{"id":1659,"date":"2008-02-13T18:52:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-13T23:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1659"},"modified":"2008-02-13T18:52:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-13T23:52:00","slug":"well-maybe-not-a-strategic-genius-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1659","title":{"rendered":"Well, maybe not a strategic &quot;genius&quot;&#8230;but&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Say what you will about Stephen Harper (and I\u2019ve said a lot), but he\u2019s nobody\u2019s fool. Two small, but very good, examples of smart messaging:<\/p>\n<p>1. Make it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/servlet\/story\/RTGAM.20080213.welection13\/BNStory\/National\/home\">look <\/a>like Liberals and Tories have come together on Afghanistan, in a bid to take a very problematic issue for him off the table.<\/p>\n<p>2. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.canada.com\/montrealgazette\/news\/story.html?id=605cc127-2d8c-45b0-a514-7cdae9cdc659&amp;k=42789\">Lower expectations <\/a>for the budget so that anything Flaherty gives out will be welcomed with open arms.<\/p>\n<p>Clever guy, eh?<\/p>\n<p>Now, as for our example of not so smart politics, I&#8217;d say this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/servlet\/story\/LAC.20080213.DONATIONS13\/TPStory\/TPNational\/Politics\/\">fits the bill<\/a>. When you&#8217;ve been hit hard on the ethics issue in the past, blatantly breaking the fundraising laws right before on election strikes me as an odd tactic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Say what you will about Stephen Harper (and I\u2019ve said a lot), but he\u2019s nobody\u2019s fool. Two small, but very good, examples of smart messaging: 1. Make it look like Liberals and Tories have come together on Afghanistan, in a bid to take a very problematic issue for him off the table. 2. Lower expectations [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}