Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, right, waves to photographers as he and former deputy White House chief of staff Michael Deaver walk on the South Lawn of the White House in this Aug. 30, 1984 photo. Deaver, one of Reagan's closest advisers at the time, died on Aug. 18. He was 69. (Barry Thumma/Associated Press)

Michael Deaver, the man who shone the spotlight on Ronald Reagan for his biggest role — as president of the United States — died on Saturday of pancreatic cancer. He was 69.

Neither ABC nor CBS reported the news on their Saturday newscasts. They were preoccupied with the latest "storm of the century." It was a decision that Deaver would have surely understood.

Hurricanes provide great visuals for consumers of TV news and no one appreciated the importance of a good visual more than Michael Deaver.

He was deputy chief of staff for Ronald Reagan from 1980-1985, but that title belied his true role as the mastermind behind the communications strategy for the man widely known as "the great communicator."

Unlike Karl Rove, who, until his resignation last week, held the same title in the George W. Bush White House, Deaver did not meddle on the policy side. He was a public relations guy from California who knew his place.

That place was to sell the president and his policies to the American people, and that's what he did with extraordinary success.

When you see a politician on TV today in a setting that catches your eye, or taking part in a carefully staged photo op, or when you hear cabinet ministers talk about a government's five priorities and nothing else, no matter how hard the press complains about the exact same message or not getting enough access to man at the top, you're living in the world that Michael Deaver helped create.

It's a world that Stephen Harper and "Canada's New Government" has embraced with open arms.

The 'vicar of visuals'

For Deaver, politics was all about the pictures, which is why Time magazine once dubbed him, "the vicar of visuals."

Political strategists had been trying to harness the power of television since the 1960s but when Deaver came to Washington in 1980, he did so with a better understanding of the medium than almost everyone who had come before him. He knew how to make the small screen work for him and, perhaps more importantly, he had uncovered one of the deep dark secrets of television news.

"I understood something the media didn't ever want to admit," he told me, in the spring of 2006, when I interviewed him in his Washington office. "That was that TV was an entertainment medium, not a news medium, so people were really wanting to be entertained more than they wanted to be getting the news."

Deaver understood that every afternoon in the headquarters of the three big American networks, producers and anchors were making decisions about which stories to include on the nightly newscast. His job was to make sure that at least one of those stories featured the president in a positive light.

"What I did every day," he recalled, "was to produce a story that I thought could compete with anything in the world. It would be visually interesting, humorous, controversial and exciting to watch. And that was what was going to grab the producer because they were in the business of building ratings."

Deaver also understood that on television, pictures trump words. How the president looked and what was filling the space around him on the screen were more important than whatever the story was actually about. With this in mind, he could magically turn Reagan into an environmentalist by placing him at a nature reserve; or turn the economy from bust to boom with a busy factory as a backdrop.

"I built the stage, I framed the visual and that's what the networks got. I could control it only from the standpoint that I could control his access, and when the camera actually got a chance to photograph him, he was where he had to be so that visual was exactly what I wanted it to be."

The line of the day

But there was more to Deaver's blueprint for political success than compelling visuals. He imposed a level of discipline on White House communications that had never been seen before, but which has today become commonplace.

The administration decided that in its first year — this was in the midst of recession — it would talk about economic recovery and nothing else. "We had a meeting every week," he recalled, "where people would come into the Roosevelt room, every head of every department would come in, and they would petition me for whatever it was they wanted to get on the schedule.

"And I had one line: I would say, show me how this is a 60-second sound bite for the evening news and has something to do with economic recovery. If it hasn't got something to do with economic recovery, we ain't going to do it! And we didn't."

That discipline extended well beyond the general topic of economic recovery. "One of the things I understood very early on was that you can't say anything once," Deaver asserted. The message needed to be consistent across the entire government and repeated often.

So at the daily White House meeting involving both political and PR people, they would develop a "line of the day" ("President's tax cuts creating optimism on Wall Street"). And everyone in the administration who would communicate to the press that day would trumpet that single line.

"The point of having a line of the day," Deaver argued, "was to get, not just the press saying something, but to get 100 or 200 people saying the same thing in venues all over Washington and the country. And if we could control that message and repeat it constantly, it would have a much better chance of becoming reality."

Deaver on the Rideau

Deaver's success with Reagan was such that, in the 1980s, communications strategists in both the Trudeau and Mulroney governments paid close attention to what he was doing in Washington. They also tried, with varying results, to emulate him.

Arguably, however, the most devoted Canadian follower of the Deaver school of political communications is the current Conservative government.

Prime Minister Harper and his advisers understand the value of a good photo op, and a great deal of effort is spent filling up the screen around him. The PM appears to like to be seen on podiums surrounded by people in uniforms, particularly soldiers and police officers. It helps demonstrate his support for the military and law and order.

(Deaver had the opposite problem. He knew that many Americans worried that the hawkish Reagan would lead the country into war. So he resisted all attempts to get the president onto aircraft carriers, or to be seen on military bases surrounded by weapons.)

The prime minister is also famously concerned with controlling his government's message. His successful 2006 election campaign was a model of discipline. He would speak about his five priorities and almost nothing else.

In office, he has been forced to broaden the range of subjects under discussion, but he remains virtually the only person to speak on behalf of the government.

For better or worse, Michael Deaver took politics into the age of the photo op and the discipline of the message track, and it has remained there ever since. At the end of our interview fifteen months ago, I told him that the new government in Canada seemed to following his prescription very closely.

He smiled. "Well then, I think it will probably work."