Devices and Desires

Newt in Florida: Fat Chance

2012-01-26T12:40:00.000-05:00

Carl Cannon asks the question about the GOP race at the forefront of everyone's mind: can a fat man beat a thin man?

...perhaps it’s not a true test, but last Saturday, Gingrich clearly outdid three thinner men. Presidential primary elections are not purely popularity contests, and this is not high school, but in attracting more votes than Mitt Romney, Gingrich bested a candidate who is not only in better shape, but better-looking, more physically graceful, and younger.
Such a result is not unheard-of, but it defies the odds. Political consultants and presidential scholars will tell (not to mention psychologists, corporate headhunters, and Madison Avenue hucksters) that in social competition, physical qualities matter. Generally speaking, tall beats short, dark hair beats gray, agility beats klutzy, handsome beats homely. And trim definitely edges out pudgy, as any overweight kid ever called “fatso” on the playground can attest.

Hmm... does this apply in Canada? Considering the general appearance issue rather than weight alone, the old Progressive Conservatives obviously did not have the reactions of other humans, choosing Bob Stanfield over Duff Roblin and Davey Fulton and Joe Clark over Claude Wagner and Brian Mulroney, getting the electoral results you would expect. The lamestream media at least did not seem to think that Preston Manning's appearance and voice were those of a leader, although I never concurred with the worldly minded on this. Manning always seemed to me to fit the image of a leader, while Brian Mulroney came across to me as a phony blowhard of the kind who gets his position by excelling in everything superficial. I never thought that the fixed teeth, contact lenses and $750 suits helped Manning any; they made seem like just another politician. Yet when he put his leadership on the line, Stockwell Day's sleekness in a Speedo was part of his implicit case against Manning.

Whenever I see Newt appearing particularly porcine my thought is that he should have made a point of losing 20 or 30 pounds over the year before his campaign started. It would have been a sign of seriousness in a campaign which many didn't take seriously at first, of self-restraint in a man who has often seemed to lack that virtue, of stability in a man feared to be too erratic. Haley Barbour said two years ago that if he was 25 pounds lighter a year from then, you would know that he either had cancer or was going to run for president.

In choosing a candidate, GOP primary voters say that they're more concerned about electability than any other qualification,including being a "true conservative". That means that voters, rather than choosing according to their own reactions to a candidate, are trying to guess how other people will react to him. That works to the advantage of a Ken-doll candidate like Romney. You and I may be too deep to pick a president on the basis of superficial characteristics, but we don't expect that your mushbrained independents, people who can't even figure out what party they belong to, will do the same. This factor helps Romney, and as of now he seems to have halted his decline in Florida, but I will say this: a candidacy like Romney's, based not on being the guy you want, but the guy who you think other people will want, is a house of cards. If Gingrich could ever manage to seize even a small advantage over Romney in trial heats against Obama, Romney's campaign could collapse quickly like a previous "Mr Moderate" frontrunner -- Mitt's father George, in 1968.

Or,as his tide goes out, Gingrich could be left stranded on the beaches of Florida. Like a beached whale.

Comment Dit-On Tasha Kheridden is a Liberal Elitist?

2012-01-20T10:51:00.004-05:00

Outside of the small number of unilingual speakers who are part of the minority in an area and so genuinely need government services in their own language, Official Bilingualism is a project of the New Class -- the caste of manipulators of symbols that includes high-level bureaucrats, some types of lawyers, the media and executives in government-regulated industries. So it is not as much of a surprise as it might be to find that Tasha Kheridden is a staunch defender of Official Bilingualism

Born and brought up in Montreal -- check -- who has worked as Legislative Assistant to the Attorney General of Ontario -- check -- before working as a producer for the CBC -- check.

Consequently Ms.Kheridden mounts a defence of capital-B Bilingualism in the face of the recent Fraser Institute study pegging the costs of Bilingualism at $2.4 billion annually. So what is that defence? Well, people need to be able to deal with same-language government officials when fighting a traffic ticket or asking questions about how to get a passport. Granted. The provision of such services is a minute part of the cost of Official Bilingualism. What else?

while GPS has largely replaced the need to ask for directions, bilingual tourism officers will ensure that a New Brunswicker travelling in Alberta will feel as at home there as back in his native province.

Tourism officers? When is the last time you have found a Tourism Officer handy when you had to ask for directions?

Whitby, Ontario is about as Anglo Canadian as you can get, yet it boasts a huge, brand new French immersion elementary school. The Julie Payette Public School opened in 2011 at capacity: just under 700 students fill its classrooms, including six grade one classes. In an interview, principal Monique de Villers explained that parents choose bilingual education not only to enable their children to travel and work within Canada, but to prepare them to be “citizens of the wider world… Learning another language prepares them to talk to others.”

Well of course upper middle class parents are going to want the option of French immersion for their children in a society where you have to speak French to be Prime Minister, a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada (once the Liberals and NDP get back into power), or a senior bureaucrat. It is very much in the interest of the bilingual New class to encourage such white elephants as French immersion, knowing that 90% of Immersion graduates will lose whatever ability they had within a few years of leaving school,and thus never be real competition for jobs with the genuinely bilingual. As for French immersion as a preparation for talking to others -- people living in Whitby, as in most of Ontario, would have to scour the region to find someone who speaks only French to talk to.

Canada’s nationalist concept of bilingualism has morphed into an internationalist concept

I don’t think many of the students entered into French immersion classes are planning to be diplomats or to move to France.

...having two official languages sets our entire country apart on the world stage, allowing it to participate in both the Francophonie and the Commonwealth

So we’d be thrown out of the Francophonie if we dismantled the excesses of Official Bilingualism? I think the presence of Quebec in Canada, and the status of French there, would militate against expelling that.

It [the federal government]should review second language requirements within the public service, to make sure they are all fully necessary, before sending bureaucrats out for pricey language training.

It should, but it won’t. Official Bilingualism has been in place for four decades, and the grip of mandatory French around the throat of English bureaucrats is worse than ever. French proficiency is required for posts in which the language will never be used. The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages acts as a permanent lobby for more Bilingualism, as well seeking every year things outside its jurisdiction to meddle in.

That is the real cost of Bilingualism -- in every part of the civil service, the competent lose out in promotion to the bilingual. As concerned as people are about efficiency in government, there should be more outrage about a programme that systematically discriminates against the competent.

And selection of a prime minister is as a practical matter now restricted to the small pool of bilingual people in Canada. That’s a tremendous cost when you consider how few great leaders a country has, even if it speaks only one language.

All this is a substantial price to pay for the right to try to hunt down a bilingual Tourism Officer when you get lost in Alberta.

Dystopia

2012-01-19T05:27:00.001-05:00

The GOP presidential campaign lacks the excitement of a real race, but one thing it has is great television ads. I just hope these ad shops still have their game when the battle for control of the Senate comes up later this year.

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Explaining Bain

2012-01-18T08:55:00.001-05:00

Bill Bennett and Fred Barnes are on the wireless worrying over Mitt's problem of explaining Bain. His advisers are spending their own intellectual capital on figuring out how to deal with this. Here's how; and if they need more advice, my rates are reasonable:

"Have you ever worked in a company that was being run into the ground? A company that was running down, that was being managed so poorly that you knew it was a matter of time before it went under and you lost your job? Or had a relative or friend who worked for a company like that? Well, we looked for companies like that, stepped in and bought them, streamlined them and turned them around. If it worked, people kept their jobs, and we made some money."

Thank you. Next problem?

BULLETIN: 150 Religious Conservatives For Taft over Eisenhower for GOP Nomination

2012-01-16T08:04:00.001-05:00

A group of 150 influential religious conservative leaders have endorsed Senator Robert A. Taft (R-- Oh) over General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. The leaders had been divided, with many supporting the candidacies of General Douglas Macarthur and former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen.

“Many of our members have been sitting on the fence, wanting to look more closely at these candidates,” said Kinfolk Analysis Coalition president Pony Terkins. “However we have determined that now is the time to act, when together we can have the decisive influence over the choice. The only major events that we have missed are the caucuses in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire, which are small states with relatively few delegates and not very important.There was not a fear that this is too late; there was a sense that this could be exactly the right time,” Terkins did say that the group was influenced to act now by a presentation by a noted political consultant, who suggested that the group should not wait overlong before acting as their ability to make an impact would be hurt by the fact that many of the delegates were now dead and so unlikely to be influenced to change their minds.

An Audition for Schiffren

2012-01-13T11:05:00.003-05:00

Mitt Romney has a bigger problem than his exploits, in his role as Robber Baron, as ruthless exploiter of the people. It’s one that we’re likely to hear more about steadily during the campaign. It’s described by many labels... inauthenticity, stiffness, distance from the average guy.

Michael Leahy describes the affliction as “failure to connect’:

...concerns about his ability to connect are casually noted by Republican insiders, even among some who once worked for him.

“This is Romney: He knows what is wrong with a car engine, and he knows how to rebuild that engine — but he doesn’t acknowledge the person driving the car,” said Doug Gross, who served as the Romney campaign’s Iowa state chairman in 2008 but is uncommitted in the 2012 race....“He’s not able to warm a room immediately or make an audience feel like he is speaking to them,” Gross said. “You’d have to put a new card in him for that to happen.”

Leahy names Tom Dewey and Michael Dukakis as two whose presidential campaigns have foundered on this not-quite-humanness. (I’m surprised that the story of Dewey’s furious outburst against a careless train engineer didn’t make the story. ) I would have thought that Al Gore definitely makes this list, and John Kerry deserves at least an honourable mention.
It would be a mistake to try to be someone other than he is, to affect a ‘jes-folks’ demeanour and empathetic mien. As Dukakis’s press secretary says,

“You can talk all you want about changing a candidate, but eventually the candidate will go back to his default position — he is who he is,” said Duncan, who along the way with Dukakis learned the most humbling truth of all, one that Romney likely has already discovered. “The attention of a presidential campaign is so glaring, so unrelenting for a candidate. Those parts of you that make you who you are eventually get exposed.”

Lisa Schiffren thinks that conservatives could do better, but is trying to accept the reality of Romney:

he is very handsome, and has such a good work ethic for a rich guy who really does not have a clue what it means to have to make the choices that normal middle-class people always have to make — which is why we don’t really trust him. Have you ever noticed how the very rich have so much more sympathy for the non-working poor than for the boring old middle class? ...Especially if he picks the right advisers. But why can’t he hire a conservative speechwriter, who knows the words and the music?

Right on point. Mitt can’t stifle himself from blurting out that he likes to be able to fire people, or that other candidates are attacking him over Bain Capital out of envy. But he can hire speechwriters who can try to evoke that sense of hope and confidence that successful candidates evoke. And hey -- Lisa Schiffren’s a speechwriter isn’t she? Maybe she has better things to do, but isn’t that the good thing about being Richie Rich, that you can keep piling stacks of money on the table until you can get people to do what you want? If Lisa won’t do the writing, she should sure be picking and supervising the people who do.

Keep a watch on who Romney’s speechwriters this campaign. It’ll tell us a lot.

Newt the Uniter

2012-01-11T11:07:00.002-05:00

Could there be brilliant strategy behind Newt’s kamikaze attacks against Mitt? At first glance there’s no possible gain to the Republican Party or conservatism in launching a kamikaze campaign against the future presidential nominee of your party, depicting him as a remorseless capitalist vampire bloodsucker. Let’s see...you’re helping the Democrats hone their plan of attack and handing them ammunition to carry it out. You’re exacerbating divisions within the party of the kind that are slow to heal. You’re diverting attention from whatever shared positive ideas the GOP does have for the nation.

But maybe there’s silver linings. Suddenly, people like Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and the Club for Growth, who should be spending their time right now denouncing Romney as a pathetic and useless RINO deserving of reprobation by all true conservatives, are united in his defence; now Mitt is a Hero of Free Enterprise, a truer conservative than the man who won the House of Representatives at a time when people thought the GOP would never win the it again in their lifetimes. Politics fans get the demolition derby they expect from the primary season; populist conservatives have their catharsis, their opportunity to see a lashing given to the Wall Street/Big Corporation wing of the party. At the end of the day, everyone’s anger at the state of things having been voiced, everyone can resign themselves to Mitt in the end, knowing that they are not unrepresented in the party.

Knowing Newt, if this is a brilliantly concocted masterpiece of strategy, complete with double feint, bait-and-switch and fumblerooski ploy, we can be sure that Newt will tell us.

Wanted: A Canadian Rehnquist

2011-06-09T09:18:00.002-04:00

The Harper government should have an opportunity during its term to make the Supreme Court into a body where the principles of judicial restraint and sound legal reasoning have strong exponents. Its opportunity is however restricted by the complete absence in Canada of a movement comparable to the U.S. conservative judicial revolution of the last few decades. It is not Stephen Harper's fault that one may look over the entire Court of Appeal plus all law faculties in the province and find no one who dares to dissent from the current regime of legal Bolshevism that followed the enactment of the Charter of Rights. Worse, the Ontario A-G and Federal DOJ constitutional lawyers of whom I have personal knowledge are if not card-carrying members, at least committed sympathizers of the left-wing human rights industry.

What the Government needs to come up with is another William Rehnquist. Rehnquist's career prior to his nomination as a SCOTUS judge was not as a judge or legal academic, but as a lawyer in the Department of Justice. (President Nixon happened to drop by a meeting at the Department of Justice which Rehnquist had handled with great skill. He was also at that time however wearing a jacket with a flamboyantly wide lapel and a bright yellow tie, leading Nixon to refer to him thereafter as "that clown". Nixon also was unable to remember Rehnquist's name, so after two of his nominees had been defeated by the Democratic Senate, Nixon, searching for a replacement, asked, 'What about that clown Renchburg?') The extent of Rehnquist's legal conservatism was, because of his DOJ background, unknown to those passing scrutiny on him. With the paper trail he would have had as a judge or professor, he would never have got through the Senate.

In addition, Rehnquist had the courage of his convictions. Rehnquist had no problem with recurrently being on the wrong end of 8-1 decisions, earning him the title, seriously or mockingly, of "The Great Dissenter". It would be over a decade before Rehnquist would be joined on the court by anyone else with a similar commitment to judicial restraint and original meaning. And longer than that before the legal academics were to take conservative legal thought seriously. But once you have 3 or 4 exponents of any judicial approach on the court, they have no choice.

With two Ontario appointments this summer, the Government can be cautious and prudent and select a woman practitioner or government lawyer who at least is not a full-fledged fanatic. But with the other appointment. what the Prime Minister needs to do is to pull, apparently out of his hat, the name of another Rehnquist, someone to hold the fort until the lower courts can be seeded with possible future appointees and some means can be designed to give the jurisprudence of true meaning and judicial restraint a foothold in the academy. He needs to be able to find himself a facsimile of "that clown Renchburg".

A Miss Thorne Conservative

2011-06-08T10:28:00.003-04:00

When I came upon Trollope's portrait of Mr Thorne in Barchester Towers, I thought that I had found a man of fellow temperament:

In politics, Mr. Thorne was an unflinching conservative. He looked on those fifty-three Trojans, who, as Mr. Dod tells us, censured free trade in November, 1852, as the only patriots left among the public men of England. When that terrible crisis of free trade had arrived, when the repeal of the corn laws was carried by those very men whom Mr. Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of his country, he was for a time paralysed. His country was lost; but that was comparatively a small thing. Other countries had flourished and fallen, and the human race still went on improving under God's providence. But now all trust in human faith must for ever be at an end. Not only most ruin come, but it must come through the apostasy of those who has been regarded as the truest of true believers. Politics in England, as a pursuit for gentlemen, must be at an end. Had Mr. Thorne been trodden under foot by a Whig, he could have borne it as a Tory and a martyr; but to be so utterly thrown over and deceived by those he had so earnestly trusted, was more than he could endure and live.

Mr Thorne for a while withdrew from political discussion and social intercourse entirely, but

...that plan of his for avoiding the world did not answer. He, however, and others around him who still maintained the same staunch principles of protection -- men like himself, who were too true, to flinch at the cry of a mob -- had their own way of consoling themselves. They were, and felt themselves to be, the only true depositaries left of certain Eleusinian mysteries...To them and them only was it now given to know these things, and to perpetuate them, if that might still be done, by the careful and secret education of their children...He had within him something of the feeling of Cato, who gloried that he could kill himself because Romans were no longer worthy of their name. Mr Thorne had no thought of killing himself, being a Christian, and still possessing his 4000& a year; but the feeling was not on that account the less comfortable.

But Trollope had better to come. On discovering his sister, Miss Thorne, my feelings of sympathy of temperament were perfected:

As a politician, Miss Thorne had been so thoroughly disgusted with public life by base deeds long antecedent to the Corn Law question, that that had but little moved her. In her estimation her brother had been a fast young man, hurried away by a too ardent temperament into democratic tendencies. Now happily he was brought to sounder views by seeing the iniquity of the world. She had not yet reconciled herself to the Reform Bill, and still groaned in spirit over the defalcations of the Duke as touching the Catholic Emancipation. If asked whom she thought the Queen should take as her counsellor, she probably would have named Lord Eldon; and when reminded that that venerable man was no longer present in the flesh to assist us, she would probably have answered with a sigh that none now could help us but the dead.

