It may be too early to write the final word on the fate of the Paul Martin government. But a couple of things are certain.

Martin, himself, must be wondering why nothing sticks to some politicians — his Teflon-coated predecessor, for example — while others are magnets for barnyard mire.
Martin, of course, fits the latter category.

The other thing about the Martin government that is apparent is its inability to communicate. This is truly remarkable because the Martinis, as they’re known in Ottawa, with the ever-buzzing Blackberries, were the gang that took over the Liberal party riding by riding, and then kicked out a sitting prime minister with three majority election victories in a sort of in-house coup d’état.

Let’s deal with the first little optics problem — Martin as magnet.

Marshall McLuhan talked about hot and cold media. Hot media such as radio gets people agitated. Cold media such as television massages people into passiveness.

One could make a similar observation about politicians. Jean Chrétien, having learned to turn to his advantage partially paralyzed facial muscles, non-sequiturs and mangled syntax in both official languages, is the quintessential cool politician. Nothing sticks to him.

When he was prime minister, there was the broken promise to scrap the GST. And how about the time he was caught in a fib about an imaginary homeless person? Or how about when his government ordered the sudden shutdown of a judicial inquiry into the murder of a Somali teenager by Canadian soldiers, months before it was finished its work?

Or the time, on CBC Television, he bullied a taxpayer who had the audacity to remind him of the broken GST promise? Or the time he dismissed police overzealousness with pepper spray at APEC, much as Marie Antoinette would have, by proclaiming he preferred pepper on his plate?

We can ridicule him now all we like. But, as Canadians, we willingly overlooked his shortcomings and handed him three easy majority election victories in a row.

One disturbing detail after another about Shawinagate simply slid off Chrétien’s Teflon coating.

The machiavellian little guy even turned the Gomery inquiry into his own personal sideshow with his collection of VIP golf balls. And an obliging media set aside their watchdog duties that day and became the former PM’s laughing lapdogs, much as they did when The Boss voiced his preference for pepper on his plate.

Meantime, Martin, the guy who called the Gomery inquiry into what went on during the Chrétien years, has been the target of Canada’s pent-up outrage.

While the Parliamentary Press Gallery has been hot on the current PM’s trail, demanding to know what Martin knew and when he knew it, Chrétien has been strolling undisturbed down O’Connor Street below Parliament Hill most weekdays and having lunch at Hy’s Restaurant, directly across from the CBC and a block away from the National Press Building.

Martin rarely ducks a question, reacts to virtually every issue thrown at him and talks a lot about doing the right thing. This accessibility is probably why the media love to pounce on him and Canadians love to vent at him.

Chrétien, as prime minister, was rarely accessible and coolly watched as his RCMP bodyguards removed journalists from his path.

Kennedy and Nixon were compared this way as wholesale and retail politicians.
Kennedy, the wholesaler who knew how to touch the mass zeitgeist, rarely had to worry about media hostility. Nixon, the traditional retail politician who ingratiated himself one handshake at a time, was loathed by the media in and out of power.

Similar comparisons were made between Ronald Reagan, another great Teflon master, and Jimmy Carter, whom Americans never forgave for carrying his suitcase into the White House.

Martin needs to develop survival instincts quickly — much in the way, as Larry Zolf observed, Pierre Trudeau was able to morph from Philosopher King to MacKenzie King after near-defeat in 1972.

As for the next problem, the inability of the Martin government to communicate policy, a clue about what has gone wrong might be found on the list of this government’s cabinet committees.

Veteran insiders cannot recall a government before this one that did not have a committee of cabinet devoted to communicating policy to taxpayers. In other words, the Martinis grew so used to all the fawning media during the leadership race, that they came into office taking communications for granted.