Harper and Iggy in 2011

Saw a traffic spike to an old piece of mine on Ignatieff from 2006. So I re-read it. And one paragraph seemed more relevant than any other...though perhaps not the one the linkers intended.

That's not to say he'd be a worse Prime Minister than Stephen Harper, of course. Stephen Harper is a zealous market fundamentalist; a neoconservative exploiting a base of social conservatives to gain the kind of autocratic power that only a Canadian Prime Minister at the head of a majority government can enjoy. We've already seen that he wants to control the government from his own desk, and the only check on his ambitions is the reality that he only controls a minority government. That's why every single thing he's done since the end of January has been turned towards winning that majority; from budgetmaking, to speechmaking, to muzzling his ministers, all of it is aimed at gaining power. Nobody knows what Harper would do with that power, but I imagine it would be to do his damnedest to remake Canada in the image of Howard's Australia and Thatcher's England. Needless to say, anybody would prefer Ignatieff to THAT.

I actually think Ignatieff has changed. I still prefer Dion or Rae to Ignatieff, but "Iggy" has moderated his tone, and has handed off the lead on foreign policy to Bob Rae.

Meanwhile, if anything, Stephen Harper has become worse. He seems to be working hard to become the most autocratic leader of any democracy in the english-speaking world. He cows his party and the public service at the same time, and lies with impunity only when he can't simply ignore you. A Harper majority would be disastrous, and the only reason anybody could possibly think otherwise is that much of Canada's media is so bizarrely right-wing—compared to the public—that they seem to welcome the prospect of a Thatcherite Canada.

Just to be clear, and I'm saying this as a once-strident Ignatieff critic: Given the choice between Ignatieff and Harper, I'd choose Ignatieff in a flash.

Remember How I Said Canadian Opinion Journalism is Terrible?

Here's exhibit "B": Kelly MacParland giving the world's worst advice to Iggy.

See, I can almost respect good concern trolling. For all that he's an idiot, David Brooks concern trolls so well that he can write whole books worth of it and people actually buy it. So if it were competent, believable concern trolling that MacParland was up to, it might be respectable too.

But it isn't. Hoo boy, it isn't. Not only does he sabotage it by saying "don't listen to advisers!" in an feeble attempt to be cute, and not only does take as a given a lot of assertions about the public that he can't even superficially support, he is simply unbelievable. Anybody who writes ridiculous blog entries talking about how Iggy is "trapped in the '70s" because he hasn't joined the Reagan Revolution is going to lack credibility as a concern troll... but if you're going to try, damned well don't LINK to it! They'll just click through, think "welp, this guy's a throwback" and go read Coyne or something!

Honestly, it's more sad than anything else.

Oh Christ on a Crutch

Elections are about choices. And the choice that is coming is simple and important. It's a choice between change, or more of the same.

I think I know what choice people will make.

I know you guys have a fixation on Obama's 2008 campaign, and it was a good campaign, but for the love of all that is Holy don't rip off his damned slogans.

Not only does it not suit the milquetoast, Tory-lite persona that your man Iggy has adopted since his return to his frozen homeland—it isn't going to resonate now that progressives think that Obama sold them out, and the transformational aspects of the 2008 campaign are all but dead.

Obama's Washington was "more of the same". Best not remind people of that.

Layton, Harper More Popular Than Ignatieff

At least according to an EKOS poll of Canadians. Since the Iggy thing is a bit of hobbyhorse of mine:

Job Approval Ratings
¤ 73% Barack Obama
¤ 36% Stephen Harper
¤ 34% Jack Layton
¤ 29% Michael Ignatieff

The numbers for the parties?

¤ 32.7% CPC
¤ 31.0% LPC
¤ 16.5% NDP
¤ 10.1% Green
¤ 9.7% BQ

For readers who aren't familiar with Canadian politics: Harper leads the "CPC", Ignatieff the "LPC", Layton the "NDP", and Obama leads "A Spineless Pack of Senators".

So, Harper's numbers are higher than his party. No surprise there, he's the reason his party has any appeal at all. But look at Ignatieff: his numbers trail his party's numbers, and trails Jack Layton, who leads the third-place NDP.

That isn't how it was supposed to be. Dion was the one who trailed his party, and thus—due to his incompetence and lack of charisma, natch—dragging his party down. Ignatieff was supposed to inspire Canadians. He's the guy who was on the BBC and taught at Harvard. He was the returning prodigal whose worldly expertise and television-forged speaking skills was going to entrance Canadians and help them forget all about how milquetoast and policy-free his party had become.

He was going to lift up his party through the sheer power of his own blinding intellect.

Yet what do we see here? Another Liberal leader trailing his own party. A leader trailing that mean ol' Stephen Harper. A leader trailing Jack Layton, the unreconstructed "socialist" whose party is supposedly out of touch with the Canadian masses. A leader being absolutely trounced by the American president, a man who has been going through a rather rough patch of late. So what's going on here?

Why was this guy installed at the head of the table, exactly? His foreign policy experience is something you'd want to avoid mentioning in Canada, what with the whole "defending neocons" thing. Besides, Bob Rae is ably handling that file. His domestic policy knowledge is limited to laudable comments about high-speed trains and quickly-renounced calls for EI equity. He gave an admittedly great speech about liberal democracy in England, but hasn't touched the subject since, in a country desperate for a Liberal leader who believes in something.

He isn't exactly charming the press, either. The desperate blogging campaign to convince the press that he's doing something this summer speaks volumes. I admire the loyalty, but wasn't the press supposed to like him?

Makes you wonder if maybe Rae should have been given the job after all.