I've never known how to describe myself when asked what kind of conservative I was. Now I can say that I am a "Miss Thorne conservative".

Projection: Looking for 10 Ridings Good and True

2011-05-02T11:54:00.007-04:00

The final polling weekend indicates that the final trend is continuing decline by the Liberals, mostly to the Conservatives in Ontario, mostly to the NDP in British Columbia.

Expect as follows:
ATLANTIC:
Conservative 13, NDP 10, Liberal 9
QUEBEC:
NDP 41, Bloc 17, Liberal 10, Conservative 7
ONTARIO:
Conservative 58, NDP 26, Liberal 22
PRAIRIES:
Conservative 20, NDP 6, Liberal 2
ALBERTA:
Conservative 27, NDP 1
BRITISH COLUMBIA:
Conservative 19, NDP 14, Liberal 3
NORTH:
Conservative 1, NDP 1, Liberal 1

TOTAL:
Conservative 145, NDP 99, Liberal 47, Bloc 17

That means we're looking for 10 ridings good men and true, to stand up and give us a Conservative majority. Here's a list of 10 prospects. The Conservatives don't need to win all 10 to win a majority; if they fail in one area they could make it up by picking up additional marginals elsewhere. In particular there's 4 more GTA ridings that could fall if the Liberal collapse is even more severe than it seems. But, for a majority, the Conservatives should be winning (or holding) 7 or more of these 10 to form a majority:

Central Nova, Essex, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, Kamloops-Thompson-Caribou, Kingston and the Islands, Lotbiniere-Chutes de la Chaudiere, Mississauga-Streetsville, Palliser, Pontiac, South Shore-St. Margaret's

So those of you who live in Atlantica should watch to see whether the Tories can hold Central Nova and South Shore-St. Margaret's against the NDP tide. For those elsewhere, I understand that Elections Canada has ruled that the results can be transmitted west from the Atlantic by smoke signals, so long as the fire is started by matches and not by any more modern technological device, particularly one that uses hashtags.

One final note: don't cheer too loud at the evisceration of the Bloc. The last 2 things we want are the NDP and Liberals together having more seats than the Tories, or, worse, having a majority without needing Bloc assistance.

Tory Top 30 -- All Hits All The Time

2011-04-18T12:39:00.004-04:00

John Ibbitson said in the Globe and Mail over the weekend that the Tories had a list of 30 seats they could win. I decided to sit down and start analyzing things and come up with my own list of seats, with help in finding the last few (and identifying one good one I missed) from someone more knowledgeable about these things than me. In fact we're now up to 31! (All hits all the time! 31 straight hits with no commercials!)

Many of these seats are implausible given the current polls, but anyway....

NWFD Avalon, St. John's East, St. John's South-Mount Pearl

NB Madawaska-Restigouche, Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe

PEI Malpeque

QUE Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, Lac-Saint-Louis, Louis Hebert, Mount Royal, Richmond-Arthabaska

ONT Ajax-Pickering, Bramalea-Gore-Malton, Brampton Springdale, Brampton West, Eglinton-Lawrence, Guelph, Kingston and the Islands, London North Centre, Mississauga South, Sault Ste Marie, Welland, York Centre

MAN Elmwood-Transcona

ALB Edmonton-Strathcona

BC Burnaby-Douglas, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, New Westminster-Coquitlam, Vancouver South

NWT Western Arctic

YUK Yukon

Now if anybody wants to order them for me by likelihood....

Next task is to pick the most likely seats that would get us to a majority....

The Real Scandal

2011-04-12T08:57:00.004-04:00

How 'bout the Auditor General says "I am outraged that drafts of my reports are being stolen and leaked for political purposes. These acts endanger the very important political neutrality of this office, both the perceived neutrality and possibly the real neutrality, depending on the identity of the perpetrators. I have asked the RCMP to investigate and find the perpetrators tout de suite (as we say here in Ottawa)"?

Lamestream Media Lets Iggy Off Hook

2011-03-28T08:51:00.004-04:00

The media seems to think it has forced Michael Ignatieff to box himself in on the issue of the Grits' forming a government despite having fewer seats than the Conservatives. In fact it has left not just the back door, but the front door wide open.

In the National Post, John Ivison says: In Montreal Sunday, [Ignatieff] put the final nail in the coalition coffin lid, when he clarified one possible ambiguity in the statement he made the day before: did the commitment to rule out a coalition and a formal arrangement to the Bloc extend to a Conservative minority? “Yes,” he said. “We will work with other parties but a coalition is out of the question. I have an obligation to voters to be as clear on this as I can.”

But a coalition or formal arrangement with the other parties isn't the only way in which a second-largest party might form a government early in a minority situation; it's not even the most typical way. The likely scenario is this:

!. Conservatives get more seats than the Liberals but not a majority.
2. Conservative government stays in office; prepares throne speech.
3. Combined opposition parties defeat Harper government on throne speech.
4. Mr Harper resigns, either immediately or (possibly) having been refused a request for another election.
5. The G-G asks the leader of the next largest party whether he believes he form a government. Mr Ignatieff says "Yes".
6. Liberals form government, not based on a coalition, or a formal arrangement with another party (e.g. the Liberal-NDP 'Accord' in 1985), but simply seeking support from any and all parties on an issue-by-issue basis, just as the Conservatives have been doing for the last five years.

And for that matter the Liberals might make a "formal arrangement" with another party say six months later, to keep the thing running.

I don't know whether Ignatieff has secret intentions along these lines or not. He might not have thought it all through yet. He does not seem to know much about the constitutional niceties of these situations. It is not true, as he says, that after an election the G-G invites the leader of the largest party to form a government. Rather the government stays in power until it resigns; it is fully entitled to go back to Parliament and proceed with a Speech from the Throne even if some party has more seats, as numerous governments have thought of doing in such situations (e.g., the St Laurent Gov't in 1957). Theoretically it could even do so if another party had a majority of the seats; it is the disapproval of the public and his own party that prevents a defeated prime minister from doing this. The Prime Minister's use of the word "coalition" has helped Iggy keep his options open so far. Harper can legitimately use the word to include a de facto arrangement, while Ignatieff uses it in its stricter sense and so evade the issue. But if Canadians don't want to have a second-place party forming a government, the media will have to be a lot more specific, and get a commitment from all the parties that they will allow the party with the most seats a reasonable time to govern on the principles it has set out during the campaign.

Top 10 English Tory Leaders: 6-10

2011-02-15T09:26:00.004-05:00

Who are the 10 greatest Tory leaders in English history? A few stipulations:

1. We're ranking them as party leaders, not as prime ministers. Some were much better at one than at the other. You could theoretically make the list even while spending your entire career as Leader of the Opposition, although the inability to win an election would leave you with some splainin' to do.

2. We are starting, essentially, with the French Revolution. We are looking at what Keith Feiling called the Second Tory Party, and we will draw a discreet veil over the miserable period between 1714 and the late 18th century, not trying to figure out where Bolingbroke fits in the great scheme of things. Modern conservatism is often said to have originated philosophically with Burke; its first great leaders are of the same period.

3. To build suspense, we list them from the bottom up, starting today with the first half of the list.

10. Lord Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby 1846-68

Who? Who? Such was the nickname of Lord Stanley's ministry, earned when the names of the newly formed Cabinet were read out to the deaf Duke of Wellington. He was the longest serving leader of the Conservative party, although his three ministries lasted only a total of four years. Rather than blame him for not winning more often, we credit him for holding the remnants of the party together in the wake of the split over the reform of the corn laws and passing it on to good hands; Derby, not Disraeli, was prime minister at the time of the 1867 Reform Act.. Famous for his oratory; could be the second best orator among party leaders. The Cup was named for his second son.

9. Harold Macmillan, 1957-63

Supermac pulled the party together after the Suez disaster, in support of which in Cabinet he had been "First in, first out", in Harold Wilson's famous phrase. Subsequent Tory generations were to blame him for his budgetary profligacy, but there was just not the support for any form of economic conservatism. Under him the British people indeed "never had it so good". Sometimes thought to have left because of the Profumo crisis, he in fact survived that, and resigned after being misdiagnosed with a terminal disease; he lived until 1986. He left the party in good shape, but loses much credit for that for foisting Alec Douglas-Home on the party as his successor because of his contempt for Rab Butler, who might have won the next election.

8. Stanley Baldwin 1923-37

The selection of Baldwin over Lord Curzon in 1923 marks the party's successful adaptation to the modern, post-World War I era. A One Nation conservative, he was the first Tory leader to shed enough of its aristocratic lineage to allow it to succeed. Assigned too much blame for the failure to arm in the 30s considering the complexion of public opinion in the period. Successfully wrestled the Government away from Labour in 1931, co-opting the sitting prime minister Ramsay MacDonald into a coalition government, eventually transmogrified into a Tory one. Keeping a party popular and in party in the Depression was no easy feat; ask R. B. Bennett, who eventually sat with Baldwin in the House of Lords late in life.

7. Sir Robert Peel 1834-46

This is a toughie; party hero or party destroyer? The corn laws had to be repealed because the Tories could not win in even the slightly democratized electorate while standing for protection on food. The truth of this is shown by the Tories' abandonment of serious support for food protection not long after repeal. On this issue, as on things like Catholic Emancipation, Peel had the sense of when to fight and when to accept the reality of defeat. It is revealing that the serious part of the party -- the part with brains -- stayed with Peel after the great party split; the stalwart landed gentry and country gentlemen may have been in some sense the backbone of the party, but they were not its future. Although the Peelites were lost to Toryism, we can be thankful that Peel himself refused to join any Whig/Radical government.

6. Winston Churchill 1940-55

Churchill 6th? Remember we are assessing him as party leader, not as prime minister. He became prime minister as leader of a coalition government; caring little about domestic politics, he let Labour ministers run loose, preparing for the post-war establishment of a welfare state. Although he made a point of securing the official party leadership so that he would never suffer the fate of other emergency coalition leaders Lloyd George and MacDonald, he never really considered himself a Conservative, and considered the conservative backbench and the "average conservative" distasteful. His wild "Gestapo" charges may have cost the party the 1945 election, in which the socialist welfare state was firmly established, never to be uprooted. He was a spent volcano in his last term, and his choice of successor was a near-disaster and could have cost the party power.
There are, of course, good things to be said for him, which is why he rates 6th.

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The subject of the quote in the last post was Niccolo Machiavelli.

The Philosopher in Winter

2011-01-26T17:27:00.000-05:00

The philosopher in all eras must be prepared for disgrace and exile:

In spite of his exile, he had a wide circle of friends and admirers to whom he wrote unbuttoned letters. In the most famous of these, to Francesco Vettori, we glimpse his addiction to hobnobbing with simple people over cards and drinks at the tavern. When in the late afternoon he is through with that recreation, he goes home, dresses in handsome garments, and converses with the ancients, "asking" them about their lives and actions. During these four studious hours he is never bored, he forgets his poverty and disgrace, and does not fear death."

Who was this philosopher who knew how to live in winter? Answer at end of next post.

Lion's Den

2011-01-18T08:02:00.002-05:00

The commentators expecting Mitch Daniels to make a strong outsider run for the 2012 GOP nomination as a fiscal conservative underestimate the impact of Daniels' intentional snubbing of social conservatives via a "truce" on social issues. The idea is ill thought out in every respect. It took a couple weeks before Daniels clarified that the truce was with liberals -- who are not interested in any such thing. No explanation has been given why a legislature cannot act on economic and social issues both. Most importantly, socons know that people who think that way would always find a reason why urgent concerns of some other kind demand a "temporary" putting aside of social issues. If the economy was hot, the suddenly urgent issues might be inflation and infrastructure.
Socons cannot elect a nominee, but they can defeat one. By taking them on, Daniels has put a target on his back -- metaphorically speaking only, of course.
Now Jennifer Rubin has identified two other significant groups of Republican conservatives that Daniels is alienating. "National security hawks are concerned that he is sounding more Robert Taft (Midwest isolationist) than Ronald Reagan internationalist." Worse than that, although the whole rationale for his candidacy is his economic expertise, Daniels is not a tax cutter, as are the great majority of GOP fiscal conservatives. Says the Cato Institute:

"He's kind of a more of a 'trains run on time' kind of guy, like a balanced budget kind of guy. He wants the government to be efficient but he doesn't necessarily want it to be smaller. Other than his property tax cut, he hasn't cut state level taxes at all. He hasn't really even proposed to cut them. Indiana has an above-average business tax."

What's going on here? Is Daniels setting himself up to run a brave-speaker-of-truth maverick campaign, Daniels as the prophet challenging the established wisdom of his party and warning of the danger to come? This kind of campaign wins disproportionately large coverage and editorial raves from the New York Times and Washington Post but doesn't win nominations even in the Democratic Party (Paul Tsongas; Gary Hart) where their seal of approval is valued. Or by snubbing social conservatives does Daniels hope to become the Establishment candidate, taking over as frontrunner if Romney implodes? But while the GOP Establishment might silently cheer as Daniels disses social conservatives, they will not make him their candidate, because they do not support candidates who intentionally divide the party.

Morning Line: 2012 GOP Nomination Odds

2011-01-12T11:22:00.003-05:00

NEW: 2012 GOP Nomination Morning Line January 2011:

Romney 5/2
Pawlenty 7/1
Huckabee 7/1
Daniels 9/1
Palin 11/1
Gingrich 11/1
Thune 15/1
Jeb Bush 15/1
Barbour 20/1
Field 15/1

Preview:

There are two parallel GOP primaries. The social conservative primary is between Huckabee and Palin plus outsiders such as Pence and Bachmann. The winner of that primary goes up against the Establishment Republican primary, between frontrunner Romney and everyone else. The winner of the Establishment Republican primary should win the nomination. The best chance for the winner of the Socon primary is winning Iowa and running respectably in NH while Romney collapses, and then winning in South Carolina and Florida, taking a commanding lead before the establishment wing of the party can compose itself and unite behind someone else.

The candidates with the best cross-appeal to both factions are Gingrich and Barbour.
Barbour was going to be my long-choice for the nomination. The very day I was going to write about that, he shot himself in the foot in the Weekly Standard interview.They would have a great opportunity should Huckabee and Palin both decide not to run.

Despite my making Mitt the favourite, I would definitely not place my bet on him. 43 years ago his father was the favourite for the 1968 nomination, before collapsing in the winter of 1968 after admitting to/complaining about being "brainwashed" by the generals about Vietnam. Romney doesn't excite many people, has the burden of explaining the difference between his Massachusetts health care plan and Obamacare, and is still mistrusted by people who are suspicious of a Republican who tried to beat Ted Kennedy by running to his left.

Compare my odds with the results of the recent Republican Insider poll, converted into odds:

Romney 4/1
Daniels 7/1
Pawlenty 8/1
Thune 9/1
Palin 10/1
Huckabee 13/1
Barbour 13/1

I think that the Insiders underrate the degree to which Daniels has pinned a target on his back by his call for a truce on social issues. Socons will now exert themselves for his defeat. The Insiders, obviously appreciative of the difficulty that any Socon will have, still underrate Huckabee's high favourability with the race. Thune is apparently a highly thought-of establishment dark horse; Gingrich didn't even make the top 7.

Jeb Plants His Flag

2011-01-12T10:03:00.001-05:00

Laura Ingraham notes Jeb Bush's incessant repetition of the term "center-right" in his plea for a long-term outreach strategy to Hispanics, most obviously, but maybe also to anybody else who doesn't seem inclined to vote Republican. Laura asks "Query: Have the Bushes decided to start moving away from the word "conservative"? I think we can answer that one with the a clear "Yes". The dad never liked being associated with conservatives except at primary time, and brother George had to paste the "compassionate" disclaimer on before he would use it. Jeb is clearly going to differentiate himself from the Palins and Huckabees and anybody else who doesn't have who don't have a clear business agenda.
No surprise that Jeb is going to do a lot of pandering to Hispanics. Absent from his pitch is both the word and the concept of "immigration", showing that Jeb isn't going to doom any future candidacy immediately by showcasing his softness on the subject. Notice the vacuity of the Jeb agenda:

A center-right agenda means keeping taxes low and easing the regulatory burden on small businesses to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and job growth. A center-right agenda means instituting real education reforms that reward outstanding teachers and empower parents with choices if their children are trapped in a failing school. In short, a center-right agenda provides opportunity for those willing to work hard."

Yawn. Looks like a "center-right agenda" is marketable as an insomnia cure. Observe the complete absence of any social conservatism in the agenda, along with the commitment of redoubled efforts at the kind of incoherent and off-the-point education reforms also dumped unto the national agenda by little brother. If he keeps this up Jeb is going to have to switch quickly to a long-term outreach strategy to conservatives.

Salisbury: The Triumph of Reaction

2010-07-26T16:27:00.001-04:00

I’ve just finished one of the best political biographies I’ve ever read (David Donald’s Lincoln is the only one I can think of that might be superior), about one of the greatest Conservative leaders in history: Andrew Roberts’ Salisbury. Roberts is a superb writer, and had the advantage of a subject who was just as superb a writer, spent 9 years in full-time political journalism and preserved a full set of correspondence and records.

Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, won three general elections and was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for almost 14 years between 1885 and 1902. Despite these accomplishments, Lord Salisbury never entered the Conservative pantheon. He was totally eclipsed in memory by the dashing and romantic Disraeli who was by comparison an electoral failure, leaving to Salisbury the job of putting Gladstone away for good His memory has been overshadowed even by such comparatively ephemeral figures as Lord Randolph Churchill, the artificer of “Tory Democracy”. Part of the cause of his obscurity is ideological. Both Disraeli and Churchill were figures from the left of the party, both solid examples of the classic “Red Tory”, in the original meaning of the term. Salisbury on the other hand was an outright reactionary, a High Tory of a kind that had disappeared in Canada decades before. Reaction, in its secondary or vulgar sense of opposition to and obstruction of change, was the essence of his philosophy. Disraeli ‘stole the Whigs’ clothes’ and broadened the franchise in the 1867 Reform Act, seeing increased enfranchisement as inevitable and not wanting all newly enfranchised groups to regard the Liberals as their friend and the Tories as their enemy forever; Salisbury resigned from Cabinet over the measure. (But few conservatives know that Salisbury had done minute calculations of the likely effect on Conservative fortunes of Disraeli’s proposed enfranchisement, finding the calculations Disraeli was passing on to be wrong. The next election after the Bill proved Salisbury right. In 1884, on the other hand, Salisbury was able to insist that the next major broadening of the franchise not be enacted until it was accompanied by a redistribution which made the package as a whole to the Conservatives’ betterment.) Change, he said, was “an evil, and we do not desire to give it any assistance…it occupies time and energies which are wanted for other purposes.’
He has an unlikely personality for a politician: a loner, affected permanently, Roberts thinks, by severe bullying at Eton, reserved, shy and unsocial, to the extent that in his later years there were a number of instances of his not recognizing members of his own Cabinet (they were after all in the Commons, while he governed from the Lords); as unconcerned as anyone could be about being liked, admired or honoured; notoriously sloppy and careless in dress; dismissive of political oratory, writing the Queen that extra-Parliamentary speaking engagements were “an odious addition to the burdens of political life in modern times…a bad fashion introduced by Mr Gladstone.” (Victoria greatly preferred Salisbury to Gladstone, to the extent of, quite unconstitutionally, forwarding Gladstone’s letters to her while prime minister on to leader of the opposition Salisbury, just for his information.) He could never have attained political leadership in our time (for which we are the losers.)
His claim to greatness has multiple supports. Among Conservative leaders in the Anglosphere, he was one of the greatest writers, thinkers and parliamentary and electoral tacticians. One could fill a sheaf of pages with his mordant, witty, sometimes cynical observations and sayings – and I may just do that for a while.

Merit Alone

2010-07-23T08:59:00.003-04:00

It's about time that the Government got around to reining in affirmative action. It's a move that is not just a matter of elementary social justice; handeled properly, it will be politically popular as well. As the National Post
shows, reverse discrimination is no longer necessary in the federal public service, if it ever was:

According to the commission’s latest figures, published in 2009, 18.8% of public service employees are visible minorities, 4.2% are aboriginal, 3.3% are people with disabilities and 57.1% are women. Canada-wide, according to the 2006 Statistics Canada census, 16.2% of Canadians are visible minorities, 3.8% are aboriginal and 51% are women.

The government needs to march behind the banner "Merit Alone". The policy review needs to be guided toward toward the dropping of reverse discrimination and a total recasting of civil service policy. Hiring by merit thwaps hiring by status in any poll that gives both options. Some of the themes that the new policy should develop:

* true diversity, diversity of backgrounds and of ideas, thrives where selection be merit is taken seriously;
* targets for percentage hiring of specified groups are simply quotas by another name;
* selection by merit must replace "diversity' as the key phrase emphasized not just at hiring, but at every stage of the promotion process.

As part of this review, the government should cough up some money to get the best and most sympathetic personnel experts it can find to design "Merit Workshops" which will replace the diversity workshops which now infest the land, poisoning both the public and private spheres. In the workshops, trained meritocrats would indoctrinate their captive audiences on disasters, real and hypothetical, caused by reverse discrimination hires; selection by merit as a key element of equality and social justice; how "obstacles to merit selection" may be identified and expunged from the workplace, and the like; how new and better "selection by merit" practices may be embedded in the system, etc. The idea would be that these workshops will become an alternate institution to the liberal institution of the diversity workshop, as conservatives conduct their Gramscian march through the institutions of liberal hegemony.

One thing the government needs to do immediately is to drop the defensiveness, the whining about "Oh we're in favour of diversity, we're in favour of affirmative action, we really are." Stockwell Day may be permanently spooked because of his previous manhandling by the liberal media, but the government needs to stop cringing and walk with pride on this one. They have a bloody shirt to wave to start the thing going: the moral outrage of hiring people only from specified races.

Russell Kirk and the Tyranny of the More Energetic Natures

2010-03-02T08:30:00.004-05:00

Russell Kirk sets out two principles in setting out "the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with the general welfare." (Kirk has never a man to use 10 ordinary words when 20 words with a few archaisms thrown in would do.)

The first principle is that a good government allows the more energetic natures among a people to fulfil their promise, while ensuring that these persons shall not tyrannize over the mass of men. (33)

It's this last phrase that is of interest coming from an American conservative. With their libertarian bent, they find it impossible that "energetic natures" could "tyrannize over the mass of men"; only governments can tyrannize by definition.

Kirk later adds that "not only should a just government recognize the rights of the more talented natures, but it should recognize the right of the majority of men not to be agitated and bullied by these aspiring talents....there have been ages in which the aristocracy, natural or hereditary, has usurped the whole governance of life, demanding of the average man a tribute and an obedience which deprive the majority of their desire to live by custom and prescription..." (34) He thinks that natural aristocracy is not a problem in his time (1964), though, because it is the era of the mass man, of Ortega's revolt of the masses.

I think Kirk was missing the creation of an oppressive aristocracy right under his nose. Not the aristocracy of businessmen or capitalists that leftists might perceive. Aren't our new aristocrats the masters of the media, of Hollywood, of television, of popular music, even of newspapers as long as they're still around? From the time a child is sentient, they surround Kirk's fortresses of custom and tradition and besiege them with a 24/7 barrage of cultural and moral decadence. They ensure that those opposed to their rule must fight a guerilla war against a hostile culture in every area of life. Especially noxious is the insidious influence they exert over children, insistent upon asserting their control from the time they are first sentient. Unless parents or church or experience protect or rescue them, their worldview will be formed by their media overlords and they will be tyrannized by them until their dying breath.

And a tyranny is something that exists to be overthrown and destroyed.

(Quotations from "Prescription, Authority and Ordered Freedom" in Frank Meyer, What is Conservatism? (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964) 23- 40. Frank Meyer was the great apostle of "fusionism", an attempt to find, in philosophy, a dialectical synthesis between traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, and, more practically, to stop these two factions from destroying each other. I'm reading this collection of essays by folk such as Kirk, Kendall, Hayek, etc. to see if it has any relevance to the war going on today between libertarians and social conservatives.)

Should Old Betrayers Be Forgot, And Never Brought In Line?

2009-12-31T18:15:00.004-05:00

At last! We can ring out the old and say goodbye to a miserable year, a miserable decade, and a degenerate half-century, all at the same time. Let’s celebrate the right way, with Guy Lombardo and indefatigable Times Square reporter Ben Grauer, enjoying what would be for both of them their last New Year's Eve..
Happy New Year 2010!

Best of What's My Line #1: "Are You the Mother or Daughter of Dorothy Kilgallen?"

2009-12-30T17:29:00.006-05:00

In 1954, while Dorothy Kilgallen was away from the show after the birth of her third child Kerry, her other two children, Dickie, 13, and Jill, 11 appeared on the show as mystery guests. It’s obvious that Dorothy and her husband Richard let Dickie and Jill stay up till 11 P.M. on Sunday nights because their game play and voice disguise were excellent. They alternated answering questions, further confusing the issue. Typically, Bennett Cerf was the first to hone in, asking whether the guest had any connection with Dorothy’s new baby. (I fully expect a revelation some day that Cerf had some way of seeing through his mask.) The kids’ voices hadn’t given them away (Allen: are you the baby’s godmother or something?) Then Arlene Francis shows her facility for intuitive insight followed by a horrible guess....
Watch the kids greet the panel on the way out.

Just Say No to Absurdity

2009-10-09T10:14:00.003-04:00

It looks like Mickey Kaus was the first to get on record with my quick reaction -- the best way for Obama to get out of this without setting himself up as a joke is to turn it down, saying that he appreciates the thought and hopes to achieve things for world peace that will justify the committee's faith in him.

As they note on NRO's the Corner, Nobel nominations were due February 1 -- so Obama was nominated on his accomplishments for less than a month in office.

Electing a New People

2009-09-29T14:52:00.002-04:00

A note of triumphalism led President Clinton to be unintentionally revealing about the Left's long-term strategery for political domination on Meet the Press on Sunday .

MR. GREGORY: Your wife famously talked about the vast right wing conspiracy targeting you. As you look at this opposition on the right to President Obama, is it still there?
PRES. CLINTON: Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It's not as strong as it was, because America's changed demographically, but it's as virulent as it was.
MR. GREGORY: But do you worry about a repeat of '94 politically?
PRES. CLINTON: It, it--there's no way they can make it that bad, for several reasons. Number one, the country is more diverse and more interested in positive action.

To paraphrase Brecht: if the government is dissatisfied with the people, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one. In the United States that is exactly what the government has been doing, in slow motion, and Bill Clinton has let us know why the Democrats are so happy about it..
So just what is the demographic change that Clinton says prevents a repeat of 1994? What kind of diversity is it that automatically leads it to support the leftist agenda?
In 1994 there were 27 million Hispanics in the United States, representing about 10% of the population. Because of illegal immigration and high birth rates, the census bureau projected that by 2050, the Hispanic population would be 88 million, about 25% of the population.
In 2008 there were 47 million Hispanics, about 15% of the population.
In 2050 it is now projected that there will be 133 million Hispanics representing about 30% of the population. There will be about 204 million non-Hispanic whites -- not much higher than the 200 million there were in 2008.
Nobody has ever said that Bill Clinton wasn't a smart politician. If he believes that demographic change in itself is inevitably weakening opposition to the Left agenda, Republicans ought to take notice. The growth of the Hispanic population doesn't just make things harder for Republicans; it skews the whole political spectrum to the left.
That's why Republicans must make it their first priority to ensure that uncontrolled illegal immigration is stopped. They had a chance between 2000 and 2006 and blew it, largely owing to President's Bush's muddleheadedness, sentimentalism and defeatism. They may never have another chance. But they need to operate under the assumption that victory is still possible some day, until it becomes demonstrable that it isn't.
Border control, particularly real border control as a precondition to any immigration reform, has to become a Republican litmus test. It's the one part of the immigration control package that commands the support of a clear majority of the American people, including many who support generous measures for those here illegally. A country that cannot defend its own borders against a slow-motion invasion is a country with no future. Once the border is secure, we can consider measures to regularize the presence of the illegal aliens here, preferably something short of citizenship.
What we have here is election fraud. The current ongoing election of a new people is being conducted unfairly. Republicans need to remember how much Bill Clinton likes it that way.

So When Did You Stop Beating Your Spouse, Judge Obama -- I Mean Sotomayor?

2009-07-10T10:35:00.005-04:00

Steve Sailer wants the GOP to go after Judge Sonia Sotomayor by hammering her on her decision denying promotion to the white firefighter plaintiffs in Ricci and her longtime aggressive support for racial preferences for Hispanics and affirmative action generally.

Sotomayor can extricate herself on Ricci quite easily by stating that she was simply applying the precedents in force at the time as she was required to do, that the majority decision in the Supreme Court chose to alter legal doctrine as they alone have the right to do, and that she herself as a 2nd circuit judge would not have had the power to alter legal doctrine that way even if she wanted to. (GOP Senators and witnesses may say otherwise but the interchanges will degenerate into an inconclusive and dull debate on the state of existing precedent before Ricci). When asked if she agrees with the majority decision in Ricci she need only repeat the formula: she cannot prejudge questions that may come for her if she is so blessed by God as to be confirmed to the position of justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She'll need to talk her way out of the (repeated) wise Latina statements. She may take the line of least resistance which is to say that she believes that a bench that is more representative of the diversity of the population will provide better justice to everyone than a bench that is not. This is not of course what she said in the Wise Latina statements but may be her first option for defusing the situation. If pressed she may retreat to the position that she was referring to discrimination cases where it may be useful to have judges who have experienced discrimination or at least seen it up close and first hand. The GOP will have to keep after her and point out that most of the times she made the comment there was no connecrion at all with discrimination cases. I suspect that Sotomayor will be able to play rope-a-dope on this one for as long as she needs to.

But Sotomayor is going to be confirmed and it doesn't particularly matter that the GOP can turn the public against her position on affirmative action. She's never going to have to run for re-confirmation. And besides, even if she could be defeated and filibustered it's not in the Republican interest to do so. Her replacement nominee would likely be a more effective advocate for liberalism and thus more dangerous. For the GOP there is a more important purpose to the hearings:

Will they forego their best opportunity to point out that Obama not the post-racial uniter of David Axelrod’s imagination, but is merely Sotomayor with a more oleaginous prose style ?

The objectionable effects of Sotomayor's legal philosophy need to be pinned where they belong: right on the collar of Barack Obama. Don't ask her what she thinks of racial preferences. Ask her what she thinks of the Obama Administration's mandated racial preferences. Don't ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by "disparate effect" doctrine; ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by the Obama-administration-supported disparate effect doctrine. When discussing the Wise Latina comment, pause to generously acknowledge that the statement is a fair reflection of the Obama Administration's judicial philosophy.

I expect not so much a grilling next week as a light toasting.

Tim Hudak, the OHRC, and the Virtue of Courage

2009-06-20T06:58:00.004-04:00

So the Ontario Human Rights Commission is tormenting the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party again. It was over 25 years ago that internal party dissatisfaction with the OHRC first bubbled to a boil. I was at the OPCCA Annual Meeting in my capacity as Past President, soon to be Past Past President, innocently minding my own business listening to a typical policy session. Suddenly democracy broke out, and there was a motion on the floor deploring the latest power grab of the Human Rights Establishment as manifested in a package of amendments being put forth by the Bill Davis government. The motion called for the abolition of the OHRC and it looked like it was going to pass. Tom Long, incoming president, grabbed me and asked me to get up and ask that the motion be withdrawn and that a committee be appointed to investigate the amendments and the Code and come forth with recommendations to be made to the government. It was a honour back then, to be someone who was able to stand off and get the hard men to back off a bit when the leadership wanted it done but not to do it itself. In the great tradition of Past President as sometime doer of dirty work and hatchetman.

That committee turned out to be, aside from me, quite a collection of talent, kind of like when in baseball you have one of these minor league teams that turns out 25 years later to have a passel of Hall of Famers. Tom, Tony Clement, Alister Campbell and Lynn Golding for starters.

The discontent with the OHRC became quite substantial. Tony Clement later asked me to debate Tom on the question of whether the OHRC should be abolished entirely at the OPCYA Annual Meeting, with me taking the pro-retention side. I gave a very flat performance, partly because I wasn't sure I was debating on the right side.

It turned out that nothing could deter the government from its course. How the OHRC survived the Harris years unscathed I do not know, but that it did was a major mistake. The contents of the Common Sense Revolution were the entire store of the party's intellectual capital under Harris, and it spent its time in government depleting it.

The current debate over OHRC in the leadership contest, like previous ones, seems to pit the virtues of courage and prudence against each other. Like the National Post editorial board
when it first discussed the issue (it has since endorsed Tim Hudak), I am of two minds about this. Political parties need to be elected in order to implement their social visions, and they should think very hard before adopting policies that threaten to blast away their support. The London Free Press poll being disseminated by Christine Elliott is a very effective weapon. On the other hand if political parties have no social vision there is no point electing them. And make no mistake, anyone who approves of the current human rights regime is not a conservative and Ontario would be better off defeating a party led by such a person.

The crucial facts are these: Ontario's human rights regime is not a neutral and fair mechanism to promote am objective conception of human rights and fairly adjudicate claims that these rights have been violated. It is an entrenched and potent adjunct of left-wing political ideology, striving to pull the province's politics and discourse steadily to the left, changing its legal norms constantly without the inconvenient necessity of gathering the public support to change the law in the direction it wants by amendment.

Just look at the stated policy of the Liberals' supposed attempt to bring the OHRC in line, the new Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. Its mission
commits it to "strive [to] remain responsive to an evolving understanding of human rights and discrimination". That is an open commitment to a constantly changing law without parliamentary sanction. To a world where behaviour that is legal today gets you dragged into court tomorrow, because the law has "evolved" and you never got the memo. It makes the OHRT a continuing constitutional convention, populated overwhelmingly by delegates from the Left human rights establishment. The great majority of its members have resumes showing they have been saturated and steeped in Left human rights ideology.

