Ritual humiliation and other tests of leadership

Helen Clark, with local MP Harry Duynhoven visits the Tegel Foods factory near New Plymouth. Picture / Mark Mitchell

He has just launched the health policy, and Don Brash is hungry for a hamburger. There's a McDonald's in the Centre City shopping mall, New Plymouth, where Brash has come to meet the voters, and he eyes the golden arches desirously across the food court.

Nearly every day of this campaign, Brash's cavalcade has rolled through a shopping mall, and the Opposition leader usually makes time for a Whopper or a Big Mac.

Today he's out of luck. National's local candidate Moira Irving is steering her boss towards a slick cafe instead, where he searches the glass cabinet display shelves for something to clog his coronary arteries.

Brash reluctantly selects a chicken waldorf salad, which at least has the redeeming quality of being smothered in mayonnaise.

"I dare not give vent to what I'd really like to eat," he mutters conspiratorially. Brash grins, showing those two big front white teeth, which always make him look like an avuncular bunny, then obediently sits down to eat his mayonnaise salad.

It's week umpteen of the endless political campaign, and this is the hundredth mall in the millionth town. Brash is slowly getting the hang of these walkabouts, and actually seems to be enjoying striding up to diners and shoppers with his right hand extended for a handshake.

"Hello. Don Brash," he always says, beaming. "How are you? Excellent. Good on you. Great. Good luck."

Brash finishes each exchange with a friendly little cluck of his tongue, sort of an audible semi-colon, then executes a slightly awkward shuffle on to the next voter. He never seems quite sure what to say, or exactly how to extract himself without seeming rude or abrupt.

In his wake, the punters generally blush and look pleased, if slightly bemused that he has wished them good luck, rather than the other way round.

Exactly 25 hours later, Helen Clark is standing in the same spot. She's only in that particular spot for a fraction of a second, because this is a woman who does not stand for parliament, she runs for it - literally.

Like a speeding motorcade, the Prime Minister darts into shops and lunges at tables of diners, all red lipstick and charm.

"Hello, how you going? Helen Clark," she says, barely slowing her stride, to young mum Rachel Brophy and her children Logan and Jasmine, who are eating McDonald's.

"Ah, you've got fish bites," Clark observes with a smile at Logan, 4.

Logan looks down at his Chicken McNuggets but before he can correct the Prime Minister's fast-food identification skills, she has swung onwards to another table.

"She obviously doesn't eat at McDonald's very often," Rachel Brophy says with a slightly embarrassed laugh.

It's the sort of mistake fast food aficionado Don Brash would never make.

In turn, he spends the same afternoon in another town, making an error Clark wouldn't even dream of by getting entangled in his own words at a tricky press conference.

These two characters are at the centre of the strange whirlwind whipping through New Zealand. An election campaign is a funny quirk of modern western democracy, a silly-string of speeches and launches and stunts and streetwalks.

To become Prime Minister, a politician must master an extremely odd set of skills which appear to have nothing to do with the job of running the country.

A good PM needs to be intelligent, capable and firm - but first he or she must prove the ability to shake hands, wear funny hats, pat farm animals and display something approximating genuine interest in the latest production-line techniques at the local sausage factory.

It's like asking the All Blacks to spend four weeks baking cakes or knitting booties to qualify for the team.

"I'm having fun," Clark tells the Weekend Herald on Wednesday afternoon, fresh from the Tegel chicken factory, where she seemed in her element, gleefully donning a hairnet and gumboots to slosh through the plant, peering into vats of marinating chooks and dodging the dripping chicken juices splashing from an overhead conveyor belt.

"I loved the chicken factory; I felt there was a good family feeling around that workforce. The people seemed to be enjoying what they were doing," she says, pausing briefly at New Plymouth airport before flying home to Auckland.

One of Clark's campaigning rules is to always try to get home each night. "It requires tremendous organisation to go away for the week and take away a whole wardrobe, which is one area where it's a little bit more challenging for women.

"Men can wear the same suit with a change of shirt, but I have to be wearing something different every day, so I do like to get home," she says.

Clark has been running election campaigns since 1975, a triennial experience she says is a little like preparing for a marathon. "You're in training, and the one still standing at the end will win, and that'll be me 'cause I'm the fittest."

She thinks the bizarre rituals of campaigning are all valuable reminders that politicians must have humour, tolerance and flexibility.

"It's not good enough to be smart, to have a great education, to be liked by your colleagues. You have to be able to get out there and mix in with people right across the society, and if you can't do that, I don't believe you can do this job."

The speed of a Clark campaign is astonishing. In just over 10 minutes on Wednesday, she did two laps of the Centre City mall, shaking every hand on offer. In the same venue on Tuesday, Brash adopted a much gentler pace, visiting only a few shops and pausing a little longer to chat.

"I actually enjoy wandering around shopping malls shaking hands," Brash tells the Weekend Herald. He sees the campaign as a chance to learn the real nature of the country he would like to lead, and says one of the most memorable experiences came at a Christchurch factory when he approached one of the overalls-clad workers for a handshake. "The guy pushed his welding visor back and shook my hand, and he said 'I was sitting two rows behind you in the dress circle at the opera last night'. That's New Zealand," Brash says.

