Jacinda Ardern’s Wall Of Sound.

Thirty Minute Symphony? Among her peers there is no one who approaches Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern when it comes to talking the talk. She is, indisputably, New Zealand’s foremost impresario of political verbiage.

PHIL SPECTOR’S “WALL OF SOUND” production technique revolutionised the recording of popular music in the 1950s and 60s. Simple multiplication lay at the heart of Spector’s innovation. Where other producers would hire one musician, he would employ many. Three, not one, drummers. Two, not one, pianists. Multiple guitarists – acoustic and electric. All dedicated to enlarging his young listeners’ experience. The effect he was looking for – and delivered – was a two-minute symphony.

Jacinda Ardern has perfected her own version of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. A multiplication, not of instruments, but of words. Verbal riffs and phrases that build upon one another to create an edifice of explanation that doesn’t so much enlarge as overwhelm those assigned to question the prime minister, along with those inclined to listen to her. Among her peers there is no one who approaches the Prime Minister when it comes to talking the talk. She is, indisputably, New Zealand’s foremost impresario of political verbiage.

To describe Ardern in these terms is not in any way to deprecate her. Increasingly, across the Western World, the quality most sought after by politicians – and admired by voters – is fluency. To be at a loss for words, in the current political climate, is a sure sign of weakness. What counts today is polish, style and ease. The ability to convince: not by the meaning of one’s words, but by how well one delivers them. In an age of celebrity, all that matters is the smoothness of the “talent’s” performance.

Nowhere was this phenomenon more agonisingly on display than in the on-screen confrontation between the Democratic and Republican contenders for the open Pennsylvania Senate seat: John Fetterman and Dr Mehmet Oz.

Prior to the debilitating stroke that hit Fetterman in the opening weeks of his campaign, he had been well-ahead of his rival. In spite of the fact that “Dr Oz” is a well-known television personality, he was unable to match Fetterman’s working-class “authenticity” – manifested principally through his rough-and-ready working-man’s vocabulary and diction.

Robbed of this easy fluency, however, Fetterman soon began to flounder. His positive medical prognoses notwithstanding, Fetterman’s stroke-induced inarticulateness, when set alongside Oz’s smooth delivery, instantly began to tell against him in the polls. The voters did not appear to care about the candidates’ policies, or even about their characters. The only factor that seemed to count was who sounded most like the host of a reality TV show. Pennsylvania, which, six months ago, had been seen as a slam-dunk for the Democrats, is now too close to call.

As New Zealand enters election year, a change of government may ultimately come to depend on how closely National’s Christopher Luxon can match the Prime Minister in political fluency. At the moment, Luxon is well behind Ardern. Plausible, rather than convincing, the National leader presents well enough under gentle questioning. Pressed to explain his words, however, Luxon’s fluency falters. Openly challenged by politicians or journalists with the facts at their fingertips, his fluency has an alarming tendency to disappear altogether. Unlike the PM, notorious for being formidably well-briefed, Luxon, under pressure, sounds neither convincing, nor reassuring.

The contrast between Luxon and his health spokesman, Dr Shane Reti, is instructive. Even more than Ardern, Reti presents an easy authority. On both the generalities and the details he is a hard man to fluster. That medicine is his profession undoubtedly helps, but so, too, does his ability to think on his feet.

Questioned by John Campbell on Sunday’s Q+A, Reti turned his interviewer’s collection of official statements and reports into a formidable debating point – demanding to know why it was necessary to have so many bureaucracies dedicated to supplying more-or-less identical advice to the Government. That is the calibre of performance that wins a Leader’s Debate in the final weeks of an election campaign: the sort of “Show me the money!” improvisation that enabled John Key to defeat Labour three times in a row. Can Luxon think that fast? Not on current form.

Luxon’s performance also falls short in another important respect: his ability to emote convincingly. On the “performative emotion” scale, the National Party leader is positioned several rungs short of the Prime Minister. Sadly, Nature has not supplied him with the highly mobile features of Ms Ardern, who can flash a dazzling smile of reassurance with the same ease that she adopts the pathos of a mourning Madonna, or demonstrates the empathic rictus of a woman who feels your pain. Luxon does cheery tolerably well, but all those other emotions, so critical to a successful political performance: anger, pity, disdain, lofty indifference, intense solidarity; still need a lot of work.

