Canadian Cincinnatus

John Tory for Mayor of Toronto...oh nooooo!!!

The new came out yesterday that the hapless former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is once again considering a run for Toronto’s mayor. He had considered it in January of this year, then publicly declaring that he wasn’t running. Now, he is running. Or he may be running. True to form, he is undecided on his change of mind.

What is it with our silver-spoon Hamlet? At this point, I do not care how many more times he humiliates himself electorally. The real problem is that every time he vacillates, he jeopardizes the whole conservative movement.

He blew the last provincial election with his chaotic handling of the faith-based funding issue. He started out well ahead in the polls, but by the time he was finished, Dalton McGuinty had been handed another electoral triumph. Then he gave Dalton McGuinty a free pass for a year while he chose to hang on to the party leadership by his fingernails (even though he lost his seat). Then he proceeded to get shellacked in a by-election in a safe conservative riding after persuading a loyal conservative to resign ‘for the good of the cause’. All that resulted from his pathetic bid to get back into Queen’s Park was one less conservative MPP.

The only reason Rob Ford is running for mayor in Toronto is because John Tory isn’t, or wasn’t. Ford knows he can’t win when the conservative vote is divided. As it was, he had to wait a fair bit of time before he formally declared his candidacy because Tory couldn’t make up his mind the last time. Now Tory’s mind is unmade up again, throwing major sand in the wheels of the Ford campaign, which had been making strides until now. 

If George Smitherman becomes the next mayor, he will have had help along the way from John Tory.

The significance of the journolist scandal

In case you were living in a cocoon, or only got your news from the Globe and Mail, you know all about the journolist scandal, whereby Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller got a hold of many e-mails that had passed back and forth between 400 top mainstream American journalists. E-mails that graphically illustrate what many conservatives have long suspected, that the mainstream media is left-wing and biased against conservatives. The journolist scandal is to journalism what Climategate is to global warming. For instance, the e-mails show journalists from top-ranked news organizations like the Guardian and the Washington Post openly discussing how to hide issues to help Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and to demonize his critics. For instance, to get Obama out of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright pickle, David Ackerman of the Washington Independent advised those on the list:

“Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Obviously this is more than bias, more than advocacy - it is downright slander. But most of it wasn’t this bad. A lot of it was simply like-minded journalists coordinating ‘their message’. A defender of the mainstream media might ask, so what? While wilder excesses like slandering Karl Rove with baseless charges of racism is inexcusable, what’s wrong with journalists having a point of view? Rush Limbaugh has a point of view. Why can’t they?

In my opinion this is a very good question and one that is worth pondering carefully before responding with a spittle-spewing partisan retort. What is wrong with journalists having a point of view?

The short answer is nothing at all, if you are honest about it. What elevates Rush Limbaugh morally above the scheming sneaks over at journolist is that Limbaugh is honest about who he is. He tells you right out that he is a conservative and that he is presenting a conservative point of view. The mainstream media does not do this. They present a sort of ‘faux objectivity’ where they push their agenda just as hard but pretend that they are merely presenting the facts in a disinterested way. And this is bad.

And this is why don’t have as much of a problem with left-wing journalists like Chris Mathews or Keith Olberman as other conservatives do. I disagree with their politics of course, but at least they are up front with who they. The people in journalism I really can’t stand are the Walter Cronkite types, who are just as left-wing as Olberman and Mathews but hide it with phony ‘gravitas’. During the Tet Offensive, he pronounced the war in Vietnam lost and LBJ famously remarked at this, “If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost America.” This is a shame because Tet was a spectacular American victory that really turned the Vietnam War around. LBJ would have never lost America if America knew how left-wing Cronkite was, but Cronkite carefully hid who he was in order to be able to wield the kind of influence a left-wing crank usually can’t.

