park bench

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 4, 2003

Our New Premier

In the summer of 2002, Peter Byrne, a partner at the advertising firm Bensimon Byrne D’Arcy, was contacted by a friend involved with the Dalton McGuinty campaign. Byrne had never done political advertising before, but he agreed to meet with McGuinty — although the Liberal leader’s reputation preceded him.

“Really, I didn’t know the guy from Adam,” Byrne said. “But I had heard that he was dull, and wooden and stiff.” 

Indeed, McGuinty’s campaign image was freighted with some difficult cargo — a holdover, perhaps from a disastrous 1999 campaign in which he appeared flustered and awkward, feebly parrying Mike Harris’s aggressive political blows. 

This time, he told Byrne, it would be different. “Dalton said, `I’ll be happy to lose, I hope I win, but I want to be me this time,'” Byrne recalled. 

So began an image makeover so obvious that it seemed to hide in plain sight: Against all conventional wisdom, McGuinty, soft-spoken, wholesome and sincere, would simply be himself. (CP)