Canadian Cincinnatus

Somebody else gets who the moderate voter is

According to conventional wisdom, the body politic is a one-dimensional universe, with voters on a continuum from ‘left’ to ‘right’, with most found in the middle. Therefore, if a right-wing politician wants to win, he must ‘moderate’ his message, typically by axing policy positions, starting with those that are the most ‘right’ until he achieves 50% of the vote plus one. (Notice how the call to moderate is never given to left-wing candidates, who are labelled inspiration and visionary, but never extreme.) 

This strategy rarely works. The only visible result is that the moderating politician’s base, which has already been seething below the surface, now openly revolts. The ensuing acrimony further alienates moderates. This phenomenon I call the Red Tory/RINO death spiral.

It happens because politicians usually misunderstand the nature of ‘moderates’. These people are not in the middle because they are ‘moderate’, but rather because they don’t care. Clayton Cramer, of PJMedia, explains:

“Here is the problem: low-information voters are a big chunk of the electorate, especially in the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party isn’t free of them either. These are the voters who could not tell you if the national debt is $16 million or $16 trillion. They don’t know anything about the criticisms of how our government handled Benghazi. Ben Ghazi? Isn’t he an actor? Fast & Furious is a movie, not a scandal. They know that gay marriage is a good thing because all their favorite actors and musicians think it is so cool! And “assault weapons” are those guns they see in movies, firing hundreds of rounds a minute.

I hope by now that you are beginning to get the picture of what defines an LIV: he or she does not read PJ Media or, for that matter, the Huffington Post or any political publication, left or right. The better-informed LIVs read Us or People. Most of an LIV’s knowledge of economics, politics, and history comes from watching movies, television shows, The Daily Show, and stuff that one of his leftist friends posts on Facebook. You know why President Obama won the election? He was doing local radio shows and The View. He was being promoted by rap musicians and actors.” 

What a wonderful term: low information voter. The low information voter doesn’t care about policy. Right-wing, left-wing, who cares? Pass the chips.

You can’t woo the low information voter with policies. This is why the left never tries. What to do instead?

“The left knows this. They are not just running political ads during campaigns; they are running a continuous campaign through movies, television, news organizations, and entertainment media.Instapundit has pointed out that for a few million dollars, conservatives could buy up some of the women’s websites that get enormous audiences, and subtly change the political spin. It is a slow process, but over time this approach alters the basic assumptions that many LIVs have about the world. Think about the movie Death Wish (1974): do you think it played a part in changing popular perceptions of civilians engaged in armed self-defense?

Movies, music, and television are other areas where the left has been promoting their message for decades, and when they are subtle about the message, they actually make money at it. Lots of money. We can do it too — in fact, we might even make more money at it, because there are a lot of Americans who are still fundamentally on the right. Look at The Passion of the Christ (2004): more than $611 million in revenues worldwide. Act of Valor (2012) has brought in more than $81 million worldwide — considering what it cost to make, that’s spectacular.”

While he is right, it is unreasonable to expect Tim Hudak or Stephen Harper to become a movie mogul or tabloid magazine impresario overnight. But there are many things retail politicians can do. For starters, they can target low information voters with cues that they actually will respond to: those that are visual and emotional, not cerebral. Use policies to secure your base. Do both things and both groups of voters will cheer you on.

DIY: how-to advice for combatting campus thought police

If you are at all politically active in conservative circles, you will have likely been around when the subject of young people has come up, specifically how to attract young people to conservatism. At this point, I usually roll my eyes at the lame-o suggestions bandied about, which involves for the most part adding some ‘golly-gee’, ‘whiz-bang’ into conservatism to appeal to the ‘MTV generation’, or some such thing. These guys sound about as with-it as old people in the 1960’s, who fretted about teenagers shooting up with marijuana.

