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What happens when over the course of five decades, the most insignificant of prime ministerial gaffes are blown out of proportion? When freedom of information legislation permits the exposure and public ridicule of personal spending habits (albeit, with taxpayer money)? When style and image are overblown, become the target of humiliation and are seemingly far more important than discussions of policy? And when a prime minister or any politician pays a heavy and usually embarrassing price for any mistake, miscalculation, misspeak, slip-up, stumble — or even when an airline loses a politician’s luggage?

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One predictable result is: Stephen Harper and his Machiavellian Prime Minister’s Office.

As columnist Jeffrey Simpson recently put it, the “takeaway lesson” of the Senator Mike Duffy affair on how the PMO operates is that, “everything in the Harper entourage revolved around image, reputation, damage-control and spin.” True, but why is this surprising?

There is no denying the Harper PMO’s manipulation of the Mike Duffy affair and many other issues, or the prime minister’s hyper-control freakish behaviour. But the real question is: why has Harper and his PMO adopted such an obsessively contrived approach? The short answer: because since the early 1960s, that is how the media have set the rules of the game. And often you really do reap what you sow.