KCCCC Day Last: Who won, who lost, and why

     

  • It’s the last day! I’m supposed to be up at the cabin with my Mom, my youngest, and two dogs…and I have nothing left to say.  Sort of.
  • Here’s my Sun column from today, in which I attempt to explain what happened.  Let me know what you think – and have a great day, whether a campaigner or not.  Oh – and don’t forget to vote!

 

They back Jack.

Jack’s got the knack.  The others? They yak, but they lack.

There you go: some really (really) bad poetry, designed to neatly sum up Election 2011.  There’ll be lots of much-smarter political analysis, this weekend, but I’m sticking to my pithy rhyming couplets.

Whether he captures the keys to 24 Sussex or not, the NDP’s Jack Layton is the winner of this campaign, hands down.  Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have lost. Why, you ask?

There are lots of reasons: Harper ran a lousy, uninspiring campaign.  Ignatieff pushed for an election when he should have pulled.  Both men are seen as conservative and conservative-lite, and the country is apparently fed up with policies that are nasty, brutish and short-sighted.

But the main reason why Jack Layton will make history tomorrow night?  The best explanation for why he is going to be leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – or maybe even Her Prime Minister?

Because Jack is the most likeable leader, that’s why. He’s a HOAG.

I’ve written about my “Hell Of A Guy” theory in these pages before. As the political cliché goes, you can picture yourself at a tailgate party with Jack, swigging Buds, telling lies about the ones that got away. Steve-o and Iggy, you just can’t. Standing behind a podium in an early-morning university class, giving you a lousy mark because you spelled “Milton Friedman” wrong in an essay, sure. But HOAGs? Nope.

I’ve worked with Iggy, and can attest to the fact that – in person – he is a thoughtful, easy-going, impressive guy.  But that quality doesn’t come across on TV. On the big flat-screen, the Liberal leader doesn’t emote HOAGism. It’s not fair, it’s not accurate, but it’s a fact.

Harper, meanwhile, has elevated thuggishness to official state policy. He doesn’t try to avoid being mean-spirited: he positively revels in it.  He embraces it. And Harper’s mistake – and his team’s mistake – has been equating being a hard-hearted S.O.B. with “decisiveness.”

It isn’t. Being a hard-hearted S.O.B. isn’t decisive, Team Tory. Mostly, its just evidence that you’re a hard-hearted S.O.B. More precisely, an angry guy who doesn’t like the country, let alone the people who live in it.

Now, I know what you’re going to say before you say it: how in the name of all that is holy can anyone vote for Wacko Jacko?

His policies, you’ll say, are nuttier than squirrel poop.  He wants to reopen the Constitution!  His promises cost $70 billion, and he claims he can balance the budget! He wants to have tea with the Taliban!

All true.  Also true: Canadians haven’t read Jack Layton’s policy manual, and nor do they intend to.  For different reasons, Messrs. Harper and Ignatieff wanted this election to be a referendum on “leadership” – and they got what they wanted.  In their hubris, however, they never imagined Canadians would vote for the third leadership option, nutty policies be damned.

But Layton’s team, you’ll say: they’re not serious!  He’s got candidates vacationing in Vegas – while the campaign is underway! He’s got candidates who have never run a three-house paper route before, let alone a country!  He’s got no organizational strength on the ground!

Also all true.  But ask Toronto’s Rob Ford or Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi, they’ll tell you: Canadians don’t want polished professional politicians, these days.  They like populists.  They like HOAGs.  They like regular folks.

I’m a Jean Chretien Liberal, and a Bill Clinton Democrat.  Both those men were successful because they never forgot that there are a lot more votes on Main Street than on Bay Street (or Wall Street).  They were winners because they never forgot where they came from, or who made them what they are.

And that’s why Canadians back Jack.

And that’s why, for the others, it may be time to pack.


