We won! Finally! And against the team that hasn’t lost a game all season!

Son, the goalie, is under that pile-on.  Father, the proud one, took the picture to brag.

(It’s also a souvenir: everyone expects Rob Ford is going to lock out city workers this weekend – which means that hockey, at places like Leaside, is possibly over for the season.)

Rob Ford doesn’t care if my kids get to play hockey for the rest of this season.
We parents are going to make him care.

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Whenever they’re in political trouble, progressives — Liberals and New Democrats in Canada, Democrats in the United States — will say they’d win more if only they communicated better. If only they had a better “narrative,” they say, they’d beat conservatives more often.

So, a young senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, once called for a “new narrative” to wrest power back from conservative Republicans (he got one, and won). Robert Reich, one of Bill Clinton’s smarter guys, lamented that Republican conservatives win all the time because they “have mastered the art of political narrative.”

Up here, you hear a lot of the same sort of kvetching. Shortly after he got his keister kicked in the May 2011 federal election, for instance, Michael Ignatieff told my friend Michael Valpy that he lost because he didn’t “control the narrative.”  

His successor, Bob Rae, said in a big-vision speech at the Economic Club the “populist narrative” of Conservatives has been used to fool lots of folks into voting for Stephen Harper.  

And so on, and so on. These days, then, you hear otherwise smart progressives yammering on and on about “narratives” and “framing” and “branding” and stuff like that.  

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Read it to the end.  You won’t regret that you did.

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There’s been a plethora of polls, in the past few days, and they tell us interesting things.

For the Conservatives, they’re down a bit, but not enough to relinquish the gold medal spot they’ve had for many, many months. For those of you who say the Harpies have become a Seinfeld government—a government about nothing—you’re likely to get the polls quoted back to you.

Staying out of the papers, the Harper folks will say, works. Canadians don’t like drama, at least when it comes to governing. Do your thing and stay out of our lives. Harper seems to be heeding that admonition, for now.

In second place, the silver medal spot, goes to the New Democrats. How they’ve remained there is, truly, an Olympian feat. It’s a mystery. They’ve done and said nothing—precisely nothing—for month after month. But in second place, they remain.

Sure, they’ve slipped a bit in Quebec and elsewhere. Sure, the media are grumpy about their boring leadership race. But—as a Dipper will no doubt tell you—they’re not a passing fad. Jack Layton put them in second place, and in second place they remain.

My beloved Liberals, meanwhile, have been maddeningly mired in third place—ignominious bronze medal status—for months. In the last couple weeks of the May 2011 campaign, we slid to third party status, and we’re stuck there.

Given how spectacularly dull the NDP leadership contest has been—and given how do-nothing the Harper folks have been, in the face of continuing economic turmoil in Europe and the U.S.—I find that frustrating as hell.

The Liberals have done well. They completely overshadow the NDP in media coverage, and the mid-January Ottawa policy convention—attended by 3,200 delegates—was a huge, huge success.

But here we are, still, looking down at the bronze medallions dangling from our necks. How do we get back to the top rung, where we belong?

I have some ideas, but I’m not at all certain they’ll work. But one thing’s certain: if we end 2012 where we started, Bob Rae won’t be leading us for long.

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Capitalism, in its current form, has no place in the world around us.

Those words are not mine. They’re a quote, from a fellow named Klaus Schwab.

For the many who are unlikely to have heard of Klaus Schwab before, rest assured — he’s no socialist rabble-rouser.

He’s a billionaire, in fact, and the founder of something called the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was at Schwab’s Davos gathering last week, as were dozens of other world leaders and billionaires.

While Harper didn’t perform the last rites on capitalism, plenty of others weren’t so shy.

The capitalist “model” needs to be radically revised, said another billionaire, David Rubenstein, and if we don’t, “we’ve lost the game.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the keynote Davos address, agreed: “We need to debate new methods,” she said.

As I told Krista Erickson on her Sun News Canada Live show, Davos 2012 was different from previous years. Among other things, it was interesting.

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Headed up to Joyride 150 with Son Three ’cause it’s wet and cold. Listening to him sing along to this slice of pop genius made me wish the ride would go on forever.

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Patriquin’s the biggest asshole in Canadian journalism, and that’s saying something. Typically, he misses the most obvious criticism: why is this priest allowed to comment on politics, year after year, when other priests* are ordered to refrain from doing so?

[* – The precedent.]

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This morning, as we waited for a client call to start, I told my staff – animal lovers all – about the sad, er, tale of Seamus, Mitt Romney’s Irish Setter.

They didn’t believe me.  When I finished telling the tale, they were in shock.

I told them we should start a contest: come up with the best design for a Seamus Romney T-shirt, and we’ll get it printed on a few that we can sell to benefit a deserving animal protection group (we represent quite a few).

So, get to work, Team Wk.com! The best design gets a signed copy of The War Room, plus a few T-shirts to give to Democratic friends, and/or Newt Gingrich!

 

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So says Tea Party North “leader” Tim Hudak:

“We took our foot off his throat by giving him a bit of a free ride in the summer.”

What a bloody fool.  Can you imagine the Con braying and screeching if Dalton McGuinty had said he had his “foot on the throat” of his principal opponent?  You’d never hear the end of it.  “That’s not how a Premier speaks,” they’d say.

And they’d be right. Tim Hudak lost because he couldn’t present a positive vision for Ontario’s future.  He lost because he launched vicious attacks on “foreigners” and gays and lesbians.  He lost because he allowed his party to be taken over by far-right Landowner extremists.

But the main reason he lost is because no one can picture a smirking adolescent as the Premier of our biggest province.  Because no one could imagine handing power over to a frat boy who talks about putting his foot on his opponent’s throat.

Walk like a Premier, talk like a Premier.  This child doesn’t do either.

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No, they’re not. They suck, in fact. In the book-to-come, I discuss how progressives have let conservatives get away with claiming they’re better at managing dollars. Among other things, progressives need to tell that story, over and over.

UPDATE: Here’s a tweaked graphic, sent along by FB friend Carolyn Weatherson.  And one commenter, Joseph Angolano, writes: “The Canadian numbers add up to the same conclusion. Flaherty was the first Con Finance Minister to post a balanced budget since 1912. He then promptly started posting deficits since. Moreover, Canada maintained its AAA rating until Mulroney came to power. Conservatives suck with finances. Always have, always will.”

Anyone want to take stab at an all-Canadian version of this?

UPDATED: From sharp-eyed commenter Jennifer Smith:

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