‘Selfie’ mayor needs substance

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2015 (3216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brian Bowman is addicted to the political virtues of the cheap, quick digital photograph.

He’s constantly using pictures to show he’s busy at public functions and his fondness for selfies with other Winnipeggers at those events is legendary. He’s even filling his social-media feed with photos of empty foyers, pretty views or architectural features. Winnipeg, meet your photographer-in-chief.

There are two prevailing views about this addiction.

The first view is that this is a refreshing sign that the mayor “gets it” when it comes to showing some 21st-century personal transparency. It’s probably a minority view, but it’s widely held, especially with voters who are social-media addicts themselves.

The other view is that this addiction is proof Bowman is a gadfly or a lightweight who simply can’t handle the job of being mayor.

My own view falls somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, mayors are expected to be extremely visible, available and accessible. If you don’t get that, you don’t understand the job. For example, former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley routinely spoke at several public dinners on busy nights, and he famously paid his respects at five different funerals in a single day. More recently, former Boston mayor Thomas Menino was so accessible, local pollsters confirmed that over half of Boston voters — in a city of almost 700,000 — had personally met their mayor at some point. Some mayors even refuse to leave town for their vacations, preferring to rent a local hotel suite so they’d still be nearby if a crisis hit.

And there’s good cause for Bowman to overcompensate on this front. Remember, his predecessor was mocked for habitually skipping events that other mayors never miss, including police graduations, business summits and even a Remembrance Day event. Katz was a guy who used the word “showmanship” in casual conversation, but he showed little concern for the “first citizen” expectations of the mayoralty — and over time, it cost him.

That said, Bowman is taking a risk if he doesn’t dial it down soon. The problem isn’t that the endless grip-and-grin photos aren’t part of his job. The problem is that Bowman isn’t doing enough of the rest of his job, and the contrast is starting to show.

Take this month’s short war over the city’s new bike and pedestrian strategy. Despite several missteps by Coun. Wyatt, the five councillors who attacked the plan were well-organized in their effort to paint the plan as a dud, carefully scheduling their attacks to introduce a fresh critique each day over several news days.

It created fodder for the media with pundits and other councillors weighing in. So, where was Bowman?

As mayor, he can hold a news conference every day if he wants to, and it would’ve been worth it to reassure voters about the details of the plan before it was debated. But he didn’t. It wasn’t for lack of time, since he’s been busy with public events this month. We know, because we have the pictures to prove it.

Consider a similar missed opportunity on another front: affordable housing. On July 6, Bowman’s picture was everywhere as he worked on a construction site with Habitat for Humanity. Again, these sort of events are part of the job. But anyone can lift a hammer for the cameras.

Two weeks earlier, Bowman had a chance to do something much more mayoral. Habitat was at city hall fighting not-in-my-backyard residents who tried to stop 18 new homes in St. James. Bowman could have intervened in that fight to make a point. Someone needs to start convincing Winnipeggers to make room for infill housing, and who better than the mayor? Or, he could’ve taken action to open up additional land for groups such as Habitat. But photo ops still take precedence over actual progress. Team Bowman still thinks of city hall as a world of symbolic gestures, without grasping that the symbols are supposed to be a small part of something much larger.

“The medium is the message.” In Bowman’s case, the selfie is a medium that is starting to reinforce his lack of a message. If there’s no goal, no objective, no progress behind one’s political communications, photo ops and selfies start to become a self-parody — a self-defeating rather than self-promoting exercise. Think of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, the 1997 flood, and Manitoba’s hostile reaction after Chrétien tossed a sandbag for the cameras before returning to his election campaign, and you’ll get it.

Bowman hasn’t reached self-parody quite yet. But if nothing changes, it’s pretty certain he will, sooner rather than later.

 

Brian Kelcey is a public policy consultant. He previously served as a senior political adviser at city hall and in the Ontario government.