On the other hand...although as a Fort Erie boy myself I have a home team attachment to Tim Hudak, there's no doubt his human rights policy is half-baked. In particular he's 180 degrees off with the suggestion of a specialized court of "specially trained" judges. Specially trained by whom, in what? Any training that is likely to take place in the foreseeable future would be conducted by the same human rights establishment that is the cause of our present problems. What we need is a specially untrained tribunal, so that human rights matters are heard by people with expertise in the law generally just as contract cases are heard by courts not specially trained in the law of contract, tort cases are heard by courts not specially trained in the law of tort, and constitutional cases are heard by judges not specially trained in the law of the constitution. We need for human rights decisions to be made by professional adjudicators, not professional ideologues. Eliminating the OHRT would also put a crimp in the lifestyle of the human rights establishment, which has long had the ability to sustain and compensate itself by getting its members appointed as human rights adjudicators. The OHRT at the moment is a kind of human rights establishment Senate. And its new members are appointed from among people nominated by -- themselves. What a wonderful way of perpetuating an ideology.

A half-baked policy doesn't need to be discarded; it just needs to be put back into the oven.

Conservatives are going to need to develop an uninstitutionalized human rights intelligentsia. This will require Tories to do something they are normally averse to do -- first immerse themselves in the current human rights culture, so as to better know one's enemy. Conservatives are used to have their experience with HRCs come through being hauled before them to be asked to grovel and apologize for saying that adherents of Islam are Muslims, or some similarly outrageous statement of hatred. But in the United States conservatives like Abigail Thernstrom and Peter Kirsanow, members of the U. S. commission on civil rights, have become credentialed human rights experts. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

I won't predetermine the conclusions of this hypothetical project of mine that is going to reenvision human rights policy for the twenty-first century. But I'll throw out a few ideas. The Code needs to be rewritten from top to bottom, with all its language carefully designed to rein in wandering tribunals, be they administrative or judicial. Right from the Preamble, where our human rights law needs to be decoupled from the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights and its other fatuities and reattached to our own Anglo-Canadian traditional understandings of rights. When we're in power, human rights reform can't be something we undertake once a generation or so. Conservative governments need to monitor human rights decisions constantly, moving immediately to amend legislation as soon as an outrageous decision occurs. Ideally the amending legislation should be ready to be introduced the day after the period for appeal of an outrageous decision is over.

And a way out of our dilemma might be the creation of a statutory tort of discrimination, something that was on its way to evolving at common law before the proliferation of HRCs choked off its growth. A tort of discrimination would fit into the judicial system like any other tort. It would treat breaches of civil rights like other breaches of rights, to be remedied through ordinary actions in tort or contract, rather than making rights breaches objects of continual human-rights-establishment fuelled waves of hysteria. It would place the issue of compensation for such things as mental distress within a pre-existing legal framework.

Back to courage versus prudence -- despite Christine Elliott's boughten poll, I believe that human rights reform can be part of a winning progressive conservative platform. It won't be a major part of it, but it needn't be the rotten plank through which our leader falls to a gruesome electoral death. The problem with Christine Elliott's winnability argument is that professional moderates such as herself who share the attitudes and beliefs of the liberal establishment, with an occasional zany idea like a flat tax thrown in to rope in gullible conservatives, tend not to win elections despite their oh-so-carefully-preserved moderation. Think Stanfield and Clark and Grossman and Tory. It feels terrible to sell your soul when picking a candidate and be rewarded with another four years in opposition.

Tim Hudak is the best choice for Ontario P.C. leader.

Dodging a Bullet

2009-05-28T10:54:00.012-04:00

Conservatives are staking out positions in their latest internecine battle: how hard to go after SCOTUS nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

My take: in this match we take a dive.

What the smart liberals wanted was to find a leftist Scalia, an intellectual heavyweight and lucid writer who could not just vote the right way, but set out principles of substance in a way that impresses and persuades the uncertain and undecided. A figure the liberals haven’t had for over 50 years, since Louis Brandeis left the court. And oh yes, and someone nice and collegial, who, unlike Justice Scalia, does not frequently alienate centrist judges by pointing out how dumb their opinions are.

Sonia Sotomayor is not such a person. 2 women who might have been the person liberals were looking for, Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan, didn’t make the final cut. Either of 2 of the final 4, Elena Kagan or Judge Diane Wood, might possibly have been that person. Although in the case of Wood I find it unlikely that someone who declares from the bench that because the Christian Law Society by excluding practicing homosexuals, its members do not regard them as full human beings is a very collegial person who is likely to win over centrists. Unless she also has superb acting skills.

Jeff Rosen, searching for that liberal Scalia, wrote an article that quickly became (in)famous detailing Sotomayor's inadequacy for the role of liberal saviour: Sotomayor, although an able lawyer,

was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue." (During one argument, an elderly judicial colleague is said to have leaned over and said, "Will you please stop talking and let them talk?")....

Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It's customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn't distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions--fixing typos and the like--rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.

It’s not that Sotomayor is dumb or unqualified. She’s obviously not. It’s that she’s not Brandeis or Warren. At best, she’s an Alito, not a Roberts. She’s no more liberal than Obama’s next nominee would be, if she were defeated. And is the fact that she’s the first Hispanic nominated to the court relevant? Sure. Why did the Democrats let Scalia sail through 96-0? Well, the fact that he was the first Italian-American ever appointed to the court didn’t hurt. The Democrats gave Clarence Thomas a good roughing up, but in the end let him through.

Mind you the GOP ought to pit up a bit of a fight for a few rounds. It’s fine to bring to the public attention her statement that a Latina woman is likely to make better decisions than a white male, and the couple other Kinsleyian gaffes that she has committed. But she’s smart enough to talk herself out of trouble for those statements at the hearings. Although she’s been the front runner for the next SCOTUS opening since Obama was elected, the GOP doesn’t seem to have much on her. There’s no point in the GOP copying the Kennedys and Leahys in hysterical and irrational opposition. It didn’t help their public image any.

So let’s spar for a few rounds and then throw in the towel. It coulda been a lot worse.

Really Big Shew

2009-05-04T09:54:00.003-04:00

There's something of a consensus that all the leading candidates to replace Justice Souter on the United States Supreme Court are essentially interchangeable, and the appointment will exchange a liberal for a liberal and not make a difference. What the smart liberals want, however, is to find someone who could become a real intellectual leader for liberalism on the court. Someone who could make arguments for judicial liberalism that hang together, someone whose opinions could make law students say "that's what a judge should be". Through a combination of bad luck and missed opportunities, liberal jurisprudence hasn't had such a person since the early 50s with Brandeis and the younger Frankfurter.

I think the left may have their candidate in Professor Kathleen Sullivan of the Stanford Constitutional Law Centre, former dean of Stanford Law School. Laurence Tribe described her as the most brilliant student he ever had. Sullivan has an uncanny ability to write about law with analytical rigour but in a way that can be easily understood — she thinks like a lawyer but writes like a human being. In public appearances she is soft-spoken, genial — and cute, which never hurts. Republicans trying to beat her up in the hearings will look bad — which is reverse sexism but why not take advantage?

Sullivan is the Bizarro Scalia, different in gender, judicial philosophy, and temperament. While Scalia's belligerence often turned off so-called moderates like O'Connor and Kennedy, Sullivan's charm might help reel in the types who don't know what they really believe.

The kicker is that Kathleen Sullivan is a lesbian. Should that stop Obama? I would say no. That might work, when the political gains and losses are computed, to the benefit of the Democrats. Some conservatives are sure to say some intemperate and inappropriate things about her sexual orientation. That will only assist Democrats in their attempt to portray the GOP as nothing more than a collection of bigots.

I don't know if Obama is willing to throw the long bomb or not. My sense is that Sullivan's biggest obstacle will be Obama's preference to go with people he knows from Harvard or Chicago. Tribe-Sullivan-Obama may not be close enuf.

She has one embarrassing negative: she failed the California bar exam the first time she took it when she moved out there. I imagine this will provide some good clean fun for Republicans but don't see it as a dealbreaker.

Further reason for Sullivan: Jeff Rosen has a story up in The New Republic suggesting that the woman on the top of most lists, Judge Sonya Sotomayor, just isn't smart enough.

Canada's Not Returning the Favour

2009-04-22T19:24:00.005-04:00

In view of transnationalist law professor Harold Koh’s controversial nomination to the position of State Department legal adviser, and Justice Ginsburg’s recent comment that the Supreme Court of Canada commands more respect in foreign courts than does the Supreme Court of the United States because the SCC listens more to other countries’ high courts’ jurisprudence than does SCOTUS, it seems appropriate to ask — does Canada return the favour? Koh believes SCOTUS should construe the U. S. constitution “in light of” foreign law when that foreign law contains roughly parallel provisions. So would Canada return the favour when its constitution contains provisions roughly comparable to those of other countries — like, say, the United States?

We found out the answer to that in one of the most important early cases interpreting Canada’s new-as-of-1982 Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms in a case that has to be in consideration for the title of worst reasoned Charter decision of all time. In Reference Re Motor Vehicle Act [1985] 2 S.C.R 486. the Court had its first opportunity to resolve the most crucial question about the interpretation of Section 7 of the Charter, which reads as follows:

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

If you're an American, does that look familiar? The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Now there is a vast jurisprudence and scholarly literature concerning the appropriate scope of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, with a particularly notable debate about the appropriateness of "substantive due process", a doctrine which has animated such notable American decisions as Lochner and Roe v. Wade.
Now the language in the two jurisdictions is not identical, but the similarities suggest that the SCC might at least have referred to the American experience to help it understand the immense implications of the choice of interpretation they were about to make.
The Court didn't see it that way. The majority opinion, written by Lamer J. entirely rejected the idea of consulting American law, rejecting

the characterization of the issue in a narrow and restrictive fashion, i.e., whether the term "principles of fundamental justice" has a substantive or merely procedural content. In my view, the characterization of the issue in such fashion preempts an open-minded approach to determining the meaning of "principles of fundamental justice".
18. The substantive/procedural dichotomy narrows the issue almost to an all or nothing proposition. Moreover, it is largely bound up in the American experience with substantive and procedural due process. It imports into the Canadian context American concepts, terminology and jurisprudence, all of which are inextricably linked to problems concerning the nature and legitimacy of adjudication under the U.S. Constitution.

Got that? Substantive Due Process and Procedural Due Process are (Gasp!) "American concepts". Not only don't we care how the Yanks reason about things, but we're not even going to let our reasoning be tainted by use of these foreign concepts.
Needless to say, after rejecting this distinction the Court went on to affirm full substantive due process, without using the barbarian words. Oh, and this was by the way the case which also at one stroke killed the doctrine of originalism in Charter jurisprudence. More is known about the original intent of Section 7 than about any other part of the Charter. The words "due process" were specifically avoided to prevent the possibility of the importation of American substantive due process to Canada. The words "fundamental justice" were intended to mean no more than procedural "natural justice". Lamer J. ignored the indisputable evidence of this intent, considering it to be "of little weight".
So if the Americans follow the advice of Dean Koh and other transnationalists and start using Canadian experience to help interpret their Constitution, don't expect Canada to be returning the favour.

Hail Franz, King of Canada!

2009-03-27T09:08:00.003-04:00

It's pretty clear that the monarchy will not survive here long after Queen Elizabeth leaves the throne. There must be a powerful republican, nationalist, egalitarian sentiment that would like to ditch the monarchy. Its size can't be estimated because there's a tacit agreement among everyone not to bring up the question while Good Queen Elizabeth is on the throne. Prince Charles however just won't do as monarch. The monarchy can't last as long as 25 years once Elizabeth leaves. It will be abolished the instant a Liberal Government in power determines that abolition would be to its electoral advantage.

If we could ditch Charles, the institution might have a fighting chance.

The recasting of our institutions to conform with notions of political correctness is one of the more annoying irritants of our time. But occasionally the process can have unanticipated consequences that are desirable to conservatives. We need to make the most of these moments.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is thinking of ending the three-century long ban on Roman Catholics becoming monarch. Historic as it is, the ban grates against modern notions of religious freedom. And as the Telegraph notes,

One of the complexities of any change would the question of whether or not to make it retrospective - a step which would move the Princess Royal ahead of the Duke of York in the line of succession.

If we're righting a historic wrong though, why stop there? If disallowance of Roman Catholics is illegitimate then the ousting of King James II was illegitimate in the first place, and the legitimate heir of the throne is whoever's at the top of the Stuart Succession. The division of Tories over whether to support James, or support the new monarch in order to protect the Church and England's independence divided both the Tory party and the church, and the divisions therein were a major contributor to the bleak generations of exile the Tories suffered after 1715.

We'll grandmother Elizabeth and let her stay on because everyone likes her.

The heir presumptive to the throne of England and Canada is Franz, Duke of Bavaria. He seems to be an accomplished and honourable fellow and his family has a distinguished history:

The Wittelsbachs were opposed to the Nazi regime in Germany, and in 1939 Franz's father Albrecht took his family to Hungary. They lived in Budapest for four years before moving to Somlovar Castle in late 1943. In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. On October 6, the entire family including Franz, then aged 11, were arrested. They were sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps including Oranienburg and Dachau . At the end of April 1945 they were liberated by the United States Third Army.

We play this up to Roman Catholics, puffing the monarchy as a powerful symbol of the end of discrimination against them. The law of primogeniture is being tossed aside too, so we hail this as a giant step for women's equality. Is it just a coincidence that people want to abolish the monarchy just after women and Catholics have become equal, we will ask.
Buying support from women and Catholics the monarchy's survival might be extended by 50 years. And one of Toryism's most disastrous defeats will have been avenged.

AshleyMadison.com: See You In Tort

2009-03-23T21:33:00.012-04:00

Maggie Gallagher over on NR Online started a bit of discussion a while back when she suggest reviving the tort of adultery (which had been "criminal conversation" in Canada). Funny, the very day before I read that I had been feeling nostalgic for those grand old torts that had been abolished over the years, the last of which were cut down by "law reform" in the 1960s. There was the tort of seduction, a cause of action for a father whose daughter had been seduced. There was breach of promise of marriage. There was alienation of affections. These old torts recognized that the damaging and sundering of covenanted personal relationships did real harm worthy of legal recognition and compensation. Although these old torts are now taken as hopelessly old-fashioned and repressed, recent times have seen the development of torts like intentional infliction of emotional distress, and this development is seen as constructive and progressive. The Family Law Reform Act of 1978 finished off the last of these "heartbalm" torts in Ontario.

Maggie's thoughts about reviving the historic tort came in response to a callout of social conservatives by NR Online's Deroy Murdock. Murdock alleged that social conservatives' interest in preserving marriage seemed to be strictly confined to fighting same-sex marriage. He noted that a Google search had shown no evidence of social conservatives denouncing AshleyMadison.com, a dating site designed, it advertises itself, to help married people cheat on their spouses. None of the outspoken claimants to the title of defenders of marriage were on record as denouncing this for-profit enterprise aimed at its subversion. As I skimmed through Murdock's article I found myself wondering where such an iniquitous website could be located. Way offshore in some country with no extradition treaty, perhaps. Or maybe they would dare to operate from as close as Tijuana.. Perhaps they would even be bold enough to quarter themselves in Las Vegas. But no:

"We made tens of millions of dollars" last year, company president Noel Biderman says from its Toronto base. We are very profitable and successful."

Whoa! The City of Churches has now become Ground Zero in the war against the family. Hopeless as it may be, it behooves conservatives to try to do something about this. If the ship of decency must go down, it should go down with all flags flying.

Practical considerations suggest that a revival of the simple tort of adultery is unlikely to be a winner in Ontario. A counter-attack against the advancing anti- family armies needs to find a weaker section of the front.

But a law supporting creation of a tort of intentional third party promotion and facilitation of adultery, perhaps limited to commercial enterprises, should be something doable. And it just so happens that the law of tort is a provincial matter, and the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is entering into a leadership campaign.

Let's find out how many PC leadership aspirants will support the creation of a tort of commercial inducement of adultery. At a minimum, their responses will show us where they stand in the war against the family.

And the Award for Most Sociopathic Sociopath in a Leading Role Goes to...

2009-02-23T09:13:00.010-05:00

Sean Penn!

In this category there's rarely a shortage of worthy nominees at the annual awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Sean Penn though has already compiled a body of work worthy of many Lifetime Achievement awards. Between Madonna, Hugo Chavez, the Government of Iran, Raul Castro and Johnny Depp, Penn has had association with more creepy and sleazy people than the whole executive of the federal wing of the Quebec Liberal Party. The convicted wifebeater's bizarre and convoluted speech proved once again that anything intelligent he ever says has been handed to him some time before written in large capital letters:

For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight,

Those were investors in All the King's Men, Sean.

I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.

Why is it only the liberals? You never hear normal people making soppyeyed speeches about the need for abstinence-based sex education or halving the capital gains tax.

And there are these last 2 things.

2? There's hope for this night yet.