So what does all this mean? I think the almost always insightful Jay Cost hits the nail right on the head:

JournoList looks to me to be yet another mile-marker on this country's return to a partisan press. This does not upset me very much at all. I think American democracy is unthinkable without the political parties, so I do not think that a partisan press is all that bad. And it might finally stop journalists and academics from acquiring the inherently political authority that comes with monikers like "objective news" or "social science" when they are in fact promoting subjective values. That would be a good thing. All in all, a partisan press is, weirdly enough, a very honest one in that you know fully where everybody is coming from, and nobody can claim for him- or herself the epistemologically ridiculous "God's eye view."

 This strikes me about right. America is returning to the partisan press that it enjoyed in the 19^th century and good for them! The veneer of bogus ‘objectivity’ has been stifling honest debate for too long. 

Ralph Peters agrees with the Cincinnatus strategy on Afghanistan

A couple of posts ago I reported on Henry Kissinger’s agreement with my Afghan strategy - that the key to victory there is to work with the traditional tribal culture, not against it. Now New York Post columnist Ralph Peters is drinking the same kool aid:

Pick your tribes: We want to be friends with everybody. It doesn't work. Our guys are the old Northern Alliance crowd (who we've treated like dirt in order to woo our enemies). If we want Afghans to fight on our side, they need Afghan reasons for fighting.

We dream of a unity government, but the Raj-era Brits figured out that you have to employ tribes against their rivals. Our goodwill won't overcome ages of hatred. In poor tribal societies, life is a zero-sum game. To win, you back your guys.

Exploit the existing culture: Don't embark on a costly fool's errand to change the nature of a tribal society. Leverage what you find. Stop obsessing on what you want long enough to consider what the locals want. If the desires differ significantly, you must change.

This is absolutely right. Keep your goals modest, realistic and achievable. And then achieve them. War is no place for utopian social engineering. Also, as Peters correctly notes, the conventional wisdom that nobody every conquered Afghanistan is wrong. The British Empire did, as Peters acknowledges. (Or rather, it was able to exercise suzerainty over Afghanistan for an extended period of time, which is all that we need to do.)

Then Peters introduces a few rules of his own for the conflict: 

Recognize your own limits: It doesn't help to complain that "counterinsurgency takes a generation" if political circumstances won't grant you that much time. We should never expect our armed forces to achieve ideal solutions that exist only in academic theories.

Except in existential struggles, such as World War II, we must do cold-blooded cost-benefit analyses: Are the realistic goals we might achieve worth the cost in blood and treasure?

 To me, George W Bush’s biggest military failure was acting like his wars had no shelf life. At the time I reckoned that Bush had a maximum of 3 years after 9/11 for the ‘hot phase’ of the War on Terror to begin winding down. And there isn’t light at the end of the tunnel by then, the public will begin to lose patience. This is why pursuing the WMD case through the UN was so wrong. President Bush did it to get Tony Blair on side (who, it has to be said, did provide significant aid). But it cost two years of wasted time. As Napoleon once said, “I would rather lose a battle than a minute.”

Another good rule from Peters:

Aid those already on your side, not your enemies: Our attempts to bribe our enemies with wells, make-work and welfare are doomed to failure. Reward your allies with aid projects; let the hostiles envy them -- and figure it out on their own.

Reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour. It’s amazing how applicable this principle is and how often we ignore it.

Here’s a rule for our negotiators: 

Your enemies must seek negotiations first: Olive branches are worthless against fanatics convinced they can win. If negotiations are to play a role, it can only be after you've pounded the insurgents so ferociously that they seek talks. If you move first, it's read as desperation. Your enemies will act accordingly.

To negotiate successfully with tribesmen, you must be feared.

The reason peaceniks invariably make such bad negotiators, even though they profess to love negotiating, is that they do not understand this point. They imagine a negotiation to be a kumbaya love-in. Bargaining isn’t a love-in and never have been. There are countless examples from Munich on down to the local used car dealer to illustrate this point, but never underestimate the power of wishful thinking to obscure the plain truth.

I am glad Peters is coming around, and, if his article is to be believed, so is General Petreaus. Even better. With the right strategy, I believe victory in Afghanistan is eminently achievable.

