Well said

John Moore reminds us of the purpose for the Cons' selective presentation of carefully-staged images of Stephen Harper, as the media is far too readily being used to distract from the reality of who currently occupies 24 Sussex:

What’s being sold, as so often happens in TV advertising, is the aura that surrounds the product, not the merits of it. And it is being deftly done. The trick in selling a politician and his policies on TV is to offering a commercial that looks like a news story. And in the instance of the rock ’n’ roll dad, what Our Glorious Leader’s handlers are doing is taken from the Ronald Reagan era in U.S. politics – allowing the cameras to film the leader often in his R&R time to show he’s a regular guy, not a professional politician.

We all know, intuitively, that this is a marketing campaign. We all know intuitively that it is timed to distract from the reactionary, hard-line, ideological PM who emerged through his position on maternal health and the abortion issue. We all know that the scary reactionary is being softened into a regular dad with a missus mad about the gardening.

While we know it intuitively, it needs to be said, aloud and often. That short piece of media analysis on Canada AM was one of the very few times recently when the selling of Our Glorious Leader was laid bare.