Bernard Gauthier

After all, the NDP web site seems to excel on all kinds of level. It’s attractive, focused on issues that matter, and features a leader who is really quite skilled at projecting a positive image. Why it even partakes (kind of) in the social media revolution of late. For all its qualities, however, something about the site or the medium just isn’t working for the New Democratic Party.  Something… but what?

My first thought on arriving on the main page is that all the bright orange is somehow going to burn a hole through my poor monitor. Add a few touches of green to attract the environmentalist crowd and you have a well branded, if monotonous, main page. The menacing picture of smoke stacks and power lines reminds me of the imagery you find in An Inconvenient Truth and reminds me that the environmental tree stump is getting crowded; when three (possibly four) leaders want to be seen as the “green” leader, it gets hard to tell them all apart.

I also notice three pictures of leader Jack Layton, which earns him the crown for the Most Visible Leader on the Main Page Award. Refreshingly, there are no pictures at all of either Prime Minister Harper or Mr. Dion. Nice touch.

I can’t resist the picture of Jack Layton in a bright red jacket on his Arctic tour.  The video is nicely done: good production values, a nice understated but confident delivery and great footage of Inuit residents talking with Jack and sharing their observations on global warming. We couldn’t be further here from Stéphane Dion’s “Hello my spacebook friends” or the Conservative’s Dion-bashing TV spots. What’s also noteworthy is that Layton’s performance on the French versionof this video is not too bad at all. He’s no Jean Charest or Paul Martin (linguistically speaking) but he’s easily the most comfortable of the three major party leaders in both Official Languages.

Still in a video mood, I then watch the NDP TV spot on health care. Once again, the production values are good and Jack’s performance is solid: calm, informal and not too slick and polished (something that plagued Layton in the last election). 

Time to take a closer look at how the site attempts to forge the image of its leader. The section on Jack Laytonis a classic example of how to make the most of a bad situation. Here’s a leader that, like his party, has never been in power. Yet the text is full of bold confident statements about rewriting the Liberal budget, doubling electoral support and re-electing every incumbent. Gutsy but perhaps too much of a tug at the leash. The rest of the section talks about Layton’s “pragmatic” municipal experience, his PhD and “idea-filled” books and the contention that “even the jaded media are noticing.” There’s even a link to “More about Jack” page that’s a little more personal and a lot too long. My biggest complaint here is a portrait of Layton that features one of those strange grade school year book poses (twisted neck, shoulders, torso and all) and the sleeves-rolled-up-tie-loosened look that says “I’m an accountant working late into the night to get this guy’s tax return in before deadline. I am exhausted and overwhelmed.” Note to Mr. Layton: the look isn’t doing wonders for Dalton McGuinty so you best look elsewhere for your sartorial inspiration.

I can’t leave the site without checking out the multimedia section and, in particular, the section on Blogging Tools. Finally, we have a major political party website that acknowledges blogging and tries to hitch a ride on this mighty wave. I frankly don’t yet know enough about blogging (strange admission on a blog, I know) to comment on whether this is worth the bandwidth it eats up but I’m impressed that they made the effort and that the end result is, once again, nicely produced, well branded and positive. Is anybody using these tools?

So, everything seems right with this site and this leader. As a professional communicator for many (too many) years, I have to sit back and say “nice work.” This could serve as a best practice for other political sites. And yet, the party and the leader remain mired in third (19% of poll respondents), 14 points behind the Conservatives and 10 behind the Liberals according to a recent Angust Reid poll. So what gives? I frankly didn’t have an answer when I started work on this posting. I have three possible answers now.

The first answer is that the site and its leader may be a little too confident. Maybe, when you’ve never been in federal power, you need to be a little more humble. You need to acknowledge to voters that they may be a little hesitant to put somebody new into the most important office in the country. You need to reach out to them, connect and help them through that process. It’s a big gap for people to get over.

The second is a little more pessimistic and stems from a conversation I just had with my son’s girlfriend. She’s young, politically active (co-president of the school council) and, by her own admission, tuned out of federal politics — another victim of negative campaigns and cold politicians. Maybe the NDP suffers more from young people tuning out federal politics than the other two parties. I’ll have to dig up some research on that at some point.

Third, and I hinted at this above, the emergence of the Green Party can’t be helping. They’re at 9% in the polls and gaining. They occupy much of the same mind space as the NDP. And they’re newer on the scene, which makes them a little more interesting perhaps.

Perhaps a closer look at the Green Party website will shed light on this. Stay tuned.