Hide and Seek with Kevin07
July 20th 2008 23:06
It has been about eight months since the election that saw Kevin Rudd storm the gates at Canberra and lead the ALP to a victory that only the most diehard, delusional Coalition supporters were trying to avoid contemplating.
What comes after an election? Well, yes, the business of government and all of the the pressures that go with it. But there is another aspect of political life that starts wriggling its way out around... well, around the eight month mark actually. The books. It seems every political commentator has a book coming out, or at least in the pipeline, deconstructing the downfall of the Howard Government after almost twelve years at the top and analysing the meteoric rise of the man that made it all happen, Kevin Rudd. I mentioned last week about Peter van Onselen’s new book ‘Howard’s Way’ that has described Kevin Rudd as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of figure: a smooth operator in front of the public and a hard task-master with a volatile, unhinged temper behind closed doors. It’s not exactly that hard to believe: people can’t be expected to be off in la-la land with a permanent grin plastered over their face all the time. For one, it’s hard on the face muscles, which is why most political leaders save the constant grinning for election years. So we could give the Ruddbot a pass on that account. But now there’s a new, in a sense more interesting, book to come out purportedly telling the world the true story about what happened behind the scenes at the 2007 election.
Christine Jackman, journalist with The Australian, has written ‘Kevin 07’, in which she talks about the strategies that the ALP put together to finally topple the Howard regime. In the book, Jackman notes that Labor strategists kept the famous Kevin07 slogan from the man himself until the last minute out of fears that he could have vetoed the move and ruined one of their most successful strategies. Jackson says that the strategists did this as their first real experience with working around their ‘control freak’ boss, and that Rudd was kept out of the Kevin07 loop for the four months that it was going through the testing process.
When it comes to electioneering, the man at the top is expected to be giving oversight to everything. But that’s just not possible. It’s a nationwide campaign spread far and wide, changing everyday. The PM-in-waiting should be a figurehead and articulate the party position but can he keep a hand in every pie? Probably not. You have got to feel for the guy. Four months into election planning, and he gets blindsided and told that one of their main election slogans (and definately the one that most sticks in the minds of the public) has been intentionally kept from him. That’s got to damage the confidence you have in the people working with you as you’re about to kick off a campaign where you need to trust them to be able to be your eyes and ears.
In a way though, the ends justified the means. The slogan did work amongst the youth market that Kevin Rudd convinced to jump on his bandwagon in droves. So was it justified of the people charged with developing slogan to keep it from him in order to protect it’s integrity? It’s difficult to say. If they had reason to believe that he would cut the slogan without a good reason, maybe they did the right thing in keeping it from him. But on the other hand, Kevin Rudd was and still is the face of the Labor campaign. He was the man that was expected to deliver the slogan, deliver the material that went with it, and fundamentally ‘sell’ the message to the general public. Not running a key campaign strategy past him was an incredibly dangerous method. If the strategists were wrong, Rudd could have been a dud in his delivery of the Kevin07 message. He could have hated it so much that he downplayed it’s usage throughout the campaign and thus wasted all of their efforts without any time for them to devise a new slogan and strategy. They put their bets on the fact that Rudd would think there was no time to change the slogan now and would put his everything into running with it. And the bet paid off. They won the election, in the end.
Let’s just hope that secret keeping during the campaign isn’t a sign for years to come.
What comes after an election? Well, yes, the business of government and all of the the pressures that go with it. But there is another aspect of political life that starts wriggling its way out around... well, around the eight month mark actually. The books. It seems every political commentator has a book coming out, or at least in the pipeline, deconstructing the downfall of the Howard Government after almost twelve years at the top and analysing the meteoric rise of the man that made it all happen, Kevin Rudd. I mentioned last week about Peter van Onselen’s new book ‘Howard’s Way’ that has described Kevin Rudd as a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of figure: a smooth operator in front of the public and a hard task-master with a volatile, unhinged temper behind closed doors. It’s not exactly that hard to believe: people can’t be expected to be off in la-la land with a permanent grin plastered over their face all the time. For one, it’s hard on the face muscles, which is why most political leaders save the constant grinning for election years. So we could give the Ruddbot a pass on that account. But now there’s a new, in a sense more interesting, book to come out purportedly telling the world the true story about what happened behind the scenes at the 2007 election.
Christine Jackman, journalist with The Australian, has written ‘Kevin 07’, in which she talks about the strategies that the ALP put together to finally topple the Howard regime. In the book, Jackman notes that Labor strategists kept the famous Kevin07 slogan from the man himself until the last minute out of fears that he could have vetoed the move and ruined one of their most successful strategies. Jackson says that the strategists did this as their first real experience with working around their ‘control freak’ boss, and that Rudd was kept out of the Kevin07 loop for the four months that it was going through the testing process.
In a way though, the ends justified the means. The slogan did work amongst the youth market that Kevin Rudd convinced to jump on his bandwagon in droves. So was it justified of the people charged with developing slogan to keep it from him in order to protect it’s integrity? It’s difficult to say. If they had reason to believe that he would cut the slogan without a good reason, maybe they did the right thing in keeping it from him. But on the other hand, Kevin Rudd was and still is the face of the Labor campaign. He was the man that was expected to deliver the slogan, deliver the material that went with it, and fundamentally ‘sell’ the message to the general public. Not running a key campaign strategy past him was an incredibly dangerous method. If the strategists were wrong, Rudd could have been a dud in his delivery of the Kevin07 message. He could have hated it so much that he downplayed it’s usage throughout the campaign and thus wasted all of their efforts without any time for them to devise a new slogan and strategy. They put their bets on the fact that Rudd would think there was no time to change the slogan now and would put his everything into running with it. And the bet paid off. They won the election, in the end.
Let’s just hope that secret keeping during the campaign isn’t a sign for years to come.
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