I’ve written before about the Ontario Landowner types, many times. Including in one of my books.
Read here about reason #1,472 why the Ontario PCs made a big, big mistake letting those guys into their tent. The Landowners are unfit for any office, and particularly in the provincial legislature.
Increasingly, it is getting less clear.
The proud residents of Wisconsin probably always thought they were important enough to affect the future of the planet. But, with the greatest of respect, the rest of us didn’t. Last night, however, Wisconsin altered things, quite a bit.
To wit, from my much-beloved NYT:
My impressions:
2016 down there, like 2015 up here, is the year of the outsider. God help you if you are seen as an incumbent.
So what do you think, O Reader?
Okay, stay with me here.
More here.
I’ll let you in on a secret: I kind of know, and kind of like, Brad Wall.
I don’t do business in Saskatchewan in any way, shape or form.
I haven’t helped run, or likely will help run, a campaign there.
My only connection to Saskatchewan, really, is a sister-in-law from there, and a brother-in-law who is still there.
Oh, and Brad Wall.
Brad Wall – who last night was the overwhelming choice of the province as Premier, yet again – is a music fan. One day, he told me about this young guy who, in my view, is amazing. I’ve featured him on this web site more than once, without ever telling you who his Dad is.
Anyway, I’m glad Brad Wall is back in. He’s a good guy and, most importantly, he has pretty good taste in music, familial ties notwithstanding.
Here’s the younger Wall, again. Congrats to his old man.
Children, someone once observed, are the only known form of immortality.
That rarely deters the makers of monuments, the curers of disease, the inventors and discoverers, the authors of books and songs and art: all valiantly attempt, in some small measure, to defy death. But we cannot ever hold mortality’s strong hand (per The Bard). The “undiscover’d country” awaits us all.
Politicians, and political folk, remain mulishly undeterred. They do not ever embrace politics to achieve riches: unless one is a crook, and also very lucky, there really aren’t any riches to be had. They do not do so to be loved: for many, all that lies ahead is hate mail, and the insults of strangers at baggage carousels. They don’t do it for their health, either: plenty of them start drinking too much, exercising too little, and – in a small minority of cases – even smoking crack.
Finally, they don’t succumb to the political life because it will bring them closer to their family. For a disproportionately-large number, politics routinely ends in divorce, and alienated offspring. It is, indeed, an unspeakably lonely life (per Kim Campbell).
So why does any sensible person do it?
Politicos are adrenalin junkies, to be sure. They love to skitter near the razor’s edge that divides exultant victory and crushing defeat. They also are drawn to The Life because it provides a kind of existential clarity: this one won, so he or she is a “hero.” This one lost, so he or she is a “zero.” There is accordingly a zero-sum moral simplicity to election night. Just as there is in, say, sports.
Mostly, however, political people are political because they crave immortality. It is how they think they will be remembered. There is no other rational explanation for their membership in a vocation that too often leaves their finances, their families, and their frame of mind in ruin.
All of this became pertinent the past few days. In the early part of 2016, a lot of music stars seemed to be dying: David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Keith Emerson, Phife Dawg, Lemmy, Vanity, Paul Kantner, George Martin, Frank Sinatra Jr. Lately, though, it seems to be political stars: Nancy Reagan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Don Getty, Marie-Claire Kirkland, Leon Korbee, Jim Hillyer – and, notably, Rob Ford and Jean Lapierre.
All of those sad passings produced a huge outpouring of condolences and remembrances: Getty in Alberta, Hillyer on the Hill, Ford in Toronto, Lapierre in Quebec – and, for some of us, Leon Korbee (because he was such a legitimately wonderful man, and because he is one who truly deserves to be remembered, as both a journalist and a political advisor). Political people were genuinely, deeply upset. To cite just one example, Ford’s death – along with the many other deaths in Brussels – was big enough to completely eclipse the Liberals’ first budget in more than a decade.
The untimely demise of Rob Ford and Jean Lapierre, then, were undeniably momentous events. Despite the fact that both men were imperfect politicians, both are now being universally remembered as exceptional, as giants. No shining adjective has been spared. Ford was provided with the civic equivalent of a state a funeral, and some here in Toronto want to name a park after him. Among other things, Lapierre was being lauded by one Liberal MP as a politician who “loved Canada,” quote unquote.
Except, well, this: Rob Ford behaved badly as mayor of Canada’s largest city. He drove drunk, he slurred minorities, he cavorted with gangsters, he trampled on ethics laws, and – most infamously – he smoked crack while in office.
Lapierre, meanwhile, was probably not someone who “loved Canada,” quote unquote. He quit the Liberal Party in 1990 when Jean Chretien became its leader – and he went on to form the separatist Bloc Quebecois in the House of Commons. He later became a Liberal, under Paul Martin, and proceeded to (a) call the Clarity Act “useless;” (b) recruit a half-dozen separatists to run under the Liberal banner; (c) illegally fire former Chretien chief of staff Jean Pelletier, a federalist, while Pelletier was dying of cancer; and (d) oversee the collapse of the Liberal Party in Quebec.
One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, as every Irish Catholic knows. But Messrs. Ford and Lapierre would probably agree that, as politicians, they weren’t nearly as terrific as many are now saying that they were. Both men, if they could do it over again, might have stuck to coaching football and broadcast journalism. Because both were truly great at those things.
Why the chorus of acclaim, then, from politicos who already know the unvarnished truth? Because the political choir also knows it is imperfect, of course. And the choir still desperately, desperately want to be immortal, their own many blemishes notwithstanding.
So they loudly sing the praises of the immortals, in the hope that someone will sing about them, too, when their time comes.
https://vine.co/v/iI7J0r6pFpZ
Don't delay – get your tickets today. #yyc #abpoli #ableg https://t.co/fMNZ72q9f9
— AB Liberal Party (@ABLiberal) March 31, 2016
Details to come…
Since I was a kid – since this day in 1972, in fact, when I started writing a daily journal – I have always taken note of April 4, and said to myself: “April 4. Dr. King.”
Today, 48 years ago, Martin Luther King was murdered by a racist in Memphis. Dr. King was a giant of a man, the one who – as I write in Fight The Right – anticipated the message at the core of the Occupy movement, among other things. While his message continues to resonate across the decades, racial hatred continues unabated, too.
It’s April 4, and so I give you some of his most remarkable speech. Surveying the pygmies who now crowd the public stage, I don’t think we will see the likes of him again.
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