I’m very, very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man President,

An elegant man? Doesn't Lyndon Johnson count? I know that's what I look for in my leaders. You know Barack Obama was praying that Sean didn't say anything too crazy that people might associate with him.

and a country who, for all its toughness, creates courageous artists, and this is in great due respect to all the nominees, creates courageous artists who despite sensitivity that sometimes has brought enormous challenges, Mickey Rourke rises again, and he is my brother

And people said Mickey Rourke was punchdrunk.

There was one powerful consolation for the evening, one so important you should mark it down right now on your calendar for next year. That was the liveblog at Big Hollywood, the conservative entertainment blog started earlier thus year by Andrew Breitbart. As Hollywood deteriorates further into a war between paganism and primitivism, following this live blog is the only thing that will make the Oscars watchable in the future.

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

2009-02-20T08:37:00.004-05:00

I’m still working on what may be my great composition, a set of theses explaining Barack Obama and all the mysteries surrounding him. Is he a hard-line progressive or a closet centrist? Does he really dream of a new post-partisan commitment to consensus or is this just a ruse to sneal behiud the city gates a legion of standard left-liberal politics?

Tony Blankley examines Obama’s early blunders and sets out their possible causes. Obama took the fall for the inept vetting of Cabinet nominees, saying that he “screwed up”.

But from a management perspective, the unanswered question is: How did he "screw up"? Did he actively design the failed vetting process and actively assess the various negative pieces of information and fail to see their significance? Or did he "screw up" by letting others design the failed system and assess the data inflow? The former would show poor substantive judgment. The latter would show he wasn't paying sufficient attention to a presumably vital matter.

Then we have the preening display of signing an executive order closing Gitmo -- not now, but within one year. And what is to be done with those present inhabitants too dangerous or unwanted by other countries to be released, but not susceptible to conviction through the mechanism of the criminal law, which is designed to regulate offenses between members of the same community who have committed themselves to upholding the same set of social values?

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn't know how -- or even whether -- his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.
President Obama: "And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. ... Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?"
White House counsel Greg Craig: "We'll set up a process."
To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

But the critical clues must be found in Obama's handling of his stimulus package. Here is a mystery packed with satifactorily intriguing puzzles. Was Obama's desire to reach a genuine consensus with a substantial number of Republicans real or charade? Was the decision to delegate preparation of the package to Speaker Pelosi and her minions an inevitable byproduct of Obama's newness to office, a sign of irresolution and weakness, or a clever ploy to ensure that his fingerprints would not appear on a package full of social liberalism and plain silliness that was desired by Obama but known by him to be unacceptable to Republicans? FWIW, I believe that Obama's desire for post-partisan consensus, if arrogant and ill-considered, is sincere. It's arrogant because Obama's belief is that everyone should abandon their petty grievances, outworn notions and unthinking allegiances. Republucans and Democrats should sit down and think things through practically, whereupon they will come to the same conclusions that Obama does, which also happen to be the conclusions of standard fossilized progressive ideology 98.7% of the time. Republicans accepting the conclusions in principle are welcome to toss in a few ideas -- for example if they had had a few ludicrous projects for which they desired excessive government funding, those ideas would have been welcome. Everyone then votes for what Obama wants; that's what's called "postpartisan consensus".

Blankley:

I can think of four possible explanations for this almost unprecedented presidential detachment from the decision making of policies the president publicly declared to be vital to the country and his presidency:
1) He is a very, very big-picture man, and he delegates decisions even on the central points of vital issues.
2) For tactical reasons, he decided these matters were not worth using up political chits.
3) He is either hesitant or unskilled at management, and he let matters drift until it seemed too late to intervene personally.
4) Or his personality type leaves him surprisingly uninterested in things that aren't personally about him.

I'll eliminate #2. Tactically this was the perfect time both to make it clear to congressional Democrats that he would be doing the producing and directing on matters important to him, and to make cooperation with him as attractive as possible to Republicans .
There's no doubt truth in #1, but it doesn't explain Obama's non-decisions on the stimulus package. The necessity of insisting on absolute unity of purpose in items in a bipartisan emergency stimulus package is big-picture enough for the most visionary leader to isolate and insist on.
#4 can't be discounted wholly. A man who writes two memoirs and compares himself favourably to Lincoln has an very healthy sense of self-esteem even for a politician. It is this type of personality also which sees itself as rising above the pettiness and self-interest that afflict everyone else.
But I say #3 is the winner. Obama was quite skilful or lucky in selecting a campaign team and setting a campaign tone, but the quantity, urgency and importance of the policy and personnel decisions to be made now overwhelm him.
This should ensure for Americans a very entertaining if perhaps somewhat painful presidency. The President's stated goals of civility, practicality and bipartisanship will be subverted and sabotaged at every stage not only by congressional Democrats but by his own appointees. Obama's rhetoric and style will ensure that his approval rating remains high despite an unending series of unpopular and disastrous policy ventures. Public anger will be continually directed not at the king, but at his counsellors, whose heads will roll regularly in response to repeated failures of judgment, achievement and ethics.

Rod Dreher Working on Discovering Fire

2009-02-17T10:12:00.005-05:00

Chief CrunchyCon Rod Dreher likes occasionally to mull over things and make "discoveries" which are utterly obvious to anyone who has thought about social conservatism for more than the last hour or so. He asks whether his readers have ever wondered why the poor and working classes tend to adopt the more conservative forms of religion. Why yes, I wondered about that back when I was an undergraduate and so no doubt has everyone else who has ever had conservative instincts and the slightest interest in political theory or philosophy. I suspect that this manner of approaching this stuff fulfils a didactic function for Rod; for some reason he has and has retained a large number of liberal commenters who have never thought seriously about these things and is trying to break them in gently. Sure enuf there were a few commenters who seemed to be transmogrified by this brilliantly original line of thought.

Rod buries the lede further by launching into a digression about the superior personal appeal of charismatic varieties of religion over liturgical ones to the most poor and oppressed. He finally gets to the answer to the question: the poor and marginalized are drawn to religions with rules and moral structures because they have the most to lose through moral dissoluteness. If you descend into the depths through drugs, promiscuity and self-indulgence, and you are wealthy, dad and mom are always around to subsidize you in university for a few extra years until you can get your head together and straightened out. The poor have no such cushion. If you as a young man get in hock to bookies you can always get dad to bail you out at least one more time before the legbreakers pay you a visit. If you're struggling when starting out in the workplace, dad has contacts; later on if life just hasn't gone the right way you can at least look forward to inheriting the family's property when they pass on to give you one more chance or spree, however you decide. The wealthy and powerful have a larger margin of error.

There are other reasons as well, looking at the question from the obverse side. Why do the wealthy tend towards the liberal forms of religion? Well, what's distinctive about conservative religion? It counsels and demands self-restraint, restraint on one's use of power. Who has the most power to be restrained? The wealthy. Therefore they have the most to give up by adherence to conservative religion, and can be more easily assuaged by liberal religion which puts its restraints on others, demanding they refrain from cutting down trees or contributing to global warming.

Rod cites James Poulos over at the American Scene who, discussing the appeal of the odd new sect known as liberaltarians, refers to the Sex Vote, that segment of "people who are generally willing or even eager to trade away political and economic freedoms for broad (in terms of scope, variety, protection and enforcement) social and cultural freedoms". I think Poulos misunderstands what these people want, though. The cultural and sexual freedoms these people want they already have, and have had without threat for decades now. What they want now is to achieve cultural hegemony for the libertine approach to life and marginalize those who oppose it, through their control of mass media and elite institutions plus the occasional unbaring of the heavy hand through boycotts, firings, and the ministrations of the Human Rights Commission.

So How Much Political Advantage Does $34 Billion Buy, Anyway?

2009-01-27T12:21:00.011-05:00

The world moves fast nowadays. What with all these pre-budget announcements, it's now possible to feel buyer's remorse before the transaction has been completed. I've been saying that the Tories had no option but to accept the Keynesian stimulus argument and produce a budget designed to rope in Liberal support. And I stand by that — as I've been saying the Conservative Party of Canada simply afford to hand over power to the Liberals, be stigmatized as the "party that doesn't do anything for the ordinary guy" in hard times, and run the risk of being out of power for 20 years as a result.

It's understandable that a government would act the way that this one has, as successful politicians have a strong survival interest. The Government slashed it's own throat with the economic statement last fall. The instinctive response is to staunch the blood, wipe up the mess, stitch up the wound and apply bandages to the wounds. Today's budget is the result. But is reasonable to ask how much political capital $34 billion buys. Well, it's not really $34 billion; just the natural effects of the downturn are estimated to produce a $12 billion deficit anyway. So what does $22 billion in stimulus/infrastructure/assistance to the unemployed buy, politically?

This package of outcomes isn't all good. There's some discontent within the party; just peruse my fellow Blogging Tories to sense the signs of mutiny in the ranks. Unambiguously Ambidextrous has managed to get these views a place on the front page of the National Post website. I'm disturbed and sad at the total rejection of the party which some conservatives seem to be contemplating. There's a danger of saying of these discontented, "So what. Where are they going to go?" The Conservative Left used to think that regularly, and say that occasionally, wearing a triumphant smirk, and one of the results was the Reform Party of Canada. Conservative activists are principled and often ornery sorts, so organizing them in support of a necessary political compromise is like herding cats. Stephen Harper is going to spend some of the political capital he has accumulated with the conservative base on this. At the same time it can't let it's policies be dictated by people who don't understand that it's necessary to win power to enact any part of the conservative agenda, so it's self-destructive to demand that a government enact all of it.

The arguments from supposed conservative principle aren't definitive here; there's nothing wrong with running deficits in bad times so long as they are paid for with surpluses in the good. That's something we have to insist that government does, when the time comes. And when that time comes it would be nice if we had a conservative government to try to hold accountable, rather than a Liberal one.

There are better arguments against these tactics. They are, like the arguments for this approach, based on politics. The case would be that this $22 billion just doesn't buy any political advantage nearly worth the expenditure. What has this $22 billion plan bought? 6 to 9 months. Things are going to get worse economically this year, maybe a lot worse. Michael Ignatieff can take 6 months, 9 months, more if he thinks it better, to organize himself, to replenish Grit coffers, and then defeat the Government when he thinks the economy is at its lowest point, with every chance of beating the Conservatives. There better be an awful lot of good things done by the Government during the next 6 or 9 months for this Keynesian adventure to be worth it. One might go further and argue that in the current circumstances, no one can know whether it is, in the long term, the better position for the Conservatives to be, next week, in Government, in Opposition, or in the midst of an election campaign. The best political outcome for the Conservatives might be if the Government was defeated, the Governor General refused a dissolution, and the Leader of the Opposition was invited to form a government. Then the anger of Conservative voters at this "undemocratic" activity might energize the base all the way to the next election, whenever it is.

But I think this argument misses a few things. If the Government had publicly renounced Keynesian stimulus theory, and brought in a $12 billion deficit budget, or worse, a budget cutting services and/or raising taxes to produce a balanced budget, make no mistake, it would have been defeated in an election campaign. It would have the wind behind it at the start, being able to denounce the Opposition for forcing an unnecessary election in a time of crisis, delaying any action to resolve it. It could take some advantage of the distaste with which English Canadians regard the entering into a coalition containing the separatists as a key component. But it would face sensationalized MSM coverage of the job losses that are now occurring every day. It would face the public preference for parties promising to do something in midst of a crisis to those proposing nothing. The conservative economists who oppose Keynesian stimulus would be overwhelmed by the MSM coverage of the plurality of economists who support it in some form. It would face the spillover effects of Obamamania in the States, which has created an appetite for change that Michael Ignatieff could take advantage of. Worst of all, it would face an Opposition that would be led by the inexorable logic of its public positions to effectively band together, promising that another Harper minority government would be defeated on the Speech for the Throne and replaced with a government that would introduce a stimulus program, an infrastructure program, and additional aid for the unemployed. And if Stephen Harper couldn't win a majority against Stephane Dion, he can't win a majority government, at least right now, against Michael Ignatieff.

The recession fighting weapons authorized in the budget won't really be worth the $22 billion they cost, marked as they are with all the inefficiencies attached to government endeavours. But they buy the time necessary to stay alive and to craft a strategy that will prevent a Liberal takeover of power that could last for generations. The difference between their actual value to the public and their real value is thus well worth the cost, even if we have to borrow to pay for them.

Welcome, Disabled Workers, to the University of Mars

2009-01-24T10:17:00.008-05:00

I've long suspected that government job training programs, especially those forcibly attached to a government subsidy, may be among the most useless and inefficient ways that government uses its money. These programs train people who don't want to be there in skills they aren't really interested in having to help them get jobs that don't exist. Well thanks to the Toronto Star for heaping up evidence for my thesis. It seems that many injured workers have been required by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board as a condition of receiving compensation to enrol in the University of Mars
Let us gather the testimonies of the grateful beneficiaries of the government's concern for their career future:

Carlos Aviles:

"It was a waste of time," he said. "So much money wasted. It's all garbage. The training was inadequate. This is not real school. It's for kids. (But) I have to go there."

Gladys Canelas:

"Someone has to stop this stupid thing," said Canelas, who quit her program in frustration and is now unemployed. "Money, money, money for nothing."

Of course teaching of new skills and skill upgrading for our modern hitech economy is very difficult considering the way our social service budgets are so severely constrained in how much they can spend to l'arn recipients in these marketable new skills. Being able to afford to pay out a mere $33,000 over a 18 months to prepare one for data entry and shelf stocking, or $21,000 to prepare one to be a "customer service clerk" -- how can one expect results when our social service programs are so starved for resources?

You know of course that it would be a lot more effective to let the recipients pick a new trade and an institution to teach it themselves and just give them the money to enroll. But they're much better off deploying the whole long-assembled wisdom of the Government of Ontario in a decision that may determine the whole course of their future life.

I've been thinking of course about the budget. There will be money for job training, Jim Flaherty has said. It's a shibboleth, a panacea, a totem. Not spending money on job training is considered equivalent to saying "We don't care about people losing jobs; they probably deserved it anyway. Let them deliver advertising flyers."

About all we can hope for from the Conservatives is that they take the time and trouble to ensure that their training programs will achieve something, but that's not something I really expect to see. Expect a Star expose of useless new training programs finded in the budget by the conservatives later this year, just about the time that Michael Ignatieff decides that he wants to force an election.

David Frum's NewMajority.com

2009-01-22T11:02:00.010-05:00

This week brings the launch of David Frum's new website NewMajority.com. If you haven't read Frum's 2008 book Comeback, the new venture's statement of purpose will leave you in doubt about just what these people are up to. The key words are these which sum up the basic attitude expressed in Comeback:

Our party has now taken two bad beatings in two consecutive cycles. It looks very likely we are heading for a third. It's not a sign of lack of commitment to our party or our movement to acknowledge these hard facts.
Our goal here at NewMajority.com is to renew and reform our Republican party and the conservative philosophy so that we can again earn the confidence of the American people and govern responsibly and effectively. We don't claim to have all the answers. We are sure that we are asking the right questions.

Comeback ruffled some feathers in the conservative aviary. There are three components to the worldview expressed in Comeback; at least two if not three of them challenge the default position, or at least the default for-public-consumption position, of the conservative establishment. First is an assessment of the future prospects of the Republican Party as they appear at the moment. Frum's is bleak. Significant portions of the electorate, portions that are growing, seem to becoming increasingly hostile to the party. Aversion to Republicans by Hispanics, women, suburbanites, the college-educated -- these things are not going to magically melt away. Many of the GOP's signature issues have exhausted their appeal. For example, income tax cuts? Further significant middle class tax cuts are unsustainable economically; almost 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all and have no need of reductions; 80% of American workers now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.

The second issue is what to about all this. Here's where the participants take off their coats and the brawling begins. Much of the movement believes that all that is needed is to return to true conservative principles, to march as in days of yore behind banners of bold colours not pale pastels, to be the party of Ronald Reagan again. Frum isn't buying it, and neither am I. Ronald Reagan didn't prevail by urging his party to ask "What would Barry Goldwater have said? What would Robert Taft have done?" The retrenchment purists are people whose plan if they could redo the Charge of the Light Brigade would be to try to think of a way to make the horses run faster. Frum urges a full, ruthless, corner to corner and ceiling to floor review of the policies the GOP has been running on. This is where Frum is right, and Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and the official voices of the conservative movement are wrong. Why do we laugh at the way Democrats acted during the Reagan years? Because they refused to look at and think about their now vote-losing positions and kept on losing as a result, always unwilling to believe that their ideas had been rejected again because the public didn't agree with them. There's a chasm here between those who want to be or at least look thoroughly orthodox and those who want to win elections.

The third component of the approach is a grab bag of new policies and strategic revision of old ones to recapture the public imagination. This isn't the place to go through them. I'll just say that Frum certainly used his imagination. I would never have thought of prison reform as a big vote-winning issue, and a government led "war against obesity" seems likely to be effective only in giving Letterman, Leno and every other comedian in the land a free joke every day of the week. I probably disagree with two-thirds of Frum's policy prescriptions, but that's not the point. I think that he's got the right attitude, the willingness to strip down the whole machine and reevaluate the design of every part, and that's what matters. Since the book Frum has gotten into issues that conservatives never touch such as income equality and the failure of the middle class to gain anything from the income growth of the Bush years, even before the meltdown.

