Your friend: the sniff test

A bit of a Liberal leadership scandal - Joe Volpe receives $15k+ from political donors under the age of 18 - two eleven-year-olds and a fourteen-year-old to be exact.

Outcry. Uproar. Funds returned.

You can draw your own conclusions on that.

But upon returning the money, this is what Volpe's spokesperson had to say:

"Let's be clear here," Hobbs said. "All the donations for our campaign have been in compliance with the law."

He said the youngsters were reimbursed simply because "we wanted to clear the air on the perception out there."

It should occur to him that most people in Canada with pre-teens likely can't identify with them having bankrolls that allow them to cut cheques for 5 grand for their favourite Liberal leadership candidate. Maybe these kids do have such resources. If so, they probably have really cool bedrooms.

However, most people probably will assume that the majority of the poputlation doesn't have kids with such financial resources. So I would suggest that telling people you're only returning the funds to "clear the air on the perception out there" would be perceived akin to saying "we got caught".

I wonder if it crossed their minds to jump out ahead of this and acknowledge that they'd screwed up and will more closely scrutinize donations from those under 18. People make mistakes - and people understand that.

By refusing to show any infalibility and staking your position around 'there's nothing leagally wrong here and we're only returning the money because it looked bad for us' you're only worsening an already bad position. Especially if you're in a party that carries a lot of baggage when it comes to financial impropriety.


Technorati tags: issue management, liberal party, politics, communications, scandal, volpe, apotex