Does anyone else find this odd? In an election campaign filled with party slogans about “forward” and “you,” there’s been an awful lot of talk about the past and “them” — the party leaders.

At this still-early stage of the current federal election, the disconnect is huge between what the 2019 campaign is supposed to be about and what has actually unfolded in the heat of political combat.

From Justin Trudeau’s now-notorious, youthful blackface incidents to Andrew Scheer’s old speeches, the Liberal-Conservative battle now seems to boil down to a contest over whose closet has the most skeletons. Both leaders have also had to contend with the chequered pasts of some of their candidates.

Greens and New Democrats have also been skirmishing over candidates and party-switchers, in an ongoing duel over which party is poised to be more relevant in a potential minority Parliament after the Oct. 21 vote.

What happened to the idea that this would be Canada’s climate-change election? What matters more to voters — the future of work or political background checks?

To be fair, all the parties have been rolling out policies that are about the future and you, the citizen, every day. Scheer has unveiled an array of tax-cut measures; Trudeau was talking about gun violence in Toronto on Friday.

Green party Leader Elizabeth May launched a platform with goodies such as free tuition and basic income earlier this week. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was almost giddily grateful on Friday when a reporter in Windsor asked him about his wide-ranging pharmacare promise.

In short, they’re all trying to live up to their campaign slogans and the promise of what the 2019 election was supposed to be about.

But all these leaders, to some larger or smaller degree, have campaign machines running in the background too, churning out the material that is intended to knock their rivals off their games. They have most definitely been busy at the outset of Campaign 2019, particularly in the Liberal and Conservative camps.

So we have two election campaigns, really: the one that’s announced each day at the podiums, emblazoned with the slogans of forward/ahead and “you.” Then there is the one being fought by the political operatives from the so-called “war rooms,” who are focused more tightly on the battle than on the voters.

There’s always a gap in elections between the positive and negative campaign, or between the air war — what’s in the headlines — and the ground war. Then there’s the perennial tension between policy and personality — are we having an election about ideas or character; values or beliefs?

While it’s still early days, the gap in this election seems particularly profound between what the leaders are putting in the shop window (“forward” and “you”) and what’s going on at the back of the shop.

The Liberals’ backroom, digging up all the sketchy stories about Conservative candidates and Scheer himself, isn’t even pretending that this election is being run on Trudeau’s famed “sunny ways” approach of 2015.

Scheer, meanwhile, is doing photo ops about taxation and hard-pressed families against photogenic backdrops every day, while his team is putting out withering, sometimes vicious ridicule of Trudeau on Twitter.

It is like the parties speak on two frequencies in modern campaigns, to use an old radio analogy. The FM dial is filled with soft soothing music, aimed to ease an anxious electorate, and the AM is all, noisy, yelling talk radio.

This week, the conversation on the AM dial drowned out almost everything else. Photos of a national political leader, with his face painted black or brown, will do that. The conversation wasn’t just noise either — it opened up a dialogue that Canadians may need to have about race, racism and accusing others of racism.

It may have even provoked some reflection in those war rooms, about whether we really want campaigns to revolve around what people did in their pasts, rather than what politicians are going to do in the uncertain future.

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We may still get that climate-change election that many of the political leaders were promising for this fall. We may see some interesting debates over whether Canada needs the government to do more in citizens’ lives than less.

But 10 days into this campaign of 2019, it’s an election dominated by what the back rooms have been doing in every party. Not very forward, and not much about you.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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