About the future of Frum's new website and movement I have no prediction. I confess to know nothing about Frum's stable of opinioners and journalists or whence they have been rounded up. Frum has closed it up at NR and it looks like he's going to be prolific here so the site will always be worth looking at for that alone. Skimming the titles and summaries of the hefty pile of opinion pieces in the first week there might be some danger that the website become something of a nest of social liberals, malcontents and defeatists. In the worst case scenario Frum could be written off as someone who's "gone over to the liberals", and marginalized and ignored.

But I'm wishing the New Majority good health. A lot of the next 4 years is going to be a defensive trench war. It's nice to have someone thinking about new weapons for when we can go on the offensive again.

Fence and Wall Infrastructure

2009-01-19T21:16:00.001-05:00

It seems the greens, the unions, the left interest groups have a terrible problem. Asked to come up for ideas for stuff that the President-elect can blow money on, not even all their ingenuity can help them come up with enough projects that can with any plausibility be considered as economic stimulus ramping up jobs and economic demand in anything like the near future. The greens have looked hard but even they cannot come up with their share of the swag. The governors and mayors don't have enough highways, bridges and tunnels, or even mobster museums and waterslides and to blow on the shovel-ready cash that is soon to be heaped on them.

But I have an idea. Highways, tunnels, and bridges — they create construction jobs, jobs that aren't there because the private sector isn't building anything. Well let's think: what other kinds of things can be constructed? Well...hydro poles maybe. Barns and rail tracks and baseball fields.... Hey fences and walls! Like for example the border fence that would allow the U.S. to regain control of its borders but which the Left say can't be done, among other reasons because it costs a zillion dollars and would take forever to complete. Well those are features, not bugs now. We're in a state of economic emergency now and need stuff to spend money on. Many of the plans have already made and could be proceeded with pedal to the floor once those annoying environmental impact studies are thrown overboard in this time of emergency. Now we can make this a national priority and get construction going 24/7.

And the President-elect wants immigration reform. The whole package won't be ready till next year, if ever, but here's a great start — a sign of good faith to those cynical Republicans who do not believe that Democrats really want border control, despite protestations to the contrary. Obama is said to want 80 Senate votes for this package and serious acceleration of border fencing might bring over a few GOP waverers. And an all-out effort at border control would convince many Republicans that giving illegal immigrants a break is acceptable, that for the first time the promise "this is the last amnesty" would be fulfilled.

There's been dispute in the past about how much a border fence would cost. Some say something like $5 billion, opponents say more like $50 billion. But now who cares? The more the better. Where there's dispute what kind of fence should be built, let's get going on both of them.

Barack Obama says he's in favour of border control. Some people don't believe him. The GOP should jump in with ideas, which Obama has solicited, and with amendments to the stimulus package that get this fence going on a priority basis.

Well if you seriously want construction jobs and stimulus I'm just saying....

Artificial Stimulation

2009-01-09T11:42:00.005-05:00

It's frigid winter in Canada but happily whatever bleak near-Arctic conditions that led to Prime Minister Harper's brain freeze in December seem to have abated. The provocative and disingenuous economic statement issued by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in December looked to be the biggest political blunder since the accursed regime of Joe Clark. But the evidence is that the master tactician Stephen Harper that we used to know has retaken occupation of his body. There's evidence of that in the Prime Minister's interview with Maclean's which deserves a close reading.

The Conservative Party's current danger is that if this recession turns out to be severe enough to cause people to start using the D-word, there are only two roles cast for the governing party to audition for: Saviour Of The People Who Protected The Average Canadian and Cold-Hearted Bastard Who Let The Country Go To Hell To Let Big Business Make More Money. F.D.R. or Herbert Hoover. R. B. Bennett starred in the latter role, while Mackenzie King, being very versatile, got to play both parts, the latter in 1929-30, and the former 1935-on.

In order to avoid being cast as the villain in this morality play, the Conservatives need some method acting. They must think, react, and act as if they were people who genuinely believe that a giant "economic stimulus" is what is needed to ameliorate this recession. This is made difficult by the fact that our conservative comrades to the south of the border are vigourously decrying, by radio, television, Internet and all manner of printed word, the uselessness and inefficacy of Barack Obama's forthcoming stimulus program, plus the evidence that FDR's New Deal did nothing to end the Depression and probably exacerbated it. Not to mention the humongous resultant deficits of a huge stimulant injection, which have led Michelle Malkin to name the promised legislation the Intergenerational Theft Act.

Stephen Harper seems to realize the Conservatives' position. From the Macleans interview:

A...I still think the underlying reality is that Canada enters this recession in a pretty strong position compared to most Western industrialized countries. We're entering the recession later; all the indications are it will not be as deep here and we should be able to come out of it sooner. If you look around the world at what other countries are now doing, they're things that Canada did over a year, year and a half ago, particularly some of the big tax reductions they're talking about in the United States, and the sales tax cuts that Prime Minister Brown has bought in Britain.
Q: So why do we need all this stimulus spending, and $30-billion deficits, if we'll be able to ride this out in six months?
A: Well, the reality is that the situation is, notwithstanding all of that, still worse than forecasters were indicating three, four months ago, and we've got to make sure we don't have a deep and prolonged drop in economic activity. So in our judgment, that is going to require fiscal stimulus. Obviously large-scale spending and deficits—even short-term deficits—are not something I particularly relish.
Q: Then why do them?
A: They are what is necessary for the economy now.

Do you sense a certain coherence and conviction in this defence? "They are what is necessary for the economy now" -- not a stirring call to action, is it. Not something likely to win over skeptics and disbelievers, were there to be any. But in his position the Prime Minister unfortunately cannot let himself be fully candid. Later in the interview Harper reminds us that his survival in the last election, despite an economic meltdown in the middle of it, is something of a marvel itself. And now the stimulus package is necessary to avoid a "deep and prolonged drop" not in "economic activity" but in "the Conservative Party's standing in the polls."
There's a chess game going on now between Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff and the two are circling each other warily. (Wait -- that's before a boxing match isn't it. Anyway....) Stephen Harper wants to avoid being defeated over the budget because of the possibility that the G-G will deny him a dissolution and the Liberals will take over (probably renouncing any full coalition with the NDP) and never be crowbarred out of power. And another election doesn't look like much fun either even though the Tories are ahead in the polls. So there will be money for infrastructure, both for "shovel-ready" projects and longer term enterprises. (At a minimum the Conservatives can serve the country be ensuring that infrastructure money goes for genuine infrastructure projects, not fixing roofs of municipal hockey rinks in Liberal-held ridings, where a lot of Jean Chretien's "infrastructure" money seemed to end up.) There will be tax cuts, skewed at least somewhat toward the lower and middle classes, despite the evidence that in times like these tax savings are used to reduce debt or saved and not for stimulative spending. And there will be at least some changes to EI to evidence specific concern for the unemployed. (The Government could do worse than to take the Grits' advice and eliminate the two-week waiting period between unemployment and eligibility for EI benefits. That has always struck be as one of the most purposeless and illogical features of welfare policy.) It seems uncertain what Ignatieff's designs are, although the tea leaves seem to say that he is not anxious to take a chance at doing anything that might trigger an immediate election.
Harper's moves may have helped him to recover from the seeming disaster of the December economic statement. His stated plans to avoid making secondary legislation matters of confidence may indicate a desire for a Commons that is stable at least into the fall. But now he must face the consequences of compromise: if the government must budget like Liberals to survive, and must allow the Left to defeat conservative measures without risking dissolution, what do conservatives actually get out of being in government at all? I guess we do have to wait for the budget and Ignatieff's reaction before planning our moves too far ahead. It would be nice if we could be sure that Harper the Chess Master is back in full control of himself again.

"Who is ‘We", Paleface?"

2008-12-12T09:32:00.005-05:00

Generous as I am, I was inclined to give Colin Powell a pass when he broke ranks in September and endorsed Barack Obama for President. Sure it was a little disappointing to have to suspect that Gen. Powell was just another "race man" whose race is more important to him than his principles and loyalties. But considering the special circumstances of the race I was willing to cut him a break. Besides he had a genuine, even legitimate beef with the way he had been treated as a front man for the Bush Administration's Iraq policies, and John McCain had been even more bellicose than Bush.

But this liberality was implicitly conditioned on Powell's recognizing what conservatives had but discreetly avoided saying: that Powell's betrayal was understandable because he has always been a social liberal, in domestic matters a natural Democrat. On every social issue important to conservatives, Powell has been on the wrong side: abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage, criminal justice, and of course affirmative action, of which he has been such a conspicuous beneficiary. The tacit deal with Powell was: we'll be fairly quiet about this betrayal, so long as you stop representing yourself as a conservative and Republican, and especially stop lecturing us on our faults in a tone suggesting that you are a brother and colleague. You aren't.

Well General Powell didn't get the memo. He's out there pontificating again about what we Republicans did wrong and what we Republicans need to do to win elections in the future. As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, "Who is ‘We', paleface?"

What's striking about Powell's analysis is its utter vacuity. He accuses the GOP of attempting to "use polarization for political advantage" in the last campaign. This after a campaign ostentatious in its avoidance of anything that could be remotely considered as racially polarizing, to the extent of declaring Barack Obama's protégé-mentor relationship with the racialist firebrand the Rev. Jeremiah Wright off limits. While Obama used class war rhetoric as an instrument of polarization, ot was only late in the campaign that the GOP seriously tried to divide people even on the issues, something that should be permissible even "for political advantage".

Why is it no surprise that in the GOP's ongoing ideological Wrestlemania Powell wants to play the role of hero of ethnic minorities:

"...if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the minority."
Powell ... said the GOP must see what is in the "hearts and minds" of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters "and not just try to influence them by… the principles and dogma."

This after an Administration which had made wooing Hispanics one of its main political goals, whose encouragement of mortgage lending to Hispanics to buy houses they couldn't afford was a major contributor to the subprime mortgage crisis. After the party nominated John McCain, whose one-time pro-amnesty stand was supposed to make him the Republican most acceptable to Hispanics. Does Powell really think that anything the GOP could do would have made significant inroads on the Democratic black block vote? Powell might have been more specific in advising the GOP how to read minority hearts and minds so as to appeal to them without enunciating any political principles and dogma. Perhaps the idea is to nominate candidates who appear leaderly and charismatic while being devoid of substance -- people like General Powell himself?

The interviewer should have asked General Powell if he would have taken strategic advice from someone who betrayed his comrades and went over to the other side during a battle. Here's my first official piece of advice to the Republican Party: do not take the advice of people like Colin Powell. If you find yourself doing anything they have recommended, check and double check your premises.

Turning Gold Into Bronze

2008-12-01T09:16:00.004-05:00

The Prime Minister has long been acknowledged as a political wizard capable of transmuting the political elements, and he still is. He has now performed the feat of turning gold into bronze. Only he could put some backbone into a caucus as timid and enervated as the Liberals, only he could unite the three motley opposition parties in an enterprise requiring initiative, cooperation and trust. What is still inexplicable to me is how an entire government could commit hara-kiri, sitting back contentedly listening to a speech guaranteed to lead to its humiliation and defeat

Within 30 minutes of hearing the economic update I had been able to figure out its likely consequences. The removal of funding would force the opposition parties to do whatever they could to prevent it. Even a timid animal will fight when cornered, and the opposition parties were faced with losing two-thirds of their income. If your boss told you that your salary was being cut by two-thirds starting in the new year, and you had some way to get him fired before he could implement it, wouldn't you take it? So the opposition parties would have to unite to defeat this, no matter what else was contained in the same legislative package. And since they would be expressing non-confidence by defeating this measure, why not go the whole way and toss the Tories out of power? The majority opinion of constitutional experts would be (the Opposition parties would calculate) that the Governor General would refuse any request by the Prime Minister for a dissolution so soon after the next election; she would call on the leader of the second largest party and ask him whether he could form a government that would have the confidence of the House. That is a window of opportunity that eventually would close. After the government had been in power for a year or so the G-G would assent to a dissolution request — so the time to act had to be now. As Liberal strategist Scott Reid has explained so eloquently , once the Opposition attacks the King they must kill him. There is no public support for subsidies to political parties, so the Opposition needed a pretext to oppose the Government so strenuously, and one is readily available, in the failure of the Government to proceed immediately with a massive economic stimulus. Once the parties overcame their initial ingrained resistance to working together and defeating the government so early, the movement toward a coalition would take on a life of its own. Even if the Government recanted the funding threat, it would be too late to stop the coup. The Opposition parties could hardly back down because their funding was restored, because it would discredit their story that the whole thing isn't about funding in the first place.

If I could figure all this out immediately, where were Guy Giorno, Jim Flaherty, and Stephen Harper?

So where do we go now? The public campaign to arouse the public against this move will be a damp squib. Conservatives making their case are going to receive rough questioning from the media, and understandably so because they have been forced by their leaders to assert things that are, at a minimum, obviously disingenuous. As I type this, Heather Hiscox of CBC Newsworld is interrogating Pierre Poilievre in a voice dripping with contempt. And Poilievre asked for it, with ludicrous assertions such as that the GST cut enacted last year was a fiscal stimulus that would help the current situation. The opposition parties have concocted a plan to take power. So what? That's what political parties do — seek power.

The rumoured prologue of the Commons would seem to be the right idea. If there is a defeat it must come on the budget, not a non-confidence motion. And the budget must be a spectacular one, since it's the last one the Conservatives may be introducing for a long time. I suppose the crucial question must be whether to include a major fiscal stimulus or not. I have argued before that the Government had to go with a big stimulus, whether it's sound economically or not, to avoid being put in the position of looking uncaring about people's economic anxieties, of Harper's becoming an R. B. Bennett or Herbert Hoover, consigning the Tories to obscurity for two or three decades. Those who reject this as contrary to conservative principles will make their case too.

When the G-G refuses the Prime Minister an election, the Tories will try to make this a new King-Byng affair and foment public outrage. I don't think this will work. In any case the new government will be a stable one, and after two-and-a- half years the next election will be about the new government's record, not the niceties of constitutional conventions.

The sad thing is that the Tories may be down to one out. It is that the economy takes a disastrous turn after the new government takes over, and it, and Michael Ignatieff, end up getting the blame.

When the dust settles, I imagine Stephen Harper will be able to stay on. My fingers are pointing at Flaherty and Giorno. There was much good in the Harris governments in Ontario, but there was in it a thuggish, brutish element, and just as bad, its people usually had a political tin ear. People who fit that description need to be kept out of important positions.

Libertarians or Libertines?

2008-11-24T14:41:00.006-05:00

David Boaz of the Cato Institute takes on folks questioning whether there can be a political alignment when self-professed conservatives so outnumber liberals in the electorate, calling the liberal/moderate/conservative spectrum a "crude and one-dimensional view of the political spectrum". Libertarians, you see, don't fit within any one of those categories; in the Cato Institute's preferred formulation libertarians are "fiscally conservative and socially liberal". Wait a second, David. Didn't you just tell us that the liberal/conservative distinction was crude and one-dimensional? How does it suddenly become more sophisticated when it is applied to the whole grand tableau of social policy? The fact is that principled libertarians do not find themselves wholly on either side of the social liberal/conservative divide. Yes, on abortion and drugs libertarians find themselves aligned against conservatives. But as Matt Barnum notes:

On the other hand, conservatives and libertarians find themselves aligned on matters such as gun control, affirmative action, political speech (i.e. campaign finance reform), environmental regulations, education policy (generally), health regulations (i.e. smoking and fatty food bans), and freedom of association.

Randall Hoven offers a libertarian's defence of social conservatism The American Thinker. Seems he's not afraid of social conservatives when he looks at the agenda of the true liberty killers, the social liberals, and their massive planned expansions of government power.

Now it's up to libertarians to decide how they're going to describe themselves. But this sally from Boaz is just another salvo in the war for the soul of the Republican Party. It's quite understandable that libertarians want to pull the GOP in their direction. And reasonable and practical libertarians are an essential part of any conservative coalition, although the true believers are too ornery to become a permanent part of anything. But why is Boaz hyping the "social liberal" tag for libertarians? Boaz blew the gaff right after the election, when he described the ideal candidate for the future as "a candidate in either party who presented himself as a product of the social freedom of the Sixties and the economic freedom of the Eighties"

Say what? Boaz is expecting the GOP not only to move in the direction of limited government, but to buy into the Zeitgeist of the Sixties. In the culture wars this is a demand not just for surrender, but surrender and betrayal. Libertarians should ask themselves if they want to hitch their wagon to leaders who want to saddle them with an attachment to a culture that is distasteful if not repugnant to people with a conservative bent, when libertarianism as such need not take any position on whether America should be more like 60s San Francisco or 50s TV sitcoms.

Libertarians absolutely have to be respected by fusionists and others as the Republicans pull themselves together and reorganize, all in the midst of what will be a bloody fight to stave off at least the worst elements of Obama's radical agenda. But there is an element of the movement that is libertine, not libertarian, and they will be sabotaging the effort to fuse the various components of the conservative coalition. Innocent flower children as they may look in their bellbottoms and granny glasses, they need to be watched.

