makes sense to give money to strivers who seem to be getting somewhere.
That, in turn, means that Fine Gael will be able to afford more bus-shelter posters to establish name and face recognition for its candidates.
Money and morale are the immediate, measurable outcomes of positive opinion polls.
Morale, in political terms, means more than candidates leaping out of bed in the morning with a song in their heart.
In Fine Gael, good polls quieten down a counterproductive but chronic urge within that party to be in policy-formation rather than in power. The minute FG morale drops, they go off and work on policy documents, start calling for “reasoned debate” on issues and feel they represent statesmanlike substance. In which context, it’s appropriate to quote the man who got Jimmy Carter elected, Pat Caddell.
“Too many good people,” Caddell wrote, “have been defeated because they tried to substitute substance for style: they forgot to give the public the kind of visible signals that it needs to understand what is happening.”
Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael have gone big- time into the visible signals business. The leader is one big travelling signal, personifying a light-hearted warmth and what-have -we-to-lose optimism.
While this has played better than they expected, party elders, bothered by recurrent “Kenny Lite” accusations, were tangibly relieved by his recent handling of the underage carnal knowledge issue: hey, our guy can do serious stuff, too.
The Fine Gael signals are simple and personal. They’re going to give householders the right to knock hell out of burglars. They’re going to fire anyone caught with their hand in the till. They’re going to ditch anyone who wastes what’s in the till.
The polls show the public like what they’re hearing. More important, the public — for the first time in a long time — are registering where Fine Gael would take the nation, given a chance.
Except the reality is that, whereas in the 90s Ireland was first and foremost an economy, today it is primarily a bureaucracy. State bodies exist to take care of everything. Former Government departments have spawned such bodies in their dozens, each with its Mission Statement, Vision Statement, Five-Year Strategy, corporate identity, staffing and headquarters.
IN this bureaucratic morass, finding the person accountable for anything is difficult and, given the matching growth of human resource legislation, chopping them off at the knees impossible.
Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats know this through bitter experience. If kicking into action those responsible for delivering services to the public was as easy as Fine Gael posters suggest, Mary Harney’s 10 Point A&E plan would have made museum-pieces out of hospital trolleys.
The problem for Government is that the public can’t be bothered with the details justifying slow progress in problem areas.
They can’t be bothered with improvements either — how many people have taken to the streets to congratulate the Department of Health on eliminating cardiac surgery waiting lists? Nor is the public as influenced by single events as commentators and politicians believe.
After a dire PD month in which Mary Harney and Michael McDowell seemed set for pistols at dawn in the Phoenix Park, yesterday’s poll suggests the public cares not a jot about that much-publicised fracas.
The real danger for both Government parties lies not in sporadic controversial explosions but in the constantly-creeping mildew of pervasive boredom.
All the SSIA-euphoria in the world may not compete with the public sense that “they’ve been there forever, we could do with a change.” Capitalizing on that attitude may not require opposition genius either, as British political history indicates.
The myth of New Labour in Britain says the Mandelson-manipulated image of Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept the Conservative Party out of power.
The reality is that if New Labour had appeared even one general election earlier, it would have failed to sweep the Tories out, because the Conservatives hadn’t a few years earlier become the national bore.
Once a government becomes the national bore, public and media alike begin to move away from it, and any reasonable alternative develops an aura of attractiveness which retrospectively gets elevated into a cunning plan when there really wasn’t much of a cunning plan in place at all.
The most recent poll suggests there is a real alternative to a Government that’s been in power since God was a child. The reality is more nuanced.
Fine Gael may have somehow got themselves into a position of possible leadership, but the Green Party are one step back from that position.
They’ve moved from vague tree-hugging gentleness into a tougher, more combative place but aren’t yet sending signals to convince the individual voter that a good-for- business environmentalism can be exciting.
If Fine Gael’s loser-reflex is “reasoned debate”, the Green Party’s loser-reflex is “public transport.” It’s their deadly default position. Being told to go on the bus may be worthy, but it’s sure as hell not appealing to voters.
The Labour Party, meanwhile, is mired in twin convictions: Fianna Fáil = evil, PDs = uncaring. Anyone open to this message has now got it. But it’s not enough.
Sigh-and-see the politics won’t turn Labour into an electoral pied piper.
And generalised opinion poll findings that an alternative exists are a long way away from proof that the alternative is coherent enough to risk votes on.
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