In reaction, I point out that today’s youth (and indeed all youth since the 1960’s) lean left because they are indoctrinated that way by our schools. To undo that, we must eliminate the practice of left-wing indoctrination in the school system. At this point, my listeners – all those guys hot to trot for the ‘MTV generation’ - recoil in horror, because they understand what I am proposing is a knock-out, drag-em-out fight with one of the left’s strongest power bases: academia.

But not everybody is so lily-livered. In the US, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has rolled up its sleeves and is doing precisely that. In this article, FIRE offers six pieces of good advice on promulgating free speech on campus: 

“1. Tie Speech Protections to Federal Funding.”

In Canada, the universities are regulated by the provinces, so substitute in the phrase ‘provincial funding’. In Ontario, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives have a good chance at overthrowing the rudderless, post-McGuinty Liberals. Recently, Tim has made favourable noises on a lot of conservative issues. We need to push him on this point.

“2. Legally End the Slippery Debate about What "Harassment" Really Means.” 

Harassment is one of those words whose definition the left likes to keep ambiguous: a narrow term, describing genuinely indefensible behaviour, when selling their anti-harassment agenda to the public, and a broad definition, that covers almost everything under the sun, at enforcement time. The word ‘racism’ works similarly.

“3. Litigate Aggressively.” 

I particularly like this point. And no, I am not a lawyer. But people who make it their business to mess with free speech need to feel pain. If they don’t, they will not modify their behaviour. And this goes double for people paid to mess with free speech.

“4.  Make Colleges Certify Free Speech Protection.

5. Not Just Sticks: Provide Carrots to Colleges that Behave.

6. The Broader Job: Let's Work to Change the Culture.”

FIRE is an American organization. In Canada, this struggle is being waged by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. At the recent Manning Center Networking Conference in Ottawa, I spoke to a bunch of conservative university students at the JCCF booth who are fighting the good fight at our universities as we speak. In addition to winning some important court victories, they are systematically rating Canadian universities on their free speech performance.

If you want to do something about the left-wing indoctrination of the youth, you can start by donating some money to them. I have.

Punching back twice as hard against the thought-police

According to the Washington Times:

“A West Virginia teen who was arrested and suspended for wearing a National Rifle Association T-shirt to school returned to class Monday wearing the same shirt that got him into trouble. 

Jared Marcum, 14, was joined by about 100 other students across Logan County who wore shirts with a similar gun rights theme in a show of support for free speech.”

“Ben White, the Charleston lawyer representing the Logan eighth-grader, said the Sons of the Second Amendment, a gun rights group, purchased and distributed the shirts.

Jared, a student at Logan Middle School, was arrested and suspended Thursday after he was pulled from a cafeteria line and told to remove or turn his shirt inside-out an order he refused.”

“School officials told the eighth-grader Monday that his one-day suspension was appropriate because he was being disruptive.

Mr. White said Jared was exercising his right to free speech and did not disrupt anything.

‘I think the disruption came from the teacher,’ Mr. White said.”

If you want to advance The Cause, you have to stand your ground and fight – hard and unapologetically. Appeasement, apologies and ‘not making waves’ is for Red Tory losers.

Way to go, kid!

 

Hat tip Instapundit.

And the winner of the Boston Marathon is… Vladimir Putin

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechnya declared independence, hoping to enjoy the same new-found freedom that the former Warsaw Pact countries, the Baltic States, the Ukraine and other central Asian republics had won. But unlike those other countries, Moscow responded to Chechnya’s desire for freedom with violence. This resulted in the two Chechen Wars, followed by the brutal occupation of Chechnya in 2000 and the election of Vladimir Putin (thanks to a conveniently timed campaign of apartment house bombings).

