Beware the sinister menace of Harper:
Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe was first off the mark: "A Stephen Harper majority means the complete denial of what we are, we Québécois. It means new attacks against Québécois culture. A Stephen Harper majority means that our economic interests are completely ignored and that our regions will be even more abandoned." He called on all Quebecers to rally around the flag to prevent the cataclysm of a Conservative majority.
He'll burn the forests! He'll pave the Arctic! He'll order the womenfolk back into the kitchen! The whole of the province of Quebec will be napalmed into submission! If Bush was Hitler then Harper is Hitler and Stalin's evil love child! Hosannah! Hosannah!
Last week in this space I called for another Conservative minority government. The best of bleak alternatives. I'm not carrying any candles for Stephen of Leaside. While reading the above Ottawa Citizen column, however, I was struck by its photograph of a young Stephen Joseph Harper fighting his first campaign in 1988. It's not Stephen on the sign, just Steve. The blue eyes and the mop-top are almost endearing. The future Prime Minister looks like the great young conservative hero of that era, Alex P Keaton.
Whatever youthful Keaton-like spirit might have suffused Harper then, his record in power is some distance from those Reaganite salad days. This does nothing to stop the opposition parties' hysterical denunciations of the Prime Minister. There is that hidden agenda, you know.
They are not really attacking Harper's ideas. The Liberal Party had no qualms about balancing the budget in three years - just as the Harper authored Reform Party manifesto had called for - and taking all the credit for it. Jean Chretien the reckless Trudeau-era Finance Minister became the Great Budget Balancer aided by his sometime side-kick / usual nemesis Paul Martin. Brian Mulroney and Michael Wilson achieving an operational surplus, well that was heartless. A few years later even deeper cuts were written off as wise statesmanship by the centrist team of Chretien and Martin.
In a post last week I decried the empty symbolism of Canadian political discourse. The vilification of the Prime Minister is a prime example. There is little that Stephen Harper has done in government that could not have plausibly been done by a Liberal leader, with the notable exception of a more pro-Israel foreign policy. There is also nothing he has done that justifies the devil-incarnate rhetoric of the opposition parties.
The Harper Tories are the supposed masters of the American-style attack-ad. This dozy informs Canadians that a vote for the Liberal Party is a vote for Michael Ignatieff. Hardly a bombshell revelation to anyone familiar with our parliamentary system. The Cosh dissects the ad here. These attack-ads are described by many in the MSM as something akin to hydrogen bombs. Political instruments of such unimaginable power and devastation that they will destroy Canadian democracy. It'll be nothing but Caudillos and Duces from here on in.
Compared to actual American attack ads they are very tame. More than tame they are also rather funny. The black and white images. The over-the-top ominous music. The somewhat out of context quotes. The repeated insistence that a Coalition is in the offing. You can almost hear the voice-over guy shouting: "Hey stupid! Michael Ignatieff is a nasty bum who hates puppy dogs."
We are told that attack-ads work. Well sort of. They work at reinforcing an already established image type. Stephane Dion was an out-touch and befuddled university professor playing at politics? Check! Michael Ignatieff is a pompous opportunist? Check! Now try imagining an attack-ad that accuses Jack Layton of being in the back-pocket of Bay Street. Not going to work. Short of having Jack on tape sharing a shiraz with Lord Black, while mocking the rank file at the CAW, very little is going to convince voters that he's turned reactionary capitalist.
The main benefit of an attack ad is in its repetition. Keep saying that Michael Ignatieff didn't come back for you and - if you're not paying attention - you'll start believing it. Now Old Publius doesn't believe that Lord Iggy came back for him. He accepts the Tory charge that the Liberal leader is a craven opportunist who looks down on ordinary people with the contempt of the august. He is to the manor born and acts it, occasional pandering to us proles aside.
This belief, however, is derived from some study of Iggy's biography. I doubt one Canadian out of a hundred knows what universities the Liberal leader attended, that he studied under Isaiah Berlin, that he was a leading public intellectual in Britain and is a well regarded fiction writer. It is not the job of the Conservative War Room to advertise their opponents C.V. Saying that Michael Ignatieff didn't come back for ordinary people does nothing, however, to explain what Stephen Harper will do for ordinary Canadians, or perhaps even for the extraordinary ones.
Some of you, gentle readers, will be engaged in the rolling of eyes. "Oh, come on Publius, this isn't the nineteenth century. No one plays politics by the Marquess of Queensberry rules anymore." No, they don't. There are no rules anymore. It's a rush to the lowest common denominator.
The vilification of the Prime Minister on one hand, and the simplification of Michael Ignatieff on the other are symptoms of the same disease. It is an election about nothing in a political environment about nothing. The pressures of globalization, the crisis of demographic decline, Medicare lingering on well past its best before date and all the political class can talk about is Lord Iggy's personal ambition. Not asking for nice here. Just for a little substance with the vitriol.
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