OTTAWA—A couple of days into his cross-country journey this summer, standing outside a bakery laden with sugary treats, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff worried aloud that he’d be a “fat man” by the time his tour was over.

It was a well-founded fear. On top of all the stops at Tim Hortons — never, ever, a Starbucks — the so-called “Liberal Express” was a journey of consumption. Barbecues, farmers’ markets, ice-cream stands were all standard stops. In between, the bus rolled past endless miles of malls and big-box stores.

Is it any accident, then, that politicians see the voters as one big crowd of hungry consumers, and that citizens think politicians, like those merchants, see them simply as wallets?

So we probably shouldn’t be surprised that populist sentiments in the United States and Canada — whether it’s the fiery Tea Party in the U.S. or the more apolitical “Tim Hortons voters” here — are named after hot beverages. As you consume your tea or coffee, so shall you judge and be judged. Above all, you shall have the opportunity to buy things.

The left wing wanted the government to be more involved in the lives of citizens, while the right wanted governments to act more like businesses. Treating voters as consumers is the perfect solution to appeal to both sides.

Add to this the infusion of pollsters and marketing gurus into the professional class of politics since the 1960s — with all the lessons learned from selling widgets or services — and you get a system that’s geared to pay attention first and foremost to consumption.

And that was a deliberate decision in the United States, historian Lizabeth Cohen writes in her sweeping saga of post-World War II America, A Consumers’ Republic.

Cohen calls it “a strategy that emerged after the Second World War for reconstructing the nation’s economy and reaffirming its democratic values through promoting the expansion of mass consumption.”

Canada, so close to the United States, can naturally expect to have experienced the same shift — consumerism as the goal and measure of good politics. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien noted during the 1993 election campaign, the first of his three successful majority wins, that politicians need to encourage construction projects, because when people see bulldozers, they want to go shopping.

Nowadays, the shopping/consuming link to politics is often expressed through coffee choice: liberal lefties go to Starbucks; the common man and woman go to Tim Hortons.

That’s not exactly what politics used to be all about — once upon a time, it was seen more as an institution, like school, church or even the military. The remnants of that view of politics linger in its practices and its metaphors: politicians are expected give speeches like teachers or church leaders; the word “campaign” comes from the battlefield, where the troops are engaged.

But now we also have politicians and governments concerned with “branding” and “getting the message out” and adhering to the mantra that the customer/voter is always right — all ideas borrowed from the mass marketplace.

That old Liberal red book of the 1990s campaigns, or the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in 1994? Those printed promises were your money-back guarantees, the warranties that voter/consumers want from politicians.

Citizens aren’t stupid. They know how it works: politicians sell, voters buy, and in between is advertising, or the more sophisticated marketing (changing your product to suit your customers). But some voters can sense that this shouldn’t be the sum total of the democratic equation.

Reg MacGregor, a retired school principal in St. Catharines, went out to see Ignatieff during his cross-country tour this summer. A lifelong Liberal, he’s been paying attention to how politics is moving away from the institutional toward the market-oriented model.

The night before, MacGregor had been watching the news on TV — specifically, Industry Minister Tony Clement talking about the summer controversy over the mandatory, long-form census.

“He just kept repeating, repeating, repeating the message,” MacGregor says of Clement’s appearance. Fast food came to mind.

“When McDonald’s first came on the scene, years ago, I can remember that they kept repeating, repeating, repeating. That’s advertising.”

At the Comber Fair in southwestern Ontario one scorching, hot Sunday afternoon in August, water-purification businessman Jerry Alice had set up his own stall. He watched Ignatieff making his way through the fair and recognized a fellow salesman at work.

Politicians, no matter what their stripe, are too busy with selling and not enough about delivering, Alice believes. And that’s where he thinks they’re allowed to be different from salespeople in the private sector.

“I can back it up,” Alice says about the kind of promises he offers when selling water-purification systems. With politicians, “I would like to see guarantees. And there are no guarantees with politicians.”

But for all that’s obvious to voters in how politics is borrowing — or should be borrowing — from marketing wisdom, there are the more subtle techniques, not so obvious to the average voter or consumer.

Mass marketing is easy to recognize — everyone knows most of the tricks on both sides. It’s large and obvious, because its goals are large: seizing as much of the market as possible.

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But “market segmentation” — focused, targeted appeals to certain swaths of the population (think “custom”-designed products or iTunes) — is also being used increasingly by the political class, especially Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative election machine.

Ironically, the same government that has declared the mandatory, long-form census “intrusive” is run by a party that has a highly sophisticated, information-gathering machine about the electorate — and using it to enormous effect.

The “Constituent Information Management System,” or CIMS, as it’s known, is the beating heart of the Conservatives’ political efforts, filled with data culled from polls, door-to-door visits by candidates and volunteers, and any other information the party can get its hands on. It was briefly a focus of controversy a few years ago, when former Conservative Garth Turner and his new party, the Liberals, alleged the Harper government was using CIMS information to send ethnically appropriate greeting cards to voters on cultural holidays.

André Turcotte, a professor of communication at Carleton University with a background in polling and strategy for the old Reform Party, has analyzed in detail how the Conservatives have been using market intelligence to segment the consumer/voter terrain in Canada.

“Traditionally, Liberal and Conservative campaigns have adopted a mass-marketing approach to winning elections,” Turcotte writes in a paper delivered earlier this year at a Congress of the Humanities conference in Montreal. “The approach adopted by the Harper Conservatives can be described as ‘hyper-segmentation,’ ” he writes, describing how the party used its sophisticated databases to pick and choose the voters/consumers it needed to form a workable, winning minority.

“The end result was that out of a sea of about 23 million eligible voters, the Conservative strategy was able to focus on a pool of about 500,000 voters which made the difference between victory and defeat.”

Some political operatives would like to see this practice get more sophisticated, with even more consumer information. In other words, politicians will be wondering not just whether you’re a Tim Hortons customer, but what kind of products you buy at the doughnut shop.

Mitch Wexler runs a firm called Politrain and recently penned an article in the Canadian version of Campaigns & Elections magazine about why politics should be more embracing of “microtargeting” techniques — using shopping information about voters. In his article, he says that Canadians are generally more privacy-conscious than Americans about this kind of data.

Wexler told the Star that there are many good reasons for politicians to want the kind of complex consumer data that is more readily available to U.S. politicos.

“Traditional demographics such as income, occupation, family size, ethnicity and other characteristics are more easily understood by politicians than other data such as consumer spending, media habits, or lifestyle. That said, it is the combination of various factors — what people spend their money on and where, do they have kids at home, what is their profession — that form the best picture of who people are and why do they vote the way they do (or if they do).”

This kind of information can be particularly useful at the ground level, he says, to help candidates build relationships with voters or to help the party with direct-mail and advertising.

Asked how voters’ shopping behaviour can be useful to politicians, Wexler says: “There are certainly voting behaviours related to where people shop, but it’s too early (in our accumulated research) to determine whether these are related to the culture of these stores directly, or if it’s because these stores inherently market themselves to certain types of people and locate in neighbourhoods where they live.”

But there are real worries that the more politicians and their campaign teams see voters as consumers, the more the voters will simply decide “no sale.” And some idealists still wonder whether the sum total of politics should be to encourage people to buy things.

The conclusion and a question: Is democracy too old-fashioned for the modern political marketplace?

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