It is important to note that Chechnya was not always a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. In the early 90’s, this ideological poison was virtually unknown there. For instance, the original leader of the Chechnya independence movement, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was a secular nationalist. He was a Soviet Air Force major general who commanded all their nuclear forces in my homeland of Estonia in the 1980’s. He patterned the Chechnyan independence movement from the Estonian independence movement he witnessed firsthand, and if you know anything about the Baltic States, you know that it is about as far away from Islamic fundamentalism as you can get on this planet. Dudayev greatly sympathised with the Estonian anti-Soviet struggle. He learned to speak Estonian while he was stationed there, and when the order came down from Moscow to crush the Estonian independence movement in 1990, he declined to pass the order along. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Dudayev went back home and led the Chechnyan independence movement all the way through the First Chechen War, when he was killed by an anti-radiation missile that homed in on his satellite phone. It is rumoured that this technology was given to Yeltsin’s Russia by the naive Clinton administration. 

In any event, by the time Putin had won the Second Chechen War in 2000, all reasonable, Western-leaning Chechens like Dudayev had been exterminated. Into this Kremlin-created vacuum stepped vicious Islamic fundamentalists who have committed all manner of atrocities in the name of Chechnya.

This terrible situation was created by the Putin administration. But now, if Putin wants to crush Chechnya some more (the Chechens don’t give up easily) by committing further human rights violations there, all he has to do to get his get-out-of-jail-free card from the US  is to remind Americans of the Boston Marathon bombing.

The Ontario Gas plant controversy demonstrates why Small is Better

Partisan Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats likely believe that the managerial incompetence of Dalton McGuinty’s government caused the Charlie Foxtrot over the cancelled Oakville and Mississauga natural gas power plants. And there is a lot of truth in this.

But the exposure of Liberal incompetence is not the most important take-away lesson from this affair. The most important lesson is that the laissez faire principle “ small is better” is correct.

How?

Simple. People don’t do Big very well. The whole gas plant issue was managed by the premier’s office. This meant that a decision that should have been made by Ontario Power Generation – or, ideally, by private investors hoping to sell power to Ontario’s power grid - was made by high-level political operatives who were too animated by matters unrelated to electrical power production. In other words, McGuinty and his advisors were living by the hoary left-wing slogan, “think globally, act locally”.

Small organizations work better because they “think locally and act locally”. On the local scale, the obviously correct answer would have been to finish their construction because natural gas plants are inherently clean; stopping construction would waste all the money spent so far, as well as incur further costs from contractual penalties; and the increased electrical capacity would eventually be needed. The relocation option would result in more additional costs and would not necessarily avoid NIMBY opposition. People opposed to power plants can be found everywhere. But to McGuinty, all of these genuine factors were trumped by the Big Picture factor of winning the next provincial election.

The small businessman (and a small government official) makes better decisions, not because he is smarter than the big businessman (or the big government pol), but because his decisions are on a small enough scale that he can ponder all the relevant details - and because his interests are more likely to be aligned with the people he serves. This is why small government is efficient government and big government is bloated, inefficient and unresponsive.

Canada, like the US, has a wonderful system for facilitating small government. It is called federalism. In this system, every government function is pushed to the lowest level possible, with municipal governments performing most day-to-day functions and the national government only performing those high-level functions necessary for a sovereign state. We also have a second system for facilitating smallness: it is called the free enterprise system. Every function that does not absolutely have to be run by the government is left to private interests to manage. When these systems are healthy, the result is efficient and responsive.

When they have been compromised by centralization and socialism, as the Ontario gas plant decision was, the result is waste and fraud.

New Civility Watch: leftists violently ‘celebrate” the death of Margaret Thatcher

According to the National Post:

“the BBC reported that seven police officers were injured in Bristol in southwest England as they tried to break up a street party apparently celebrating Thatcher’s death.

The injuries to officers came after about 200 revellers in Bristol refused police requests to disperse, police said. “Bottles and cans were thrown at officers,” Chief Inspector Mark Jackson of Avon and Somerset Constabulary told AFP. 

“A police vehicle was damaged and one person was arrested for violent disorder. Some small bin fires were also started and the fire service attended.” Police said the party was understood to be a celebration of Thatcher’s death but that investigations were continuing."

