The Life of a War Room

Back in the early days of the campaign, I posted about the disasterous rapid-response of Mr. Kenney to a post on Scott Feschuck's blog. I personally find the monotonous grind of War-Room attacks and defenses a little hard to take, I'm more than willing to accept that it has become a necessary element of the modern election campaign.

Warren Kinsella, the "Prince of Darkness" in Canadian politics and a key advisor to Prime Minister Chretien as well as an architect of the Liberal war rooms in 1993 and 2000 has demonstrated how effective these elements of a campaign can be. He wrote an article for the national post yesterday (the link is to a copy on his web site).

The idea of a war room, as Mr. Kinsella points out is to be able to defend your guy and to attack the other guy and to do it with facts and sources and wit all in 25-30 minutes. This is something I'm not well suited for but it's something that could be helpful(to a campaign).

Imagine a journalist sitting through a policy speech. 30 minutes later just as he is sitting down to start collecting his thoughts, he gets two e-mails from two war rooms. They are full of biased and partisan but factual attacks/defenses. Now Mr. journalist has a starting point and perhaps more of a reason to do some of his own research. At their best, high functioning war rooms are stimuli for better reporting. At worst they are an embarassment to everyone involved.

My Opinion: Good war rooms can be very good, effective, machines for advancing the message of a campaign. Bad war rooms are embarrassing and the stuff of which electoral defeats are made. any thoughts?