KCCCC Day 36: Jack Layton, and a campaign’s end

  • I’ve been a cop reporter, a political guy, a media commentator and (am) a voter. I tried to look at this Jack Layton story from all of those perspectives.
  • As a cop reporter: I did the cops beat at the Calgary Herald and the Ottawa Citizen. At those papers – at almost any paper, then or now – we’d write about how the police periodically do sweeps at bawdy houses and places like that. If the round-ups involved a lot of johns, we’d write about that. If the operators of the prostitution operation were newsworthy, we’d write about them. And, if there was a famous person amongst the johns, we’d certainly cover it. We’d let the higher-ups, and the eggheads on the editorial boards, agonize about whether a story we filed should get published or not. Our beat was crime, and our job was to write crime stories. We did that. From a cops beat reporter’s perspective, the fact that a man has a shot at becoming Prime Minister, and was found at a place like that, is big news. Any journalist who says that it isn’t, isn’t much of a journalist, or is being dishonest. This is a legitimate cops-beat story – with one caveat: it happened in 1996, which is many years ago. All that renders it “news,” again, is the prominence of the person involved.
  • As a political guy: A Sun reporter called me about this story yesterday afternoon. Before he could even describe what it was about – he said it involved “a major political figure and the police” – I told him I already knew what it was about. In Toronto, and amongst many political people, this story has been pretty well-known for years. Someone came to me about it two years ago. I looked at what they had, thought about it for about sixty seconds, and then urged this person to forget all about it. I certainly planned to. If the story ever saw the light of day, I told this person, it would hurt the source more than it would hurt the target. I still think that. If people within a political party were ultimately behind this – and there are four political parties which would have a direct interest in getting this story out – they’d better hope to God they don’t get found out before Monday night. Right now, there isn’t a voter in Canada who doesn’t think a political party was wrapped up in this somehow. Does that hurt Jack Layton? Not with most voters. Ask that Hugh Grant actor guy, he knows.
  • As a media commentator: I’ve told people at the Sun I felt they were being used by someone with an obvious agenda, and to caution them about the story. They had weighed all of those negatives by the time they spoke to me, obviously, and they went with the story anyway. That’s their decision, and I think it’s maybe explainable by the fact that political people use media people all the time, and vice-versa. But two problems still remain, from my perspective. One, I think the Sun was indeed used by a political party during a hotly-contested election campaign, and – arguably as unhelpful – they’ve given their competitors an opportunity to also cover the story, while simultaneously slamming the Sun for going with the story. I wouldn’t have given the competition the opportunity to do something hypocritical like that. I would have let one of them go first. Two, the bigger scandal, here, remains unaddressed: at the time he was detained, Jack Layton was a city councillor on the City of Toronto’s budget committee, which has power over the police budget. The cops knew who he was, they knew the power he wielded over them. So what did they do? They walked him to the back door, and let him pedal away. Were the other men found at that place given that kind of treatment? If not, what happened here is a bona fide scandal, one that Toronto taxpayers need have probed, the passage of time notwithstanding.
  • As a voter: On the one hand, I dislike prostitution, and I particularly dislike the media’s dishonesty about it – they condemn it, and then make money out of advertising that promotes trafficking in human beings (like the Toronto Star does, in its eye weekly paper). On the other hand, I don’t particularly dislike Jack Layton (he won me over, a few years back, when he called me to ask for a copy of one of my books – the one about punk rock, not one of the ones I’ve written about politics). Does this story make me, as voter, more or less likely to vote for him? Well, I was never planning on voting for him anyway. But it reminds me that he showed appalling judgment, sixteen years ago, and that he needs to express regret for that, instead of offering up the standard-issue political bullshit. In this election campaign, he’s not alone in offering up bullshit, I guess.

About that story

I was on Sun News tonight. My take: if a political party was ultimately behind this story – and it’s highly unlikely a political party wasn’t – they’ll be really, really sorry if they get found out.

Voters aren’t stupid. Things like this don’t happen by accident.


CPAC’s ‘The War Room’

This aired the other night, I believe, and I didn’t see it until now.  It’s got people in it a lot smarter than me, and Catherine did a great job of pulling it all together.


SFH on May 12

Forget about all this politics stuff.  If you’re a Grit or a Tory, come to drink your troubles away!  If you’re a Dipper, come revel in our misery!


Open election prediction thread!

Here’s your Daily Nanos Crack™:

Personally, this one delights me.  If accurate, it means (a) a Conservative majority is toast and (b) we are perhaps closer to a Liberal-Democrat party (for reasons I shall explain shortly).