We need to keep a mental tally of incidents like this because, in spite of the alarming frequency with which they occur, they don’t prevent the left from lecturing us about ‘extremism’. The most infamous example was President Obama’s speech after the Gabby Gifford shooting, where he falsely insinuated that ‘extremist’ right-wing rhetoric helped push the deranged gunman over the edge. And if there isn’t an incident to leverage, they simply make one up, like the demonstrably false accusation by members of the Congressional Black Caucus that the n-word was used against them at a Tea Party Rally on Capitol Hill.

This hutzpah is amazing considering the fact that almost all incidents of political bad manners and violence are from the left, whether a violent celebration of a Conservative Prime Minister’s death, or chanting “Bush is Hitler” for 8 years, or a G20 riot; the list goes on and on. There is no reason to meekly accept lectures on the horribleness of Harper’s attack ads from a party that gave us the “guns in the streets” ad. The fact is, there is simply no conservative equivalent of the Margaret Thatcher death party anywhere. They say talk radio is ‘extreme’? Try a typical left-wing street demonstration, where every form of paranoid conspiracy theory and genocidal lunacy is openly peddled, celebrated and advocated for. You never hear about it because the media maintains radio silence about such goings-on, and no prominent left-of-center politician laments the state of politics because of it.

Unfortunately, all too often, clueless conservatives are buffaloed into believing these exhortations about civility are sincere, even moral, statements. They are not. They are bilge - and sanctimonious bilge at that. We must call them on their hypocrisy – and stop taking the insult on top of the injury.

Matt Gurney is wrong, the Tories should keep being “jerks”

Normally Matt Gurney is the National Post columnist I most agree with, but this time, when he advises the Harper Conservatives to stop being jerks, I dissent. How are they jerks? According to Gurney, like this:

“That means no more omnibus bills rammed through Parliament. No more nickle and diming veterans. No more comparing the opposition to child pornographers (pretty much no more Vic Toews whatsoever, actually). No more helicopter rides back from fishing trips. No more pretty gazebos. No more shutting down your own MPs when they want to debate a contentious motion. If it’s at all possible to avoid the appearance of not caring about Africans dying of thirst, that’d be great, too. And let’s not even get started on Senator Brazeau.”

While I agree with him about “nickel and diming” of veterans, G20 pork, and sundry venal offences, I remain ambivalent about comparing opposition members to child pornographers, and consider him dead wrong with regard to omnibus bills and “shutting down [of his] own MP’s”. Contrary to popular belief, the Canadian public does not punish politicians who are jerks. It rewards them. Just look at the career of Jean Chretien. He was able to best Preston Manning and Stockwell Day in Parliament and in federal elections - not by being a nice guy - but by sticking a shiv in their backs.

Gurney points out the need for Harper to balance the budget in the 2015 federal election campaign. In this Gurney is absolutely right. But how can Stephen Harper can accomplish that?

Answer: not by being a nice guy. To get stuff done in Parliament, he has to play every trick in the parliamentary playbook. Including ramming omnibus bills through, accusing opposition MP’s of nasty things and, yes, making his MPs feel the lash.

As an old-time Reformer who believes that social issues should be tackled by the government, the last piece of advice is the hardest for me, personally, to accept. But it is nevertheless true. The rules of the Parliamentary Game are such that discipline pays off and indiscipline doesn’t. Preston Manning gave free reign to his MPs and the result was a Nazi eruption a week. To the delight of Karate Chretch, Manning was always on the defence. And the creative destruction practiced by Stockwell Day almost split Canada’s right into three. I wish this wasn’t the case, but in our Parliamentary system, the only way to get social issues (or any issues) though Parliament is by following a long-term, disciplined, top-down strategy. Kelly McParland makes the same point (though he is wrong about the GOP - he usually is wrong about American politics – because the political game down there has vastly different rules).

No, Harper needs to keep being a jerk; he just has to make sure he keeps on being a smart jerk.