Bennett New Deal -- Take Two

2008-11-19T15:19:00.000-05:00

For some reason I found myself looking at the paraphernalia surrounding the ceremonies associated with the Speech from the Throne very differently than I usually do. Ordinarily, by default, I revere the elaborate playacting, the odd rituals performed by sinecure holders with archaic titles, the recitation of formulas dating from century-old conflicts between Commons and the monarch. But not today. Just for a day I experienced the anarchistic stirrings that must be felt by people I usually disdain as just being ignorant of our national heritage because they consider this mummery and mumbo-jumbo as a waste of time. Why? I think it's because I think that we're entering a period like the '30s, where economic dislocation and downward social mobility will lead to middle class discontent with the existing order that will find political expression in wild and unpredictable ways.

Why? The Conservative Party of Canada is facing what may be a critical juncture in its history. The Tories have just enjoyed the rare experience of surviving an apparent economic meltdown occurring right in the midst of an election campaign and living to tell about it. The contours of politics for decades could be shaped by the conventional-wisdom answer to this question: who was responsible for our second Great Depression, and who did something about it? Now this could go either way. If the government is perceived as having bungled its way into a modern readaptation of the Great Depression, Stephen Harper could end up being remembered as a new R. B. Bennett, a cold-hearted miser fixated with adjusting his green eyeshades while the life and hopes of the "ordinary Canadian" life swirl down the drain and we could go through another period in which the Conservatives get to form the government once every half-century or so. If the government is perceived as fighting for the ordinary Jean the Plumber and trying something, however pathetic, to alleviate his plight, it could be rewarded by a grateful electorate like F.D.R. was, no matter that the New Deal not only did not end the Depression but may have lengthened it. Maybe the present situation is too uncertain and fluid to know right now what the government can actually do to look like it's dealing with the crisis with the right mixture of competence, innovation and empathy, but we can't wait too long either.

As for the speech itself, it was pure vanilla all the way. The bland bureaucratese of the language emphasized the sham formality atmosphere of the occasion, a non-event closer to a pre-season exhibition game than a season opener. It would help that when they did come up with a decent metaphor ("As one of our greatest hockey legends has observed, we need "to skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been." ), the G-G didn't botch the delivery.

The government is getting off to the right start by throwing the balanced budget under the bus. The booster shot of a deficit, whether actually being helpful or not, is what the mediacracy, the information classes, expect, and it would be prudent to give it to them.

Was the emphasis on northern development an attempt at channelling John Diefenbaker, reprising his "Northern Vision" of 1958? I guess it's better to copy the Chief than R. B. Bennett.

Regarding empathy and concern for the ordinary Canadian, the words were there:

"Many working-age Canadians are faced with the dual pressure of holding down a job and caring for their family. Increasing numbers of Canadians are taking care of elderly parents while also raising young children. Our Government is committed to supporting working families and helping make ends meet."
But we have yet to hear the music.

Mad Jack Layton is blasting the speech as "timid". That's a charge that could stick, not yet, but eventually....Mansbridge is painting this as presenting a very bleak picture of the future, something that did not really come through as I listened. That's the right approach, though, so long as it's combined with action and optimism. The phrase to be expunged from the glossary is "the fundamentals are strong"....Dion is acceding to the inevitable and will not oppose the speech.

Next act is the economic statement next week. That's when the bell will ring and the prizefight will really begin.

Where's the Rest of Me?

2008-11-04T10:31:00.000-05:00

So said Ronald Reagan as Drake McHugh in Kings Row, the 1942 flick that Reagan thought to be his best performance. That's what GOP leaders will be saying tomorrow morning as they awake to the biggest Democratic win since 1964. The polls all converged yesterday at McCain-Palin behind 7 points or so (or more) and his chances of winning can be estimated at 2%.

For those watching at home, Indiana closes early; with most of the state closing at 6 PM E.T. and the Democrat northwest corner at 7 P.M. If Indiana goes Democrat the race can be called for Obama-Biden right then and there; if Virginia, also closing at 7, goes Dem by more than a point or two the race will likwise be over. If these states are for McCain or close, attention will shift to the 7:30 closers, North Carolina and Ohio; McCain needs both. This race should be over by 8 P.M.

The real race tonight will be the Democrats' fight for a ‘supermajority', the 60 votes needed to break Republican filibuters. 60 isn't as much a magic number as some make out; there's no guarantee that Republicans like Arlin Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins will support GOP filibusters, nor that Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson will vote to break them. But it's an important symbol of Democrat ascendency. To get to 60 the Democrats will need to beat Coleman in Minnesota, a toss-up, and upset one of Mitch McConnell in Kentucky or Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, both early closing states.

To the crystal ball:

President

Obama-Biden 353, McCain-Palin 185

Obama-Biden 52%, McCain-Palin 46%, Oth 2%

Senate

Democrat +7

Close Races -- Dems NH (defeating Sununu), NC (defeating Dole), Oregon (defeating Smith), LA (Landrieu hold)
Reps MN (Coleman), KY (McConnell), GA (Chambliss, after runoff)

House

Dem +23

I've been on a roll on American predictions; in 2006 I had the House exactly right and missed only Virginia in the Senate; in 2004 I got every state right except Iowa, the closest in the nation. I'd say I hope I am wrong this year, except that if I am, it is more likely an Obama sweep, possibly approaching 400 electoral votes than a McCain win, and Dem Senate gains of 10 or so and 30 and more than what I have predicted.

Folks can take one day, Wednesday, to digest the results and mourn; Thursday starts the battle for the soul of American conservatism, likely to be both heart- wrenching and dirty.

"Alright. I know. I'm always wrong. I always have been, ever since I can remember." --as Drake McHugh in KINGS ROW (1942).

Two Minute Drill

2008-10-27T14:48:00.001-04:00

With 7 days left in the campaign McCain-Palin is behind by 7 points. Pundits are obsessively dissecting the red states in which the GOP is trailing and needs to catch up in order to win: Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire, and wondering what secret message from above has led the GOP to continue to try to steal blue Pennsylvania, despite trailing by as much as 10 points there in the polls. But there's no need to be fixated on these states. What McCain needs is a 7 or 8 point national swing; accomplish that and the swing states will follow.

Everyone with the GOP's interests at heart seems to agree that the whole McCain effort, in advertising and public appearances, must concentrate on one or two themes and no more. But there's total disagreement on what those themes should be. This late in the game you have to toss a lot of plays, plays that would be good in different situations, out of the playbook. Let's take a look at the themes that could have been fruitful that McCain has to now discard.

1. William Ayers, Unrepentant Terrorist

Contributors on places like NR Online have been screaming from the stands for McCain to hit harder Obama's associations with William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist now occupied with trying to turn the public schools into teachers of socialist revolution. Obama's judgment in allowing Ayers to host a meeting for his campaign is indeed open to question. But McCain has already hit this in the debates, to the displeasure of the wired-up "independents" in the network focus groups.

2. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Race Baiter and America Hater

Out of an excess of delicacy McCain declared Obama's inspiration, mentor and long-time pastor out of bounds. It's too late to reverse course now; it would be slammed as a desperate act of race-baiting. Personally what I found most appalling about the Obamas' participation in this congregation is his bringing his 6 and 9 year daughters to this school of America hatred and race animosity. I'm hoping that they were safely ensconced in Sunday School during the Rev. Wright's rants.

3. Joe the Plumber
The McCain people felt they had a winning issue with Joe the Plumber. Instead what they have done is expose the weakness of a tactic the Republicans have successfully employed for 30 years: Working and middle class voters accepted lower tax rates on the rich following a principle of fairness, that everybody should get the same percentage tax reduction. Joe the Plumber brought to public attention a conflicting principle of fairness: working and middle class voters do not really oppose the idea of making people who earn more than $250K paying higher percentage tax rates, when the issue is framed that way. As John Dickerson has noted McCain was 4 points ahead of Obama a month ago on being "better on taxes"; now he's 14 points behind. Invocation of Joe the Plumber has backfired.

4. Experience and Maturity
Everyone knows that McCain is old as dirt and has been in politics forever. Those who are impressed by this are already on side. Obama, like Ronald Reagan, passed the looks-like-a-president test in the debates and can't be taken down on this issue now.

5. Terrorism and Iraq
After Obama's bellicose interest in invading Pakistan was expressed in the debates, the traditional GOP edge on this issue has slipped to 6 points. But this isn't a bad issue; it's just not a major concern of the public right now.

There's two plays McCain and Palin need to use to go for the upset next Tuesday:

1. DRAW THE TERRIFYING PICTURE OF TOTAL DEMOCRATIC CONTROL

The polls do show an opening here. People do not like the idea of the absolute rule of President Obama and two Democratic houses of congress. An advantage of this tactic is that it can be accomplished without seeming to go negative on Obama personally, something that's hurt McCain severely already. The GOP needs to push in the viewing audience's faces every wild and wacky pet idea of every left winger likely to wield power in the next Congress. There's a genuine moral duty to be performed here: the electorate needs to know that an Obama presidency with a Democratic House and filibuster-proof Senate could change America in a way they may not be expecting, may not like and which may be impossible to reverse.

BTW he adjective to use on the Democrats is not "socialist", which is not quite believable and sounds desperate, nor "liberal" which no longer packs enough of a punch. The word to use is "radical", which is scary enough for the present purposes and has the advantage of being incontrovertibly true.

Oh and every GOP Senate candidate in trouble should be using this argument too, as Elizabeth Dole is doing in North Carolina and Norm Coleman is doing in Minnesota.

2. SHOW THAT ONLY JOHN MCCAIN CAN BE TRUSTED TO FIX AND MAINTAIN THE ECONOMY

The economy is the most important issue for over half the population, and those who have a preference prefer Obama over McCain by 64% to 36%. John McCain cannot win the election without turning these numbers around.

This is the tricky one, since McCain has no particular expertise on the economy and tends to do confidence-sapping things like ad libbing major economic policies in the midst of a debate. Maybe the themes of experience and proven courage can be worked in here. Maybe he wants to be more specific about what regulation of financial institutions he will recommend to the new Congress. Maybe you want to throw the Hail Mary and warn that incompetent management of the economy in 1929 turned a stock market crash into The Great Depression, and that raised taxes and imposition of tariffs are two of the mistakes that contributed to it. I see on Fox News that McCain has rolled out his economic team today. Maybe that will lead to something.

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Those are the plays. Go to the shotgun, call three plays at a time in the huddle, run out of bounds before being tackled, and John McCain might well cash in on his current 10% chance of winning the election.

But if McCain keeps repeating his same old themes then, as an old pal of Sen. Obama's might say, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

Ontario and Final Total Prediction

2008-10-14T15:06:00.000-04:00

Ontario's volatility was illustrated neatly last week when Strategic Counsel produced an Ontario-only poll for the Globe and Mail and CTV showing the Tories 5 points ahead of the Grits. Wonderful! The next day they published their daily tracking poll; it showed the Grits ahead of the Tories by 6 points. The first poll had a much larger sample and was the more serious one, but it does illustrate what a roller coaster ride this has been. A column I read somewhere today recounted a day when one tracker had the Liberals ahead by 12 while another had the Conservatives ahead by 5.

One thing which must haunt the Tories (it sure haunts me) is that in the last 2 elections the latest polls overstated Conservative Ontario support by a considerable margin. My hypothesis is that this was due to the Tories being perceived as a risk, an alien party, a Western party, something they didn't feel comfortable with. People who were mad at the Liberals decided that they weren't mad enough to take this chance. If I am right the Ontario underperformance effect should not exist in this election. Love them or hate them, the Tories are now a known quantity; buyers know the product they will be getting. (Hence the Liberals' efforts to persuade people that the Tories have a "hidden agenda', a nightmare of depravity to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public as soon as they won a majority.)

The economic meltdown caused a drop in Tory support that probably put the Liberals ahead by 7 a week or so ago. There is no doubt they have recovered, the question is how much. There seems to be something of a late consensus; the Conservatives leading by 2. That is a 7 point swing from last time, and should produce a larger Tory seat margin than one would ordinarily expect because of the large number of wasted votes the Liberals amass piling up huge margins in metro Toronto. So I will go ahead and take the chance of overpredicting Ontario support for the third successive election. The distance between L and NDP support has dropped dramatically, allowing some Dipper pickups as well. The large-sample Strategic Counsel poll showed the NDP with a big lead over the Liberals in northern Ontario. If the tales of northern NDP gains are true, the Grits could be in for an unpleasant shock in Ontario.

C GAIN FROM LIB (11): BRANT, GUELPH, HALTON, HURON-BRUCE, LONDON WEST, MISSISSAUGA-ERINDALE, MISSISSAUGA SOUTH, NEWMARKET-AURORA, OAK RIDGES-MARKHAM, OAKVILLE , THORNHILL

L GAIN FROM C (1) MISSISSAUGA-STREETSVILLE (where Wajid Khan switched parties)

NDP GAIN FROM L (5): ALGOMA-MANITOULIN-KAPUSKASING, BEACHES-EAST YORK, KENORA, SUDBURY, THUNDER BAY-RAINY RIVER

NDP GAIN FROM C (1) THUNDER BAY-SUPERIOR NORTH

That all adds up to this;

%: C 36, L 34, NDP 22, G 9

SEATS: C 48, L 38, NDP 20
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Adding up it comes to this:

CANADA:

% C 35, L 28, NDP 20, BQ 10, G 7

SEATS: C 133, L 82, BQ 51, NDP 40, IND 2

Let's hope I turn out to be a pessimist. By, say, 22 seats.

In The Boonies: Predictions for Everywhere Else but Ontario

2008-10-14T13:58:00.000-04:00

Alberta

NO CHANGE

Manitoba

ST. BONIFACE (C Gain from L) (EPP says L) Hard to imagine this riding with its solid French component leaving the Grits; but the regional C trend (+6 against the Ls), a strong C campaign, and Winnipeg Free Press polls suggest a swing here in a close race.

WINNIPEG SOUTH CENTRE (L Hold) Weak NDP campaign saves incumbent Grit minister.

Saskatchewan

NO CHANGE (Small pro-NDP trend not enough to unseat Tories in Desnethé-Missinippi-Churchill River or Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar)

Quebec
I will not go seat-by-seat here, saving it for my sister French publication, whose name and URL I don't recall at the moment.
Before looking at the polls I had been terrified by reports of total collapse in the C vote in Quebec and a Bloc sweep of Biblical proportions. A look at the final polls from 6 sources tell a different story. You know where the Bloc are compared to their % total in 2006? Down a point. The Tories are down 4 points, that's true. (The Grits are even, with the 5 points lost by the BQ and Cs going to the NDP and G). Unless there is some strange distribution of votes where the Conservatives are increasing their vote disproportionately in ridings where they have no hope, the ominous warnings of people like Chantal Hebert that the Tories had only 2 safe seats in the province can be ignored.) I think they can be ignored, although the tendency of Quebec late trends to magnify on voting day can't be ignored.
% BQ 42 L 21 C 21 NDP 11 G 5

Seats: BQ 51 L 14 C 8 NDP 1 IND 1

Newfoundland
ST . JOHN'S EAST (NDP GAIN from C)
ST. JOHN'S SOUTH-MOUNT PEARL (L GAIN from C) Imagine that: the Grits taking a riding away from the Tories today. I guess every dog has his day.
AVALON (C Hold) Fabian manning barely holds off clean sweep for Williams' ABC campaign.

New Brunswick

NO CHANGE (Either regional trends, incumbency/repeat candidates or other factors seem to be tending to the support of every incumbent party under challenge here. FREDERICTON going C would be a pleasant surprise.)
Nova Scotia

SOUTH SHORE-ST. MARGARET'S (NDP GAIN from C) (Atlantic polls are difficult to interpret because of small samples, but the NDP should pick up another seat somewhere; I'll pick this one.)

Prince Edward Island

NO CHANGE (Only opportunity where incumbent L retiring)

NEXT: The province where all the volatility has been in the last week, Ontario.
And then we add it all up.

Fantastic Finishes? B.C. Predictions

2008-10-14T00:48:00.000-04:00

With staggered voting times across the country we in Ontario no longer have to wait until midnight to find out what's going on in La-La-Land North. And the odds that B.C. will make a difference between the 3 possible results: C Minority (96%), C Majority (4%), and L Minority (well, closer to 0% than 1 % but still worth mentioning) are small. Nevertheless this now inaptly named province contains some of the most interesting 3-way races in the country, plus the most determinative resolution of how many Greens will opt for tactical voting to defeat the Tories as they realize they have no chance to win a seat.

The polling results here for the Conservatives have been fairly stable throughout the campaign. The Grits started out disastrously but seem to have been recovering in the last 2 weeks. That plus some good breaks have saved them from a situation seemingly possible not long ago in which they could have been wiped out entirely.

I'll note areas where the vastly overrated Election Prediction project disagrees.... Let us cut to the chase:

BRITISH COLUMBIA:

C 40 NDP 26 L 23 G 11

C 22 NDP 9 L 5

CHANGES:

ESQUIMALT-JUAN DE FUCA: C GAIN from L (EPP says L: Keith Martin to prove not as popular as he thinks; will be close)

NEWTON-NORTH DELTA:: C GAIN from L (EPP says L; with Cs appealing to the ethnic vote, no reason they should be able to resist the swing here.)