Ronald McDonald shows us how to do corporate PR right

Two posts ago, I described BP’s pathetic “Beyond Petroleum” campaign to curry favour with the environmentalists and how it failed miserably in providing them any cover at all when environmental disaster did strike them. It is therefore with great pleasure that I am able to report a story of corporate PR done right, brought to you by McDonald’s CEO, Jim Skinner:

  

The Center for Science in the Public Interest last month threatened a lawsuit against the fast-food giant to get it to dump the toys that accompany Happy Meals.

Forget it, McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner said, defending Happy Meals in the written response sent to the Washington, D.C.-based group.

 

"Internet sites, blogs and network surveys suggest that public opinion is running overwhelmingly against your premise," Skinner wrote. "Our customer websites and phone lines at McDonald's are also busy, with more than nine out of 10 customers disagreeing with your agenda."

 

The strong public response is uncommon for the company, whose dominance in the fast-food industry makes its a target of a range of activist groups.

 

"CSPI is wrong in its assertions, and frivolous in its legal threats," Skinner said, calling the group's claims "over-the-top rhetoric."

 

Seeking to turn the tables on the group, Skinner called for an apology.

 

"CSPI's twisted characterization of McDonald's as 'the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children' is an insult to every one of our franchisees and employees around the world," Skinner wrote. "When CSPI refers to America's children as 'an unpaid drone army," you similarly denigrate parents and families, because they are fully capable of making their own decisions. You should apologize."

 

"Parents, in particular, strongly believe they have the right and responsibility to decide what's best for their children, not CSPI," he wrote. "It's really that simple."

 

When it threatened to sue last month, the group called the use of toys to entice kids to eat Happy Meals "unfair and deceptive marketing" that "is illegal under various state consumer protection laws."

 

"McDonald's use of toys undercuts parental authority and exploits young children's developmental immaturity--all this to induce children to prefer foods that may harm their health," the group's litigation director, Stephen Gardner, said at the time. "It's a creepy and predatory practice that warrants an injunction."

 

Jim Skinner evidently understands the first rule of politics, that you can’t apologize fast enough to win. So don’t try.

 

He also realizes that the key to turning the tables on socialist busybodies is understanding that, in a free market, the consumer is king – in other words, an attack on a company is really an attack on its customer’s freedom to choose. Unlike CSPI, who likely gets it funding from taxpayers whether they want it funded or not, every Big Mac Meal is bought voluntarily. In this spirit, Skinner mobilized his customer base to McDonald’s defense and accused CSPI of undermining parental authority. I also like the reference to the franchise owners and their employees. He took CSPI’s David-vs.-Goliath narrative and deftly turned it around. After all, who works harder and is more productive: a McDonald’s franchise owner and his employees, or a public policy scold? Is there any doubt?

 

The tobacco companies have completely missed this insight. Instead of trying to prove that tobacco is harmless (a fool’s errand), they should have framed the tobacco debate as a war on the smoker’s freedom of choice. Empower the “small people” (to borrow a phrase from BP’s chairman) and you win.

 

Yes we can!

NASA’s Muslim outreach

Earlier this week, in an Al Jazeera interview (!), President Obama’s NASA Chief listed the President’s top priorities for NASA. They are:

1. “re-inspire children to want to get into science and math”

2. “expand our international relationships”

3. “[Obama] wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

This set of priorities is so off-base and downright wacky that if Bolden’s interview was part of a comic skit written by a conservative satirist and he asked me what I thought of it, I would have disapproved. For satire to be effective, you can’t overdo it, I would have advised, there has to be some resemblance to reality. For that reason, such a comic book caricaturization of liberal excess is too over-the-top to be effective.

And I would be wrong. Not only does it resemble reality, it is reality.