Justin Trudeau, the Blank Slate

Chairman Mao once said, “the most beautiful poem can be written on a blank piece of paper.” In the 2008 Presidential elections, candidate Barack Obama was that piece of paper, and the genius of his campaign was that they were able to write a very beautiful poem indeed on the canvas of Barry Soetoro. It was all BS of course, but damn it was pretty. 

In the Post, John Ivison points out the same thing about the Dauphin, Justin Trudeau:

“At the moment, he is a giant blank screen and people are able to project their own image of what a Trudeau government would mean.” 

I think that is a good explanation as any about why this pretty-boy cipher with a famous last name is as popular as he is. By any sober, objective standards, he should be dismissed out of hand.

Therefore, subjecting him to objective standards is what the Harper machine needs to do, and that is what the upcoming attack ads should aim for.

This cannot be done simply by reciting a laundry list of dry facts. Trudeau’s frothy personality and celebrity image must also be subject to ridicule, but in a way where the humour is seen to illuminate deep truths about the man’s incompetence at holding executive office. The takedown of Dion and Ignatieff form a good blueprint for the project.

As I said before, I worry that the Harper Conservatives have become complacent with success. The Republicans under McCain and Romney could have done this to Obama, whose biography was wide open to all kinds of legitimate attacks. But he never received such critiques - likely because these don’t-rock-the-boat Republicans were pre-emptively cowed by the charges of racism they knew would be coming at them if they had tried. Of course, they would have had to fend off those attacks from the White House. It is to the everlasting shame of McCain and Romney that America was inflicted with a hard-left, stealth-socialist President even though it was in their power to prevent it.

Stephen Harper is burdened by the same responsibility.

Upcoming Conservative attack ads against Justin Trudeau may be too timid

According to John Ivison of the National Post:

“The Harper Conservatives have not bothered to wait for the apparent formality of Justin Trudeau’s election as the next leader of the Liberal Party – an attack ad campaign is in the can already, claiming that Mr. Trudeau is “not ready” to govern.

Sources say the Tory campaign will start almost immediately after the Liberal leadership results are announced on April 14, in an effort to define the new leader in the eyes of voters.”

Good. Gotta define him now and not take any chances.

“Going after Mr. Trudeau for his perceived lack of credentials is curious. 

Successful attack ads are grounded in reality and have to amplify feelings about their subject that already exist.”

True. As well, the ads against Dion and Ignatief worked also because the caricatures were painted in pastels. A lot was left to the imagination. In each case the Conservatives found an image of their target that expressed in pictures the message they wanted to get across. Who could forget the picture of Stephane Dion shrugging his shoulders as if he were saying, “I haven’t got a clue.”

“On that score, the Tory ads may work well – many Liberals remain unconvinced that Mr. Trudeau has been tested sufficiently to be leader of their party, far less leader of the country.”

Good start.

“On the other hand, Mr. Trudeau’s advisers are happy that the Conservatives have gone after their candidate over his lack of experience, rather than for being the son of a former prime minister with no obvious qualifications for political leadership." 

Oh, oh.

“We will need to see the finished ads before final judgment, but it seems the Conservatives have not attempted to tar Mr. Trudeau as being “one of them” not “one of us.”” 

If this is true, it is a big mistake. The attacks on Dion and Iggy worked because they simultaneously attacked their personalities as well as their executive incompetence.

“It may be that the party’s own research suggests Canadians are fed up with negative ads and have decided to pull their punches as a result. Certainly, the ads released to attack NDP leader Thomas Mulcair in fall 2011 were limp by previous Conservative standards – a policy-based assault, accusing him of propagating “risky theories and dangerous economic experiments.””

Poll after poll says that people hate attack ads; and poll after poll show that they work. While people may have had it up to here with attack ads by the time the 2011 federal election drew to a close, they have had two years of peace and quiet to recuperate.