Naturally, all of the above were on display at various points during Jacinda Ardern’s speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference (6/11/22). Unsurprisingly, there are few contexts in which the Labour leader feels more at home than in front of the party faithful. Given the amount of practice she has had, Ms Ardern’s ease is only to be expected. Long before she became leader, “Jacinda” had made herself the darling of Labour’s membership. Her youth, her vivacity, and her ability to string together words that conveyed less in the way of deep meaning than they did of happy feeling, made her the ideal Mistress of Ceremonies at party gatherings.

It is a testimony to just how much Ardern learned about the art of communication at the University of Waikato, that she has been able to parlay her talent as an MC into the skills of a PM. She grasped early what her predecessors – Phil Goff, David Shearer, David Cunliffe and Andrew Little – missed. That what people are looking for in a leader are exactly the same qualities they admire in a game-show host. Warmth, wit, and a complete absence of condescension, obviously. But, also unflappability: the quality of always appearing to be on top of things – even when they are going wrong.

That unflappability, so evident in the hours and days following the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, White Island, and – most impressively – during the Covid-19 Pandemic, is what makes Ardern such a formidable political contender. That sense of being in control – without appearing to make any obvious effort – drives her political opponent’s crazy. John Key has it – albeit with a slightly different performative repertoire . Boris Johnson has it. And so, to the deep chagrin of millions, does Donald Trump.

Phil Spector’s two-minute symphonies made his career. That wall of sound testifying to the unstoppable power of pop music. The other wall of sound, the one produced by men and women who can read an autocue without appearing to, points to another kind of power: the kind that reassures us that even in the midst of chaos – someone is still in charge. Small wonder, then, that the politicians capable of conveying that reassurance – without an autocue – tend to win more elections than they lose.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 November 2022.

A Bloody Hard Act To Follow.

From Here To There: In 2017 the Grey Lynn Ardern declared airily, “Let’s do this!” If, in 2023, the Morrinsville Ardern can snarl, “I’ve bloody done it!”, then she’ll lead her Labour Government to a third term.

POLITICAL PROVACATEUR, Matthew Hooton, predicts that we should expect to see “less Grey Lynn and more Morrinsville” from Jacinda Ardern. He may have been referring to the Prime Minister’s earthy vocabulary, with its “bloody” this and “bloody” that, but his characterisation also offers an apt description of the political territory traversed by Ardern since the heady days of her “Let’s do this!” campaign of 2017.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to recognise the almost reckless quality of Labour’s 2017 election campaign as the product of a party that did not expect to win. The gap to make up after David Cunliffe’s 2014 debacle, when Labour’s Party Vote declined to a woeful 25 percent, was generally assumed to be too wide. With a Party Vote of 37 percent, Labour seemed happy enough to have lifted its vote by 12 percentage points. Ardern had done well, but her demeanour on election night gave no hint that she believed herself to have done any more than avert yet another electoral catastrophe.

Certainly, the pundits’ verdict on the night was that, with 44 percent of the Party Vote, Bill English would remain New Zealand’s prime minister. Much as he might squirm at the prospect, Winston Peters’ final decision as to which of the two main parties NZ First backed would be dictated, as it always had been before, by which of them received the most Party Votes.

But it wasn’t. This time Peters chose to sit down and dine on a dish of cold vengeance, and Ardern found herself, at the age of thirty-seven, the stunned steward of New Zealand’s fortunes. That she was woefully unprepared for that role was hidden from the electorate by the new prime minister’s superb communication skills. Ardern accomplished the transition from the person who could always be relied upon to charm Labour’s rank-and-file, to the prime minister who could charm not only her own people, but the rest of the world to boot, with astonishing aplomb.