One of Clark's secrets is an innate ability to assess people from a distance. She calls it "the radar". Clark seems able to spot a young family with Labour sympathies at 40 paces, and zoom in on them. With the same zen navigation, she can briskly identify and avoid nutcases as soon as they materialise on the peripheries.

"I know when to move. I think I've got reasonably astute over the years at seeing trouble coming. There are some people who will want to spoil your visit, so you have to keep moving," Clark says.

The radar is demonstrated on a New Plymouth street when a woman approaches to ask about the presence of lesbian agendas in the Labour Party. Clark instantly drops the smile, drops the woman's hand and turns away without a word.

Brash's radar is not so sensitive, and he has not yet developed the ability to walk away from or shout over potential troublemakers or pesky journalists. It is another indicator of the slightly warped nature of a campaign that a leader must be simultaneously able to charm people and cut them dead.

In the past month he has been spotted offering hello-vote-for-me handshakes to unlikely supporters, including union protesters and blokes wearing Maori Party T-shirts and Greens co-leader Rod Donald.

He admits he sometimes gets it wrong. "You don't know [who to avoid] at all, and sometimes you get it wrong. I tend just to wander up to people and extend my hand and overwhelmingly people put their hand out in return and shake it, and they normally smile."

This week, two stand-up press conferences turned messy when Brash wanted to stop answering questions - in New Plymouth after the health policy launch, and in Auckland when journalists were demanding his latest explanation of political pamphlets circulated by the Exclusive Brethren.

Brash doesn't have Clark's skill of either giving a firm, brisk answer or turning the question around to what she wants to talk about.

Brash wanted to get away from the questions, but didn't know how to do it cleanly, and both events deteriorated into rolling mauls, with reporters and police officers clattering into one another as Brash tried to walk away, mumbling half-answers.

On Wednesday, Brash's police officers even appeared to block the path of a Radio New Zealand reporter, which Brash says he did not notice or intend. He acknowledges it was not a dignified exit.

"What I've discovered is the media will keep on asking questions until I move away. We had answered questions on quite a range of issues including the Brethren and eventually I thought it had gone on long enough so simply said, 'Well that's the end' and started moving away.

"But the journalists kept asking questions as long as I was anywhere close. I haven't been very good at that. You get to know the journalists as people, and I don't like saying, 'No, I'm sorry, I'm not answering' - but you can't even say that, you have to just stop talking and leave, and for me it just goes against the grain."

Brash lacks Clark's power to intimidate - and that means some journalists behave in a way they would never dare with Clark.

The press conference after Thursday's TV debate was dominated by repetitive questions from journalists who clearly did not respect him, and Brash could not hide his fluster. But his guileless appearance may be his great secret.

He certainly seems to get away with admitting he doesn't know, confessing to mistakes, infuriating the media, even making the kind of verbal slip-ups which haunt the darkest dreams of political strategists.

He forgets the names of people he has just met, and re-introduces himself to people he has met dozens of times. This week, he tried to shake hands with two potential voters who turned out to be press gallery journalists, both holding notepads and tape recorders.

In Rotorua, he criticised the latest policy outrage from "National", when he meant to say "Labour", then guffawed at his own mistake.

At New Plymouth transport firm Hooker Pacific, Brash tells a group of truckies and admin workers he's not quite sure how many extra police he would appoint if he became PM.

"We need more police, but if you ask me exactly how many, I can't tell you - but one of our top priorities when we form government is to talk to the police commissioner about what he needs," Brash says.

Hooker Pacific sales manager Rodney Maiden, who asked the question about police numbers, says this frankness is refreshing.

"I think that's honest. Honesty is a very unusual trait for a politician in the eyes of an average New Zealander. I like the guy," Maiden says.

If elected, Brash will be the first Prime Minister never to have won a local electorate, having run unsuccessfully for East Coast Bays.

Clark thinks this is his big weakness, and says her skills have been developed over 30 years of cottage meetings, walkabouts, interviews and stump speeches. "What I'm doing now is applying the lessons I've learned from the time I first stood [unsuccessfully] in the Piako electorate in the Waikato in 1975."

Clark restrains herself from mocking Brash's tendency to trip himself up. She even soundsslightly sympathetic.

"It depends how often it happens, and sometimes things are taken in a way that you might not have intended, but hey, you've gotta move on past 'em. My attitude is never look back, you just have to keep moving forward."

Brash knows the campaign is testing his ability to communicate, and that of his staff. "Sometimes it doesn't come off," he says ruefully, adding it is sometimes frustrating when reporters focus on his errors.

"The latest gaffe I had was Monday in Rotorua. We had a lot of Maori people saying they totally agreed with what I was doing, but none of that was reported at all.

"Both TV channels ran my chance meeting with Rod Donald and my making a comment about Labour and saying National by mistake.

"Sometimes I think, 'Oh gee, the best-laid plans of mice and men'. It certainly hasn't been a conscious choice [to make mistakes], but whether they matter or not I'm not sure. I'm still a bit undecided on that point."

Clark hopes the voters are more certain. "After running two losing electorate campaigns, Dr Brash decided his vocation lay somewhere else, and I'm optimistic about the electorate saying the same thing on a grander level this time."