Liberal Response Ad

It is a corny effort, but this Youtube response by a young Liberal has the right idea. Using the video distribution and production capacity of the internet makes a lot of sense. You can get effective widely-distributed political messages out at minimal cost.

Does Harper Want An Election?

The attack ads on Dion imply that he does. If the budget includes tax cuts and a strong effort to woo Quebec, the question arises, why fire off all this political ammunition if the election is not until next year. Harper's statement implying he did want an election made me think immediately that it was what is called in football a misdirection play. If you parse his words he simply observes that he, Harper, has no "incentive" to want an early election. I focused in my earlier post on the opposition but if the government wants an election, they can likely engineer a Commons defeat.

A new CROP poll in Quebec suggests the Liberals are on the verge of being able to win in Quebec - the Liberals lead the PQ by three points 37 to 34. My seat estimate has the PQ ahead of the Liberals 61 to 59, a minority government, but this is the strongest they have been in a long time. With PQ Leader André Boisclair's reputation continuing to diminish, this spring may look to Charest like the time to go.

That would put off a federal vote in all probability to June.

The Swiftboating of Stéphane Dion

I am not certain how effective or persuasive the Conservative ads directed at Stéphane Dion are or will be, but then they are not aimed at me. They are directed at establishing a public impression of the man before Canadians have had time independently to establish firm views.

However, I am certain of the genesis of the strategy. Its inspiration is pure Karl Rove, the George Bush operative, who was behind the attacks on John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for President, made in a series of defamatory ads sponsored by a group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth – with no official ties to Rove, but lots of connections, another Rove trademark.

The tactics are well described on the web site of the makers of the documentary Bush’s Brain:

Our film, BUSH'S BRAIN, is a primer on how Karl Rove operates. If you want to understand what happened in the elections of 2000 and 2004, you should see our film. If you want to know what will probably happen this fall, you must see our film.

For those who saw BUSH'S BRAIN, the Swift Boat Ads came as no surprise. They were vintage Rove. You attack your opponent's strength, not his weakness. And you cast deep shadows of doubt -- which can't be refuted in time for the election.

The same technique was used in the 2000 primary election against Senator John McCain. Rove turned McCain's heroic ordeal as a prisoner of war into a liability. Because of his years of imprisonment, McCain was said to be "mentally unfit" to be president. Sound familiar?

Familiar indeed! This is the exact playbook being used now against Dion – attacking his reputation for integrity and strong support for the environment. And given its odious but effective history, the Liberals should not underestimate its potential. There is more about Rove and his tactics in this Atlantic Monthly article by Josh Green from 2004, for example this paragraph:

Some of Rove's darker tactics cut even closer to the bone. One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents. The 2000 primary campaign, for example, featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office. More often a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record—when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs.

You see the tactics at work in the ads – attacks on Dion’s environmental record, insinuations of Liberal corruption, etc. There may be more to come.

The Liberals need to hit back fast and hard but their response so far has been weak.

Other parties such as the NDP, the Bloc and the Greens plus the media should join in denouncing this loathsome import from U.S. political culture. They should all demand that the Conservatives drop the ads, and instead turn the air time over to ads that will raise awareness of global warming and offer practical advice on how to do something about it - something the Conservatives in other moments profess to care about. Let them put their party's money where their mouth is.

Tory Attack Ads

CTV News tells us the Tories will soon launch attack ads directed at Stéphane Dion. This comes just after they made a series of environmental announcements. The ad campaign reveals their true colours. If they really want to persuade us their commitments on the environment are genuine, why not cancel the attacks and do something positive, like using the ad buy to promote ideas that would help Canada reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

No Spring Election

TC has been convinced since early in the fall that we were heading for an election this spring.

Something happened this week to change my mind. First, the premise of my thinking was that each party for its own reasons was likely to vote against the budget. In the case of the Liberals and the NDP it was always likely that there would be elements of the budget - for example, the old child care program ends March 31 and the budget could change that, but won't - which made a negative vote inevitable. The two parties are direct competitors for the same pool of votes. The NDP would be ridiculed by the Liberals if they supported the budget and, while the Liberal exposure on this front is not as strong, the reverse is also true.

In the early fall the BQ began signalling that it was ready to bring the government down. It even toyed with the idea of forcing a confidence vote by mid-February. They also demanded an apparently non-negotiable $3.9 billion for Quebec to rectify fiscal imbalance. This week Duceppe suddenly shifted ground on his fiscal demands and said simply, "Make me an offer".

Here is an excerpt from the story in the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Duceppe, a former union negotiator, said: "For negotiations to occur, there has to be an offer. There is no offer as we speak, there is nothing on the table. I'm not about to negotiate with our own request. We won't settle at 50 per cent of our objective. We will see the offer, how it's spread out, what it means. But don't count on us to start negotiating with ourselves."

The implication is clear: Mr. Duceppe and company will vote for the budget - notice the phrase "how it's spread out", weasel words if I ever saw them. He will likely justify it by saying he wants to lock in and implement whatever gains Quebec makes in the budget on its fiscal imbalance agenda. Chantal Hebert reaches the same conclusion as TC about a spring election with somewhat different reasoning, but her column on this subject is worth reading.

New Star for the Democrats

He may have been Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, but Jim Webb, the new Democratic Senator from Virginia, is emerging as one of the stars of the new Democratic Congress.

He gave the reply to Bush's State of the Union's address last night. Apparently he rewrote the original script prepared by the standard Democratic Party wordsmiths. The authenticity shows.

It should be watched or read here.

The response by Newsweek captures the zeitgeist:

Something unprecedented happened tonight, beyond the doorkeeper announcing, "Madame Speaker." For the first time ever, the response to the State of the Union Message overshadowed the president's big speech. Virginia Sen. James Webb, in office only three weeks, ... left President Bush's ordinary address in the dust. In the past, the Democratic response has been anemic... This time it pointed the way to a revival for national Democrats.

As for the speech itself, it contained the usual quota of Bush's, ahem, nosestretchers. All well documented here.

The result of all this for Bush is that his popularity is comparable only to that of Richard Nixon just before he delivered his last State of the Union Address in the middle of the Watergate Scandal.

The New Environmentalists

Stephen Harper and company have spent the past week trying to convince us all that they are the ones truly committed to doing something on Kyoto. One tactic has been to trash the previous Liberal record on global warming.

Fair enough, the Liberals do deserve criticism for their lax record. The catch is that governments don't respond to these things in a vacuum. They take into account response to their plans on the part of individuals, corporations, lobby groups, provinces AND the official opposition. During the late nineties after the Liberals had signed Kyoto, but did not then move quickly to take the steps necessary to achieve the goals. Across the House of Commons they faced a Canadian Alliance opposition which vigourously attacked them, for example, for considering mandatory greenhouse gas emission caps (Alliance MP Dave Chatters speech in 1997 on this subject illustrated the attitude).

Now, if the Canadian Alliance had been attacking the Liberals for not moving fast enough on meeting Kyoto targets, that could have made a significant difference to the behaviour of the Chrétien government. Paul Martin's February, 2000 budget was filled with various tax cuts (even using the neocon phrase "tax relief" to describe them) in order to undercut the campaign by the Alliance for tax cuts as a way of spending the then growing surplus.

Listening to them suggest they will do now what the Liberals failed to do then is a bit much, as it ignores their own very considerable political responsibility for that record.