KEY POINTS:
Watching men in bonnets thrashing a wet ball round a pool is not my thing so last night I skipped the end of the water-polo and hopped over to Prime to catch another episode of the fascinating drama "Mad Men," before the Olympic closing festivities.
Mad Men is set in a New York advertising firm, Sterling Cooper, in the 1960s and its principals would win medals in cheating. But between scenes of sex on the carpet with models and sex on sofas with secretaries is an historic political backdrop. It's 1960 and John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon are contesting the presidential election after two terms of Eisenhower.
It is not entirely unrelated to National and Labour, though I'm thinking here about the politics and the advertising, rather than carpets and sofas. And let's face it, Mad Men is pretty much how you could describe John Key and Bill English now as they move into damage control over Maurice Williamson's interview on toll roads popping up all over Auckland.
Back to Mad Men. Last night the main guys at Sterling Cooper are sitting round talking about political attack advertising and whether it is called for.
Not long after, the boss Roger Sterling is carted off to hospital after too much exhaustive activity on the carpet. In the hospital waiting room (possibly built privately) is a TV playing a true-life Eishenhower press conference that helped to sink Nixon's campaign.
A reporter had asked Eisenhower for an example of the decisions Nixon had bragged about being part of in his duties as Veep. "If you give me a week, I might think of one," said Eisenhower, in the throw-away line that has lasted nearly 50 years.
What was screened on the hospital TV was not just the live press conference. It had been made into an attack ad, by Kennedy, against Nixon, though I'm not sure if the attack ad was real. "For real leadership in the 1960s, help elect John F Kennedy," the voice-over says after Eisenhower's crushing line.
The relevance to New Zealand? Well it's likely that Labour's strategist, after three terms in Government and less of the reform and vision thing, are thinking about using attack advertising in its campaign.
New Zealand political parties have been squeamish about attack ads. But they are done in US and were certainly used by Labor in Australia last year.
And if Labour here is thinking about it, the party they might well be reviewing the rich pickings Maurice Williamson offered yesterday on TV One's Agenda. It was a lesson in how ill-disciplined National is: the leadership did not know that the famously loose-lipped Williamson was even appearing.
Williamson gave a virtuoso performance not only extolling the merits of road tolls but also the role of the private sector in managing state hospitals and schools.
He has been to Victoria recently where the doctors and nurses are state paid but the building of hospitals, the running of them and maintenance "is all done by the private sector" and the doctors and nurses love it.
Clark's response on Newstalk ZB was to point out that while National was promising $50 in tax cuts, it was suggesting motorists $50 in tolls a week to avoid 40 minutes in the traffic wasting the same amount of gas ("you'd be mad not to," Maurice).
National has jumped into damage control. Williamson was unavailable for further media comment this morning and Bill English appeared on RNZ's Nine to Noon. "There is no way we are going to impose $50 tolls a week on motorists...[Maurice] has got a bit exuberant with his numbers."
The numbers weren't his, English claimed. They were the interviewers. Actually the interviewer, Rawdon Christie, just multiplied Williamson's daily toll by five to get the $50 weekly figure.
The moderate sounding education spokeswoman Anne Tolley has been put up this morning to talk about the potential of PPPs in education, a notion that was hastily abandoned last year for fear of scaring voters when it was raised by English himself.
This will add the spring in Labour's step with not only Williamson, but with the TV3 showing Labour on the rise and its own pollsters, UMR Insight, said to be showing Labour in the early 40s. What's more TV3's poll shows that National could form a Government only with Sir Roger Douglas or Hone Harawira.
It has been a dream start to the week for Labour and its "secret agenda" campaign against National and it has barely exerted itself. There's no need to when Maurice is handing them gold.