RICHMOND: C GAIN from L: (outside Vancouver and Victoria, Ls should lose the close ones)

SURREY NORTH: C GAIN FROM NDP: (Dona Cadman C candidate here)

VANCOUVER KINGSWAY: L GAIN from C: (Not a real C loss as this was David Emerson's riding; could be close L/NDP battle, late L resurgence should win it)

VANCOUVER ISLAND NORTH: C Gain from NDP: (Easy; provincial swing restores former incumbent);
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OTHER INTERESTING RIDINGS:

NORTH VANCOUVER: L HOLD; (EPP says C gain from L) (For the uninitiated, not the same as VANCOUVER ISLAND NORTH. (Could go C, but late L resurgence in greater Vancouver saves popular incumbent.)

SAANICH AND THE GULF ISLANDS: C HOLD (EPP says L gain from C) (The most interesting riding in the whole country. The NDP had to withdraw after exposing his platform before a bunch of teenagers — but he's still on the ballot; how many people will vote for him. The Liberal, Briony Penn is a former Green supporter who did a well known Lady Godiva routine in Vancouver a few years ago to protest some kind of cutting of forests. The Green candidate, Andrew Lewis, ran last time and got 10% of the vote, and the Greens there are reportedly bitter at Penn's defection to the Liberals. A strong campaign has been waged urging voters to vote tactically and support Penn, one effective enough to cause both the C and G candidates to lodge complaints with whoever will listen.

The key here is the assumption by some that all NDP voters realizing their candidate is out will vote L or G. That is not true anywhere, and especially in British Columbia. A significant proportion of NDP supporters have Cs as their second choice. It only needs to be as high as 25% for the Cs to hold the seat. Considering the C strength in BC, incumbent Gary Lunn, who as far as I know has never felt compelled to strip publicly for purposes either good or evil, should be able to hold on — by a margin smaller than the number of voters who cast their votes for the withdrawn NDP.

NEXT: The Prairies

Freak Show aka TownHall: McCain/Obama Pre-Game

2008-10-07T16:57:00.000-04:00

Towmhalls are supposed to be McCain's forte; his forensic forum of advantage. The economy will dominate here, which is supposed to be McCain's weakness. He needs to neutralize that weakness to have any hope of winning the election. The Republicans have somehow managed to get themselves blamed both for the financial meltdown we're experiencing, as well as for the bailout needed to pull us out of it.

As John Dickerson pointed out in Slate, Town hall Forums can go very very wrong. It was in 1992 that Ponytail Guy showed up with his odd and disquieting question that annoyed Bush but which Clinton took as an opportunity to display his empathy, compassion, and love of clean politics. The voters able to ask questions at these town halls are scrupulously vetted as non-partisans -- meaning every partisan in Tennessee has been polishing their acting skills before applying to get in on Tuesday night.

This week the GOP has been trying to play up Sen. Barack Obama's ties to unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and black nationalist former pastor Jeremiah Wright. This isn't the night when McCain would really like to see these issues stressed. There's more important things to do Tuesday night. And it would be disadvantageous for McCain to be forced into repeating his desire to disavow Wright as an issue -- because national and state committees are very likely to be bringing it up in upcoming weeks.

Only a man with experience can pull us out of the mess we're in -- that's the message. Obama's not experienced enough to handle something we've never seen before. McCain's lead over Obama on the question "Who Is A Strong Leader?" has narrowed by 19 points in the last month. Specifics will be needed -- what is McCain going to do for the average guy who is hurting, with no sympathy whatsoever shown for the Bear Stearnses of the world. Specifics, specifics, and more specifics. Obama's making massive ad buys claiming McCain has no economic plan. (And just what is McCain's economic plan anyway?) That spending freeze McCain extemporized last time out needs to be returned to the mental recesses from which it sprang. It may be that the traditional GOP message of tax cuts and economic stimulation is no longer enough.

And no grumpiness. With some questionable cases to be considered, the best predictor of presidential elections since Nixon has been the candidates' likability.

As for Obama? Needs nothing more to be cool, attack Wall Street, and avoid making a disastrous gaffe. And avoid leaving the impression that he has wild spending plans that risk turning a bad situation into an irresolvable disaster.

On The Cusp: State of the Canadian Race 29/09

2008-09-29T19:34:00.000-04:00

This is a look at the state of the race in Canada's General Election judged by the polls as we enter the week of the leaders' debates, with particular attention to the prospects of a majority government.

The first hypothesis is that in using the polls to estimate the Conservatives' chances of a majority government, the Green vote can be ignored entirely. It can be subtracted from the total and the results reallocated among the 3 major parties. The Greens will win at most a handful of seats, their strength is a nuisance to the Liberals and the NDP, and the nature of their demographic appeal can affect Liberal/NDP races. But the number of seats the Conservatives will win in a given region is best predicted by comparing their poll standing with only the other parties likely to win seats. That's why people who talk about a supposed "40% threshold" for a majority government are wrong. As support for minor parties who are not going to win seats goes higher, the threshold percentage of the total popular vote needed to win a majority becomes lower.

We'll look first at most up to date national poll numbers -- all with the Green vote (and those of other 6th parties) being removed. In surveys which leave undecideds out of the party totals we will assume that they will break in the same proportions as decided voters. The dates are the dates that the polls were taken, where that can be determined. We will call these numbers the Toral-adjusted totals.

Nanos Research C 40 L 28 NDP 22 BQ 11 (Sept. 26-28)
Harris-Decima C 41 L 29 NDP 21 BQ 9 (Sept. 25-28)
Ekos Research C 38 L 29 NDP 22 BQ 11 (Sept. 25-28)
Angus Reid/Toronto Star C 43 L 23 NDP 23 BQ 11 (Sept. 25)

The next complication is that the Bloc will be highly effective in turning its votes into seats, because of the concentration of its vote. Let's give the Bloc 40 seats for the purpose of this exercise. Are these majority government numbers for the Tories? The Tory numbers are more impressive than they look because of the size of the differential between the Conservatives and their closest challengers. All the numbers except those of Ekos Research would suggest a Tory majority government; Ekos would have them right on the cusp. Perhaps this may explain some of Prime Minister Harper's recent willingness to come out and ask for a majority government, where he had previously been trying to dispel fear that one might happen. They're assured enough of at least a minority, and just uncertain enough about the possibility of a majority, that the time may have seemed right to stop pretending that they didn't want anything for Christmas and come out and ask for what they want.

McCain Vs. Obama, Part One

2008-09-26T23:22:00.000-04:00

9:06...Lehrer in the tank already as he ignores the supposed theme of the evening, foreign policy, and leads off with a "financial crisis" question...allowing Obama to advertise his love for the ordinary American, and an unaccustomed concern that taxpayers get value for what they are paying....I've switched from Fox to CNN, which all in all has a more interesting bunch of commentators. They have a neat Audience Reaction meter which tracks the approvan of Democrats, Independents and Republicans...McCain shows himself equally supple in reducing the crisis to the currentproblems of the ordinary person on Main St., which are apparently more important than the possibility of the world financial system collapsing.

9:12 Obama skilfully expounds on the question what he thinks of the bailout without even a pretense of answering it. McCain finds an excuse to tell the old Eisenhower two-letter story, about the letter Eisenhower wrote in advance of D-Day taking full responsibility for the its failure had it occurred, but he blows it, not giving enough detail for people who don't already know the story to understand what he's talking about. It's a very poignant story if you tell it right. He emphasizes that he warned of these disasters in advance, and his demand for future accountability. AR heads way up on "accountability". Survived that question well enough I think.

9:15 These "people who live on Main Street" must be living in indescribable misery. The whole brunt of this crisis seem to have fallen on them.... Both candidates look like they are wisely going to ignore Lehrer's questions entirely and make whatever points they had planned to no matter what the question is....Obama looks defensive on earmarks. He may be startled to find him being out-populisted by a Republican....McCain's arm motions look stiff and awkward. The Republicans need to make sure every voter knows that this is because of the injuries he suffered as a POW. Perhaps he could start appearing in braces slings and bandages....On CNN's audience meter, independent approval of McCain jumps as he talks about his vote against the bill festooned with benefits for oil companies....Obama is asked what he will give up in terms of spending, and ignores the question entirely, instead giving his laundry list of things on which there needs to be more spending. Oh I beg your pardon. He will end unspecified "programs that don't work"....Whoops there goes Iowa for good. McCain calls for ending ethanol subsidies again....Spending freeze? Where did that come from? Is McCain making policy on the fly again? There will be lots of opportunities for Democrats to hit McCain on that all campaign long. John McCain -- wants to freeze spending on preventing childhood deaths...Huge gap on the AR meter as McCain talks about not letting the federal government run health care. Independent line moving up, moving closer to the Republicans.

9:42 Now we get into the meat. What are the lessons of Iraq? Oh oh...independent reaction bad as McCain talks about Iraq. And the Independents like Obama talking about he was against the war from the start. If Obama mentions his plan to get out on a deadline, McCain's response could decide the campaign...McCain is strong in saying that what's important about Iraq are the decisions that will be made in the future, not those made in the past....Obama's now stressing his 16-month deadline. Audience reaction good from both parties. And it slumps when McCain responds by talking about the successes of General Petreaus. I have long thought that despite the recent successes in Iraq, McCain's refusal to provide a deadline for getting out could cost him the campaign.

9:56 McCain slaughters Obama on Pakistan. I just hope the people listening can understand that it's not a good idea to start invading friendly regimes whose problem is their difficulty of controlling thir anti-American elements...Is Obama being effective dwelling so long on McCain's supposed errors about Afghanistan? I'm not sure people are going to understand his argument, and if the audience can't really understand the nature of a disagreement between the two, their default position, in foreign affairs, will be that McCain is right.

10:06 On to Iran...McCain wants "no second Holocaust". That should help fundraising in New York City....McCain starting to tire around 10:12, starting to stumble a bit. Obama's defense of direct diplomacy may or may not sell completely, but he's succeeding in sounding presidential. The Dem Ind and Rep approval lines on the AR meter are running almost even.

10:22 Obama is trying to look restrained and thoughtful as McCain gives him Hell on Georgia, but to me he looks more like a chastened schoolboy. McCain now reenergized...powerfully conveying outrage at the naivete of Obama's views...Weird coincidence of the day. McCain and Obama argue about who knows the difference between "strategy" and tactics". You know who doesn't understand that difference? Me. I was looking at Wikipedia today to try to figure it out.

10:31 McCain not so dumb as to try to actually estimate the likelihood of another 9/11 attack. If you say "high" you encourage panic and suggest the Republicans haven't been dealing adequately with the danger; if you say "low" you suggest the government's domestic security meaures may be unduly harsh and that all the hullaballoo about security is unncecesary.

10:36 The debate is fading, and people are losing interest. Or maybe it's just me.

MY VERDICT: A narrow McCain win, with Obama able to be satisfied that he held his own in the debate on his weakest area. As Rich Lowry stated on NRO, McCain was the aggressor on foreign policy, but Obama counterpunched adequately enough.
The polls on this debate will be important though, because if either candidate has a small 5% advantage on the question "Who won?", the popular wisdom will become that that candidate won, and 2 weeks from now the notion that that guy won will become the overwhelming consensus.

Elephants on the March -- Thursday at the RNC

2008-09-03T23:38:00.001-04:00

Some thoughts on the go about the most important night of the Republican convention.

Meg Whitman, former EBay Chairman, a billionnaire, sometimes mentioned as a potential vice presidential candidate, speaking about the economy, gives the impression that in a debate she could buy and sell Joe Biden and make a profit on both ends. Carly Fiorina gives the same impression with an added political touch. I like CNN's countdown box on the lower right corner of the screen -- counting the minutes and seconds till Palin's speech as if was a liftoff into space.

I have never felt any kind of emotional connection when listening to Mitt Romney. He's a business conservative who only seemed to be speaking with passion during his presidential campaign when he talked about his grandiose plans for rejuvenating the auto industry in Michigan. On social issues, I thought it out and conjecture that his so frequent changes in belief were not because of insincerity, but because he treated his position on them as a product that he as a businessman was trying to sell. If you are trying to get the public to buy a product, you don't offer for sale the style of widget that you happen to like, do you? No...you offer the style of widget that you think the market wants to buy. And if the people of Massachusetts like different coloured widgets that the people voting in Republican presidential primaries, you offer each group the kind of widget they want.

Having said all that, Mitt sounded like a man who would have been a good vice presidential candidate. Between Mitt, Huck, and Rudy, the Democrats may have had the superstar public speaker in Obama, but the GOP who had the deep bench, and Rudy probably came through better in the clutch even than Obama.

I was hoping that Palin would put the line accepting the nomination of her party at the end of the speech instead of in its traditional place at the beginning. It would have made a great exit line.

From Palin what we were looking for was poise and confidence. As some blogger I cannot remember wrote earlier today, half of getting past the doorman is acting like you belong where you're going. She had established that before the two minute mark had past. The rest is now history. I was hoping for the best, but not expecting the best acceptance speech by a member of a GOP ticket since 1984. I was hoping for three or four memorable or funny lines, not 15 or 20.

Just from hearing Gov. Palin's rollout speech in Dayton I was completely astonished why anyone would assume that Sarah Palin was likely to be demolished by Joe Biden in a debate. If such a demolition is in the Democrats' plans, I would suggest they think again.

Palin as a Girl Thing -- Days 1, 2 and 3

2008-09-02T16:53:00.000-04:00

The choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as GOP vice-presidential nominee should be a potential goldmine for political psychologists, whether academics or political practitioners whose major concern is to determine how the selection of a person from a given demographic will move the polls among downwardly mobile red-haired transexuals in Dubuque. I don't know how quickly academic grant applications can be churned out and approved, but if I were a political psychologist I'd be working every connection I have to find out.

Gov. Palin's inexperience, and solidly social conservative views, in one sense compromise the purity of this Rorschach test. It would, for example, be fascinating to see how feminists' views of the nomination would add up if they did not know of Palin's pro-life position. But we must work with what we have. The Palin nomination's disparate effect on men and women will be worth noting. But the resolution of this question isn't the main attraction; it's just the undercard. We will see different reactions from young, middle-aged, and old women; between working-middle- and upper class women; and between homemakers, women who work because they feel to have to to make a living, and career women. Of special interest will be the reactions of career women who have intentionally limited the size of their families in order to better pursue professional interests; and of those uncounted millions of women in the United States who have had abortions (a group unreachable by polls).

I first sensed that reactions to the nomination were not going to fall within the range I had expected when I read the facial expressions, the body language -- and heard the words -- of professional newsreaders and commentators like Gloria Borger and Cameron Brown on CNN. The not very unspoken subtext of their remarks was that a nominee for the vice presidency should be someone older that Sarah Palin, someone who had sacrificed more than Sarah Palin had, someone who had had to fight harder against the male establishment than Sarah Palin had -- someone, well, more like them. There was a resentment there that seemed to go beyond the quite reasonable point that supporters of Hillary Clinton's agenda could not be expected to do a 180 to support anyone who happened to be a woman.

The best way of following immediate real-time reaction to the choice among conservatives was NROnline. In general the reaction of social conservatives as reported on blogs like NROnline was wildly enthusiastic. NRO Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez -- a fierce Mitt Romney partisan -- was quickly noting that "What's already irritating me though is the suggestion that women will run to her because she's a woman. Pro-life Palin is going to be a hard sell for liberal feminists, even if she has a uterus." That is the theme that we would repeated as often as one could want over the next few days. Shortly thereafter Kathleen Parker, NRO Contributor and author of the influential anti-feminist
Save the Males, was the first to introduce in that forum the issue of the candidate's style and attire: ". Ranging over to more superficial turf, I'd like to suggest a style makeover . . .soonest.". I was not surprised: although women in politics may complain about the attention paid to their makeup and dress, in my experience 90% of the interest, and criticism, on these subjects is from women. The daily comparisons of the colour of Hillary Clinton's pantsuits to the colour of the daily terrorist threat warning was all from women. Parker later posted that her e-mailers were for scratching the makeover; readers liked the "hot librarian" look. it later turned out that Gov. Palin had adopted the up-do and "schoolmarmish glasses" look specifically to ensure that she wasn't taken unseriously because of her gender.

Lisa Schiffren, one time speechwriter for Dan Quayle, was the first I noticed to take up the theme of social class -- one that was to take on more prominence as the first weekend went by:

I love that she is a former union member, married to a member of the Steelworkers Union. Here comes Ohio, and many of those midwest blue collar workers who aren't so comfortable with the idea of the first "community organizer" president. That she is an athlete and a hunter makes the story even better. I bet the Palins paid for their house themselves (and it wasn't any $1.6 million mansion)

The first data came from the Rasmussen Pollreleased Sunday morning. 31% of women said they were more likely to support the Republicans because of the Palin choice, and 41% said they would be less likely. The figures for men were 43% more likely and 34% less likely. Rasmussen noted that the figures were capable of explanation as a simple reflection of the usual gender gap between the parties.

We'll find out more after Gov. Palin gets her chance to speak on Wednesday night.