catchy
By Eric Dowd
Toronto – Ontario’s Liberals had a catchy slogan `choose change’ that helped win the last election, but prefer not to be reminded of it.
Premier Dalton McGuinty and his party in fact keep getting reminded. They used the slogan to help suggest they would provide a radically different government that would for example keep all promises and vastly improve services.
They have not lived up to it, although they have made some worthwhile changes. Almost as their first act they broke a promise not to increase taxes and they reduced treatments available under medicare.
The Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats scoff almost daily their `choose change’ slogan was a fraud and voters would not have supported them if they had known.
The Liberals’ slogan captured a mood among voters for an end to Tory policies that weakened services while cutting taxes, however, and few have been as effective.
One was Tory Mike Harris’s call in 1995 for a `Common Sense Revolution’ – the word `Revolution’ always written like jagged graffiti so it suggested an uprising, although it addressed particularly middle-class concerns at high taxes.
Harris inspired more slogans for and against him than any Ontario politician in memory and some are on a collection of campaign buttons reporters covering the legislature recently acquired.
There is `Harris – he’s the real thing,’ meaning he would do what he said, which he largely did (and a copy of a soft-drink commercial.) And `Harris – the future starts now.’
Harris also had `I like Mike,’ rhyming making an easier-to-remember slogan and recalling the `I like Ike’ of Dwight Eisenhower, one of the best-liked U.S. presidents.
Harris inspired even more slogans against him, including `Anyone but Harris’; Harris with a red bar across his face and the demand `Recall’; and a grisly one shaped like a label reading `City morgue. Name: Jane Doe; Address: unknown; Cause of death: Harris cuts; D.O.A.’
NDP premier Bob Rae, whom Harris defeated, also provoked critical slogans. One from opponents read `Don’t blame me – I didn’t vote for him,’ but another with a red bar through his face was from a once-friendly labor union, angry he forced civil servants to take unpaid time off to save money.
The cleverer slogans include another union’s jeer at `Pink Slip Floyd,’ Rae’s finance minister Floyd Laughren, dubbed Pink Floyd after the rock group and his leftist tendencies and now attacked for job-cutting
Tory premier Ernie Eves, whom McGuinty defeated, used a slogan that was understandable, `Ernie – because we’ve come so far,’ which suggested Harris started well and Eves should be left to finish the job.
But by then Harris had lost his early popularity and Eves dithered so much voters were uncertain whether he was continuing in Harris’s footsteps or making a new start.
Rhymes are always popular. There was `I’m with Brian,’ although it did not identify which; `All the way with Drea,’ a reference to Tory minister Frank; and `Thank you, McKeough,’ a union’s sarcastic jibe at Tory Darcy McKeough, the first finance minister to talk of cutting public jobs.
Larry Grossman, a Tory leader who never made it to premier, had a slogan `Let’s be the best we can be,’ which sounds like president John F. Kennedy’s `Ask what you can do for your country.’
A button the Tories put out after they lost government in 1985 promised optimistically `We’ll be right back,’ but it was a decade before they returned to govern.
Candidates used puns on their names like `I’m a Snow man’ by Jim Snow, a longtime Tory minister.
A button put out by Jimmy Carter running for president read `America needs change’ and may show where `choose change’ originated.
The slogan this writer liked best urged `Let’s put Leona in her place – Queen’s Park’ and Leona Dombrowsky is now environment minister.
But if there is a lesson from slogans in election campaigns it is don’t trust them.
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