“It may be that the Tories don’t want to weaken either of the other national party leaders to the point where the other then becomes a genuine threat in 2015.”

If this is true, then the Conservative strategy is too clever by a half. It would be nice to play the Libs and the NDP off against each other, but it strikes me as a political equivalent of a double-bank shot. In real life, the best strategy is usually the simplest to execute.

“Whatever the reason, people who have seen the finished ad say it lacks the bite of its predecessors.” 

My big worry is that the Harper Tories are pulling their punches because they are becoming complacent; they are no longer lean and hungry. In politics, you can’t rest on your laurels. You are either going forward or you’re going backwards. If you champion the status quo, you inspire nobody and you are probably toast. 

Just look at Ernie Eves, Mike Harris’s successor as Ontario Premier. As my friend Mike Downtown pointed out, Eves looked about as hungry as a well-fed cat.

The Lost Worlds of Apocalypse Now

I have always been a big fan of the film Apocalypse Now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came across an off-hand remark about the adventures of Col. John Stockman in Col. Hal Moore’s book, We Were Soldier’s Once...And Young. Hal Moore was a battalion commander in one of the original helicopter-borne units in Vietnam, the First Cavalry Division. The First Cavalry pioneered airmobile tactics and Moore’s book was adapted into a very good war movie starring Mel Gibson in 2002. 

Col. John Stockman commanded another battalion in the First Cavalry, the First Battalion, 9^th Cavalry, otherwise known as the first of the ninth. Stockman was known as an unconventional loose cannon by the brass, but who was loved by ‘his boys’ for dramatic gestures such as introducing Civil War era paraphernalia into his unit, like trumpets and Union cavalry hats. Sounds familiar? It should, if you have seen Apocalypse Now. 

So, I thought: are there any other characters in the movie based on real-life interesting people? It turns out there are.

Take Col Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlin Brando. He was obviously based on the literary character Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But it turns out he was also based on an historical character as well: Tony Poe. Tony Poe was a Marine veteran of Iwo Jima. After the war, he joined the CIA and organized Korean refugees for sabotage work behind enemy lines in the Korean War. From there, he did similar, behind-the-front-lines work in Burma, Indonesia, and Laos, where, according to Wikipedia:

“He paid Hmong fighters to bring him the ears of dead enemy soldiers... He dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy-ops. Although his orders were only to train forces, he also went into battle with them and was wounded several times by shrapnel.”

After Vietnam, he went native, as the British used to say, and married a Hmong woman with whom he lived in Thailand until 1990. When he moved back to the States he helped Hmong war veterans settle in the US. What an interesting guy!

The trouble is, as I read further, both Poe and Coppola denied that he was the basis of Kurtz, despite the obvious similarities. Coppola claimed Kurtz was inspired by Special Forces Col. Robert Rheault, who was considered a brilliant officer by everybody who knew him and whose predicted rise to the top ranks of the Pentagon was halted when he was charged with murdering a South Vietnamese double agent while a green beret in Nam. More similarities and another interesting character.

And the interesting real-life characters don’t stop there. Take the photojournalist portrayed by Dennis Hopper. Again, he is obviously based on another literary character from Heart of Darkness, this time the Harlequin. But again, he was also based on an historical character: Sean Flynn, actor Errol Flynn’s son! In addition to being the son of a famous Hollywood actor and starring in a movie at age 15, he was a maniac, freelance photojournalist who went to Vietnam on his own initiative and spent a lot of time on the front lines (and behind it), travelling with the 101^st Airborne Division and the Special Forces. He went missing while travelling by motorcycle in Cambodia in 1970. He was never heard from again and his remains have never been found. 

After reading all this, it occurred to me that Stockman, Poe, Rheault and Flynn were interesting men in their own right who deserved far more than to be remembered by history as movie caricatures (though Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper did superb jobs caricaturing them). All of them inspire films of their own that could be marketed as quasi-spin-offs of Apocalypse Now.

Great idea or what!