Everything you wanted to know about mooseburgers.

Lights dim. The cheering crowd falls silent. A giant screen at the back of the stage glows and the deep, slow, dramatic words of the narrator rumble through the convention hall.

"Dan Gardner was born 40 years ago in a small cabin in northern Ontario."

On the giant screen, a black-and-white photo of a toddler holding a shotgun appears.

"His father was a trapper. His mother a professional wrestler. There wasn't much money but there was plenty of love and prayer."

The screen fills with the image of the family, heads bowed, hands joined above a dead moose. A piano plays softly.

And so it goes. I watched every night of the Republican convention and I still don't know what John McCain would do about climate change, the deficit, immigration or a dozen other burning issues but I did find out how he and Cindy met and fell in love and I learned that Sarah Palin's dad woke her at 3 a.m. to go hunting.

Oh, and I discovered that Democrats hate ordinary Americans. Good to know.

Aside from the partisan rancour John McCain promised to eliminate just as soon as he finishes using it to get elected, the convention was dominated by the candidates' life stories. Like Olympic broadcasters, political consultants have learned focusing on the substance of the event -- whether pole-vaulting or policy-making -- isn't the best way to score with an audience. Stories are.

Stories about people. People who overcome tragedy and never lose faith. People whose high-school sweethearts stick with them through it all. People who never stop smiling, no matter how hard the road ahead.

As psychologists have shown, we respond intuitively and emotionally to stories while numbers and logic leave us cold. This is why stories can sway us like nothing else and why, for someone selling toothpaste or politicians, stories are an essential marketing tool.
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Unfortunately, stories have limitations and the growing importance of candidates' narratives in political marketing leads to problems that were on full display in both conventions.

For one thing, the stories tend to be ersatz simply because real life stories are far too complicated and messy to be packaged and advertised.

John McCain's story is as good as they come, full of courage and accomplishment, but it's also more human than the saccharine confection fed to the family values crowd Thursday night. Republicans would not, one assumes, have gone misty-eyed at the heartwarming tale of a married 42-year-old who leaves his first wife -- a woman who stuck by him through his five years as a prisoner of war -- for a 24-year-old beauty queen. And so in the tale told at the convention, the first wife was dropped down the Orwellian memory hole and, in her place, the audience was told the charming story of how, when John met Cindy, John told Cindy he was younger than he was and Cindy fibbed about being older.

And with that little revision, the storytellers had their Hallmark moment.

Is it offensive for me to raise details of John McCain's life which, I would agree, are irrelevant to McCain's candidacy? Well, that's another problem with this sort of marketing. It makes the candidate's life political. If the story about how John and Cindy met is fair game, so is the fact he was married.

Similarly, it's a bit much for Sarah Palin to speechify at great length about her family and its struggles, parade her very pregnant teenage daughter onstage, pass her special needs baby around the convention floor -- and then loudly object that the Obama campaign is using her family for political purposes. (Which they weren't, incidentally. Barack Obama said from the beginning of Palin's various baby controversies that he'd fire anyone who did and, when pressed, the Republicans couldn't give an example of the alleged offence that had Palin complaining so righteously.)
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Worse than the fudging and hypocrisy, however, is that making the personal political steals valuable attention away from what really should matter.

There once was a man who ordered a group of his followers to hijack planes and slam them into various buildings. Thousands died. That man has never been caught. His crime was mentioned repeatedly and prominently at both conventions and yet his name and the burning need to bring him to justice was mentioned only briefly at the Democratic convention and not at all at the Republican.

There were, however, at least a dozen references to "hockey moms" and "mooseburgers" at the Republican convention and the three years Barack Obama spent as a community organizer after graduating from Harvard got a remarkably thorough going over in Denver and again in Minneapolis.

As for public policy -- you know, what the candidates would do if elected -- forget it. There was the usual rhetoric about bold plans and visions -- energy independence! balanced budgets! prosperity! victory! -- but less substance than in an average episode of The Daily Show.

There wasn't time, after all. We had to learn about how Cindy McCain's dad became a successful businessman, how John is such a wonderful father, and how Cindy's charity work led Cindy and John to adopt a child with a cleft palate from one of Mother Teresa's orphanages.

The next morning, it was announced that the economy had lost 84,000 jobs in August. But what does that matter? It's only a number.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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