Around mid-September, once I had been fully vaccinated and President Cyril Ramaphosa had moved SA down to Covid-19 alert level 2, I decided that I had had enough of Zoom meetings and WhatsApp calls, and accepted an invitation for a cheeky cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a senior news editor in Johannesburg.
Amid the usual gossip and invitations to share my predictions for the upcoming local government elections, he asked me an interesting question about the DA, the political party that I used to lead in parliament.
Is the party's only real problem a matter of tone and style?
In other words, if the DA were to change nothing else about its current makeup - from the leadership team to its policy platform - and focus only on developing a warmer, more empathetic and less nakedly confrontational posture in its style of communication, would it be able to appeal to a far broader constituency?
My answer was an emphatic no. Because the question presumes that style and substance are independent of one another.
If fact, they are not. One is always a reflection of the other.
Tone of voice and communication style are a manifestation of the authentic identity, ideology and belief system that resides within and is nurtured at the heart of a political organisation - of any organisation, really. They do not exist independently of a party's leadership, culture or policy platform; they are reflections of what that organisation really is, or, in the case of the DA, what it has become.
Political parties and their leaders cannot scam voters by cultivating tonal artifice in order to cover up what they really are.
People can spot the inconsistencies a mile away, and thank goodness they can, because if they could not the door would be opened wider for insincerity and manipulation to thrive far more than they already do in politics.
There is a well-known political campaign strategy known internationally as "get out the vote" or "GOTV" that political parties contesting elections usually deploy towards the end of a campaign.
It is a fervent effort to turn out their own voters in greater proportional numbers than those of their opponents on election day.
It is possible these days to estimate with a high degree of accuracy for whom the registered voters in an electorate will likely be voting. Political candidates deploy a variety to methods to gauge this information - from the general and unscientific, such as observing demographic patterns, to more precise methods including extensive data collection and representative polling.
Political parties and their leaders cannot scam voters by cultivating tonal artifice in order to cover up what they really are
Depending on your political sentiments or affiliations, GOTV can be used for good or ill.
It can galvanise voters who traditionally have not been energised by elections, such as the young people of Zambia who registered and voted in record numbers to elect president Hakainde Hichilema in August this year.
Or it can be used to suppress the vote among people who would not ordinarily back your candidature - a common practice in US politics, such as in 2016 when Donald Trump's presidential campaign used paid and targeted negative advertising on Facebook to discourage African-American voters from turning out on election day to vote for his then opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Getting out the vote in the run-up to an election is most often accompanied by what is called "squeeze messaging".
This is usually the release of a message - by poster, leaflet or targeted social media advertising - that criticises your opponents and is intended to energise your political base and turn them out to vote in your favour.
Squeeze messaging is often a distillation of a candidate or party's hopes, fears, anger, excitement, disillusionment - whatever has been the abiding message of their campaign. It is also an example of the kind of communication that can reflect the darker side of an organisation's values and identity.
The DA's controversial and utterly disgraceful poster campaign in Phoenix this past week was a crude attempt at GOTV: a squeeze message intended to energise its base to turn out to vote for the party in the local government elections. Except that what the message also did was expose the dearth of empathy, ethics and critical thinking in every single person involved in designing the campaign.
It also illustrates how often some political leaders will choose an appeal to our lesser angels in service of the narrow interest of securing additional parliamentary or council seats, and how this trumps any bigger responsibility they have as influential public leaders who have a role to play in shaping our society for the better.
I won't spill any additional ink on the many demerits of that poster campaign; this has been done eloquently and repeatedly by a number of writers in the print and online media.
Nor will I dwell on the preposterous defence mounted by the party's provincial chair in his
non-apology statement ahead of the removal of the posters.
Explaining, as the saying goes, is losing.
I will, however invoke the inimitable American poet, Maya Angelou: "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time."
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