This bizarre example illustrates the frightening fact that President Obama is an empty suit. But it is not the first clue. There have been others: the lackadaisical response to the Christmas Day bomber; the 12 days it took for him to respond to the Gulf oil spill; and last year’s equivocation over McCrystal’s Afghanistan plan, to name a few. But this is the clearest indication that the President is unfit for duty.

On the one hand, it is a bit of a mixed blessing because his incompetence has inhibited his legislative agenda. For instance, if he knew what he was doing, he would have had the Department of Health and Human Services craft the health care plan. Once done, he would have simultaneously introduced the bill to both houses of Congress in early 2009, a time when his approval numbers were still stratospheric so that it could pass without any unseemly deals like the cornhusker kickback. That Obamacare would have been much harder to dismantle. Instead, he slept past the window of opportunity and let partisan hacks in Congress like Nancy Pelosi write the bill because he couldn’t be bothered with the details. As a result he had to spend an enormous amount of political capital to achieve a pyrrhic victory on an entitlement program that a vast majority of Americans hate and want repealed.

Unfortunately, there are times when a President must lead. At such times, lack of judgment can be disasterous. Take the Gulf Oil Spill. Obama’s cluelessness has meant that the federal government has been little more than a bureaucratic hindrance in the cleanup efforts. He could have repealed the Jones Act, which prevents foreign ships from working in American waters, the way President Bush did after Katrina. This protectionist measure, which benefits maritime unions, should have been waived immediately in order to allow foreign vessels from places like Holland to help out. The question of whether to waive the Jones act or not is not a pro-union/anti-union thing, but a common sense thing. For instance, Bill Clinton is just as much of a unionmeister as Obama but is there any doubt that he would have immediately waived it under similar circumstances? Of course, Clinton has common sense and Obama doesn’t.

In his own mind, Obama thinks he is so high-minded that he is above it all, but in reality, he is merely Chauncey Gardiner.

BP and corporate PR

The current vilification of BP over the Gulf oil spill is a perfect example of the uselessness of conventional corporate PR.

Why do I say that? 

Take a look at BP before the spill. Knowing they are a prime example of ‘big oil’ (boo…hiss), they implemented a coherent strategy to counteract the negative connotations associated with that: they supported every environmentalist initiative they could, such as cap and trade; they loudly called themselves the first ‘green energy’ company; they even rechristened themselves “Beyond Petroleum”. Fat lot of good any of that did to them. As soon as disaster hit, they were “British Petroleum” and vilified with all the gusto they would have been vilified with if they had done none of this.

This got me thinking about the lousiness of corporate PR, how a business can be so good at advertising its products while simultaneously so woefully inadequate at politics. The problem, I believe, is that everybody knows that big companies are there just to make a buck. As a result, their slick ads just look cynical and, if they have any effect at all, it is negative.

The big flaw in today’s corporate PR strategy is that they begin by apologizing for what they do, and if there is one rule in politics (that Red Tories have yet to learn) is that you can’t apologize fast enough to win. When your enemies hear you apologize, they don’t see contrition or moral goodness, they only smell weakness and fear. You win political fights by trumpeting the strength of your case - and by vilifying your opponents.

Instead, corporate PR departments should run ads that say things like:

“Yes our purpose is to selfishly make money, but so what? given that we can only make money by engaging in voluntary transactions. This means we only turn a profit if we make products that are so good and desirable that people voluntarily part with their money in order to acquire those things. The consumer is our king and if you restrict us, it is the consumer who you really punish. And unlike our socialist critics, we actually produce things, many of which required real creativity and effort to produce. We don’t have to ‘give back to the community’ because we give back to the community every day, with jobs, and tax money and products that people want to buy. Our critics are the ones who need to ‘give back to the community’ since they produce nothing and only sponge off of other people’s taxes.”

I am not saying that aggressive PR like this, done ahead of time, would allow BP to come out smelling like roses after the Gulf oil spill crisis. Nothing could accomplish that. All that I am saying is that all their prostrating before the environmentalist gods did them no good. Absolutely zero, zip, nada. No favours that they could cash in at crunch time.