Now, the poll/ads blackout commences shortly, does it not?  So it’s a good time to get everyone on the record, in what promises to be a very volatile weekend. And, as regular reader Art Williams suggested, we need an open election prediction thread – wherein you get to offer up your prognostications about popular vote, seat projections, majority/minority, or any combination thereof.  The person(s) who is closest the actual result on election night will receive a signed copy of The War Room, and a personally-delivered invite to my next book launch (also about politics, surprise surprise, and also well underway).

So, predict away, wk.com readers!  Now’s your chance to make sense of the senseless!


Just move in! Zombie-proofed house

As any regulars know, I am (a) er, deathly afraid of zombies and (b) constantly evaluating my surroundings to ensure they are adequately zombie-proofed.

In the coming (and inevitable) undead apocalypse, I do not plan to be unprepared.  Thus, this domicile, which I now intend to purchase.

This link comes from my colleague Rob, by the way, who may take up residence there after next Monday’s vote, but for non-zombie-related reasons.

Home sweet zombie-free home.


KCCCC Day 34: Orange Crush – ingredients and nutritional information (with important Akin-related update)


  • Don’t feel like you’re alone in not seeing this historic change comingnobody saw this historic change coming. All of the professional pundits, pollsters and politicos – an alliteration, as well as the people who get paid to be smart about politics – didn’t see it coming, either. I challenge you to find one one person, one, who said this sometime in the past year: “The Liberal Party will drop to a distant third place. The NDP will surge and have a shot at defeating Stephen Harper on election night.” You won’t find anyone who said that, out loud. Not even Jack Layton believed it.
  • Figuring out what the Libs and Cons did wrong is easy. And, one thing I will predict – entire forests will be felled, soon enough, to print up articles, essays and books which will analyze the reasons why the Reformatories (as even conservatives agree) and the Grits (in particular) did badly. But the Dippers? Wacko Jacko? That’s a lot harder to understand. Here are a few of my suggested ingredients in the Orange Crush.
  • Jack Layton is likeable (and has few calories). He’s Taliban Jack, he’s Wacko Jacko, he’s all those things right-wing media call him – but he’s also the most likeable of all the federal leaders. Polls have been showing that for years, now they’re showing it at precisely the best possible moment for him. If the campaign has devolved into a great big HOAG contest – that is, “who is the one who is a Hell Of A Guy” – Layton wins, hands down. Iggy is quite likeable in person, in my opinion, but loses in a televised HOAG showdown with Jack. Harper’s people, meanwhile, had decided likeability didn’t matter – a decision they will come to regret, profoundly. Sixty-five per cent of the country dislike Stephen Harper. They needed to fix that, and they didn’t. Too late now!
  • His party’s policies are irrelevant (and contain ingredients that are very bad for you). They have some not-bad policies – and they have some that are plain nutty (like reopening the Constitution, or multiple billions in promises that Jacko doesn’t know how to pay for). But, in the main, his party’s policies don’t matter. Canadians have decided they want to vote for someone they like, not for someone with the best policies. Jack, they like. Harper, especially, they don’t. The policy analysis of many Canadians: Harper and Ignatieff are too right-wing. I’m voting for the only guy who isn’t right wing.
  • His party’s team is irrelevant (and have no nutritional value whatsoever). Name five of their candidates – ones who don’t currently hold a seat. Name two or three. Can’t, can you? Me, neither. The Dippers aren’t popular because of their team – because they don’t really have a team (and that’s why their strength in places like Quebec may end up being largely illusory – they literally have no one on the ground to GOTV). It’s a big problem for them on E-day. Cue the screams of righteous indignation about rep by pop on Tuesday morning.
  • But what do YOU think? Why did the Orange Crush happen? Comments are open – and welcome.

AKIN-RELATED UPDATE: Take it away, Sun News colleague David Akin:

Warren: “nobody saw this historic change coming. All of the professional pundits, pollsters and politicos – an alliteration, as well as the people who get paid to be smart about politics – didn’t see it coming, either.”

Er, ahem, I know I write a lot of drivel but, as my predictions are rarely write, I’m going to poke my head up on this:

Here’s me on March 21, writing five days before writ drop:

My hunch is that if they can boost their popular vote on e-day to anything above 20 per cent, they stand a very real chance of becoming the official opposition in a scenario where the Tories win a majority and the Liberal vote collapses.”

Mind you, in that blog post, I thought Layton would back the budget!