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become the victim of the speed of communication. The day was coming when there would be no breadth of information. The news would be purely episodic and the audience’s critical faculty weakened. It was good news for marketers and nirvana for political strategists riding herd on the suggestible masses.
    Technology has also made political manipulation frighteningly less difficult, Finkelstein noted. While acknowledging that freedom of speech was sacrosanct, he observed that it was hard to clarify the truth on the internet. Although he said that lying about people had never been his specialty, discrediting them was—as John Kerry learned after he was “swift-boated” in the presidential election against George W. Bush. Finkelstein was widely suspected of having organized the attack ads. “I do not slander someone without proof, but with proof, I am happy to,” he said, pointing out that if Kerry had responded more quickly to the attacks against him, he would have become president.
    To Finkelstein, a negative campaign is legitimate as long as it’s not patently untrue. It comes down to casting the appropriate lights and shadows over your opponent; you are relentless in highlighting his failings and you never mention his strengths. Because most people water-ski over the surface of events, theydon’t want deep content or even to know what a politician thinks. They want to know who he is sleeping with and how many of the good human vices he has. Finkelstein said it came from watching “nonsense programs” on TV. With the right information, you can cut somebody off at the neck instantly. It was, he told his audience, “a dangerous world we live in.”
    It would be four more years before Stephen Harper commissioned a poll by Arthur Finkelstein in 1998 to test the waters for making a run at political leadership in Canada. But what Harper had to offer was on display at the ninth annual memorial dinner for the founder of the NCC, Colin M. Brown. Speaking in Ancaster, Ontario, as a Reform MP, Harper delivered the same message in 1994 he had delivered to the same group in 1989— that there was a “crisis in the welfare state.” Harper argued that Western countries were suffering from high unemployment, low economic growth, and very high government expenditures. The choice was either a major reform of government programs or “the state as we know it will experience a financial collapse.”
    In the public question period after the speech, Harper was asked what he thought of Premier Ralph Klein’s slash-and-burn approach to reducing the deficit in Alberta. Harper heartily endorsed Klein and offered a prediction: “If Premier Klein can carry off his program in Alberta, it will lead to a revolution, a very quick political revolution across the country.” But as one of his audience members, NCC president David Somerville, noted, getting rid of the deficit would be meaningful only if the system itself were changed in such a way that successor governments and the bureaucracy would be unable to undo the reforms. Stephen Harper was clearly listening.
    Despite his hard work and speeches promoting a competitive international market economy for Canada, Harper was growing less and less comfortable in the Reform Party. Preston Manningtold me that he thought that part of the explanation for Harper’s restlessness was that he had turned against a fundamental principle of Reform: freedom of expression for its MPs. “What soured Stephen early on with Reform was that if a member’s constituents differed from the Party’s position, we allowed the member to represent the constituents,” Manning recalled. “It bothered Stephen that one rogue member could undermine all our work. While the Conservatives and Liberals appeared united, we sometimes got hammered by our own people, and that soured Stephen Harper. Personally, I would prefer the benefits of freedom even at the cost of flack.”
    Stephen Harper’s instinct to control the message