That words – no matter how well chosen – were not, in the end, enough to produce concrete policy victories became clear to all in the grotesque failure of KiwiBuild. It would not be the last instance of massive over-promising, followed by equally massive under-delivery. Indeed, all those years working alongside Helen Clark and Heather Simpson had not driven home to Ardern the deep political wisdom of Clark’s “under-promise and over-deliver” formula for electoral success.

The explanation for this failure is almost certainly generational. As a Baby-Boomer, Clark belonged to a generation that not only understood how much a properly equipped state could accomplish, but also knew, as someone who had lived through the angst and anguish of Rogernomics, exactly how much equipment the state had lost. Yes, there were still many levers left to pull, but hardly any of them were attached to anything that actually worked. If it was work you wanted, the place to get it done – after 1984 – was the market.

Ardern’s other generational problem was the extent to which “communication” and “performance” had melded together. Government announcements about government action had become so important that the very fact an announcement was about to be made itself became the excuse for an announcement. It was as though Ardern and her colleagues believed that the announcement of a set of measures, and their accomplishment, were one and the same. To say it was to do it. Which was fine, providing “it” was something the market wanted to “do”.

The ”Grey Lynn” Ardern understood the genuine desire of her generation to do something about climate change, poverty, racism, sexism and cycle-lanes. But, she also understood how good they felt “liking” a Facebook post of “hearting” a tweet, and how effortlessly signing an online petition had come to replace trudging down the main street with a placard. Politics had become performative – a play. It existed to deliver a message – but not much of anything else. Surely, everybody understood that what they were looking at wasn’t real?

When it comes to delivering messages, however, the Grey Lynn Ardern had few equals. Her “They are Us” on the day of the Christchurch Mosque Massacre, followed by her hug in a hijab, brought the whole world to tears – and cheers. Covid-19 provided an opportunity for more of the same. In the face of a global pandemic, the delivery of calm and inspiring leadership proved to be a vaccine every bit as effective as Pfizer’s – maybe more so!

Ardern’s signature message of kindness, and her powerfully solidaristic “Team of Five Million”, combined with her intuitive decision to “go hard, go early” with the “science” (rather than the business community) carried her forward to an historic electoral victory.

But, if 2017-20 was the Lord Mayor’s Coach, then 2020-23 shows every sign of being the shit-cart. In spite of announcements, and announcements about announcements, the relentless machinery of free-market capitalism grinds on. Every crisis has its cost, and the cost of New Zealand’s Covid-19 pandemic has been, and will continue to be, huge. Political dramas cannot go on forever, and all too often the audience steps out of the theatre into driving wind, freezing rain – and Omicron. When you’re wet, cold, ill-housed and infected, and the cost-of-living keeps spiralling upwards out of control, then messages – no matter how inspiring – tend to be forgotten.

The Morrinsville Ardern is emerging because our Prime Minister has realised just how bloody naïve the Grey Lynn Ardern always was. Like Helen Clark, who grew up in the same part of the country, the Morrinsville Ardern has learned the hard way just how little the contemporary New Zealand state is capable of delivering. She knows what it’s like to pull on a lever and feel it rattle loose in her hand. She knows, too, that a Labour prime minister can only say “No” to the business community for so long. She has learned that carrots are all very well, but every now and then it’s necessary to put a bit of stick about. And if the stick’s victims turn up on your front lawn? Well then, you give them a little bit more!

Morrinsville Ardern is what you get when reality drives an iron spike into the gentle soul of Grey Lynn’s “Jacinda”. Will Kiwi voters take to Morrinsville Ardern? Hard to say. As a people we’re notorious for letting ourselves fall in love with performers – generally on the sports field. We are even willing to allow them a few mistakes – providing the culprits demonstrate they’ve got what it takes to pull themselves together and lift their performance. Even the disappearance of the grace and flair that first attracted us to them is forgivable, just so long as the ruthless and ugly efficiency with which they’ve been replaced continues to deliver the wins.

In 2017 the Grey Lynn Ardern declared airily, “Let’s do this!” If, in 2023, Morrinsville Ardern can snarl, “I’ve bloody done it!”, then she’ll lead her Labour Government to a third term.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 28 March 2022.