President wanted: those without sin and ladies not for burning only
Ireland has recovered and we’re no longer living in the half-finished ruins of the development debacle. With me so far? Good.
Next thing, The Suits come for you. The Suits, usually male, who are the quiet movers and shakers within political parties or special interest groups.
They come to you, do The Suits. If they’re from a political party, they stress that their approach hasn’t been authorised by the leadership. They’re just exploring possibilities. In confidence. Without prejudice. Off the record. They just want to put a question to you. Hypothetical question, you understand. Here it is: Have you ever thought of being a candidate in the upcoming presidential election campaign?
You laugh and deny it. Or you redden and admit it. If you’ve laughed and denied, my first bit of advice to you is to keep laughing. Except for the 30 seconds it’ll take you to finish your cappuccino. Then tell them you’re flattered to death but it’s not for you.
Don’t give them reasons. Don’t ever give them reasons. Once you give reasons, you’re in a negotiation. The Suits will negotiate you into a cocked hat and a candidacy.
If you’ve reddened and admitted interest, you’re already goosed, God love you.
You’ve handed them your heart strings and before you know it, they’re using them to knit a noose for you. They show you private research showing you’d win it in a canter. Or a gallop. You’re the man or women of the moment. All you have to do is take leave of absence from the job and Áras an Uachtaráin is your next residence.
Having initially met The Suits, you talk — in confidence, of course — to your friends and immediate family. Because they’re pretty bought into you already and the thought of reflected glory is seductive, their reaction is affirmative: Go for it.
Unless you have a wise mother or father who remembers what it was like, 14 years back, in the autumn of 2011. Or a wise old mother or father who can recall what it was like even further back, in the election before that. That older person with the long memory will wince, rather than rejoice, at the possibility of you running for the presidency. Wince with them.
Then do worst-scenario planning. Yes, right now, media love you. But media has to fill screens, radios and pages with exciting stories. You being pleasant and agreeable is worth a picture and a paragraph on the day of your launch. After that, media will want to know the worst. Not good news stories. Never good news stories.
In the 2011 election, one week Mary Davis was a national heroine. The following week, she had a malevolent moniker stuck to her, based on dark interpretation of her past.
What’s that? Media should want good news stories? Honey, you’ve just established a really good reason for you not to run. Two good reasons, in fact. First, it is never your job to decide what media should or shouldn’t do. Stay on your own side of the net and let those in a difficult business get on with it. Secondly, you’re not being realistic. Human beings, all day, every day, share gossip about scandal, disease, betrayal, greed and crookery. They buy media for an extension of that. Not for uplifting sermons about the righteous. They get that bit in the editorial. Can you quote a recent editorial from any paper? Didn’t think so.
It’s media’s job to provide counterpoint and contrast to ubiquitous PR sunshine, so you’d better work out what’s the worst they might find out about you, or be told about you by someone you got drunk with/slept with/were horrible to 30 years back, or some employee you fired or some relative who believed you did them out of something to which they felt entitled.
Go find the details of when you got in trouble with the Revenue, availed of an amnesty, did a DUI, lied on an official form, sniffed a banned substance, cheated in an exam, were on the wrong side of a barring order, owned an offshore account or appeared in a photograph half-dressed. If you don’t find one of the above, but you know in your heart you did it, trust me: media will find it even if you can’t.
If you agree to let your name go forward, you will be introduced first to the focus group expert. They’re the ones who listen to 14 people in a room rather than a thousand people on the street. They call it qualitative research. Bill Clinton called it “a bunch of bull”. Al Gore, because he was so bright and consultative, did not accept that easy dismissal. He did what the focus group guys told him. He lost. Surprise, surprise.
WHAT’S that? You don’t want any facile dismissals of solid research? Okay. Try this. The focus group experts will gather a group of people (who have the time to eat bikkies and generate a bunch of bull) before the campaign starts. They’ll ask them what they want of the presidency. If the previous president has been worth a damn, they’ll want more or less the same.
In 2011, the view would have been that another seven years of Mary McAleese would have been dandy. Then the researcher will present the group with your name or picture or both, to find out what they like about you. If your profile is from involvement in a charity or a political party, the focus group will say they value your experience. Yep. Except that in every presidential election, whether Irish or American, candidates who major on experience lose out to candidates who may have much less to boast about, but who tell stories. Stories of triumph and disaster. Stories of people who changed their lives. Stories that link them to the state of the nation.
No research in advance of presidential election 2011 came up with a Seán Gallagher-shaped need. He just decided he was what they should want and went out and told stories about himself.
Of course, he was greatly helped by other candidates setting fire to themselves. What was that? You have too much experience and judgement to set fire to yourself? That’s what Dana Rosemary Scallon thought, back in 2011. She had the TV skills to interrupt a live debate in order to release her personally-directed pyromania and in a subsequent TV3 interview scattered Zip fire-lighters around to sustain the blaze. Ditto Martin McGuinness, who set fire to himself by failing to answer a predictably pejorative question with reproachful dignity and then getting argumentative with the questioner.
If, despite all this, you’re determined to run, please understand one last danger you face. Political pyromania gets more acute as the campaign wears on. By the final week, everybody but the leader in the polls gets irrational from panic. The urge to do something, anything, takes hold. And they can’t keep their hands off the matches.
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