Canadian Cincinnatus

Obama acts like a winner, the GOP acts like losers

In politics, as in romance, perceptions of reality are often more real than the underlying reality itself. 

According to the Real Clear Politics average of presidential approval polls, President Obama is about 14% underwater. The thing is, he doesn’t act as if this is the case. He is moving full steam ahead: the nuke deal with Iran, Obamacare, immigration reform, whatever. As a result, the impacts of his bad poll numbers are not anything like what they would be if he were visibly shaken. It is true that many Democrat congressmen are panicking, and this has negative consequences for his agenda, but because he is pushing forward on all fronts, he is not actually being forced to give up on anything.

I say this not to criticize Obama, but to praise his political acumen. He acts like a winner and he fights to win. If only the Republicans did the same.

Speaking of which, the GOP leaders in Congress - the in-over-his-head, backroom dealmaker, John Boehner, and the greatest orator since Cicero, Mitch McConnell - are acting like losers even though they are winning in spite of themselves. They have pre-emptively conceded that the debt ceiling will be raised and that they are still interested in passing some sort of an amnesty. My God, what fools! If they only acted like half the winner in victory that Obama pretends to be in defeat, Obama’s socialist agenda would be completely routed. The collapse of Obamacare is an historic opportunity that rarely occurs, and it is largely being fumbled because Obama’s opponents are clueless bumblers.

Toronto City Council’s unintended gift to Rob Ford

Heading into the 1988 federal election, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was cruising to defeat, weighted down by a thousand petty scandals. Then a miracle happened. The Liberal-dominated Senate did something that the unelected Canadian Senate rarely did until that point: they rejected the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that Mulroney had staked his political reputation on. They told him that it was such an important piece of legislation that passing it in Parliament was insufficient. It needed to be ratified by the voters. As a result, the election was transformed from a referendum on Mulroney’s venality into a referendum on free trade. Thus transmogrified, Mulroney won the election in a walk. The Liberal Senators thought they were giving Mulroney a shit sandwich; in reality, they baked him a victory cake.

So it is in 2014, when Toronto City Council voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of his powers. As a result, from now on every misstep in city hall is the fault of the city’s left-wing establishment; and by leaving him as a ceremonial mayor, they let Ford retain enough of a public profile to capitalize on their screw-ups. Demonstrating the instincts of a natural politician (the kind of instincts that are totally alien to that manor-born buffoon, John Tory), Ford immediately capitalized on his new-found freedom by pouncing on an unforced error made by City Council. The very first act of the Ford-free City Council was to vote in a property tax hike. In response, Ford announced that now that he is gone, the gravy train is back.

You know what? He’s right.

In related news, the latest polls show that Rob Ford is now more popular than Barack Obama.

So how conservative is Hollywood anyway?

No that isn’t a typo, I meant to say ‘conservative’ rather than ‘liberal’. The reason I ask such a counterintuitive question is that I have long suspected that there are far more conservatives in Hollywood than meet the eye, choosing to go stealth to avoid the fate of out-in-the-open conservatives John Milius and Mel Gibson.

Milius is the talented but underutilized scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry. As Steve Sailer pointed out:

"When I was in college, Apocalypse Now was being sold as the ultimate antiwar film. Yet it was actually beloved by the jocks and ROTC cadets in my dorm, who came back from it humming Wagner and shouting, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” Meanwhile, my more cultured friends seemed perturbed by it.

When I finally saw Apocalypse Now, I realized why: It was a based on a far-right script by Milius (who went on to direct Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn) about how the US could have won in Vietnam if we only had the guts to unleash Kurtz. (Apocalypse Now was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who won his first Oscar for writing Patton.)"

Other that being the creator of the excellent Rome miniseries in 2005 (one of the best shows to ever appear on TV, at least in my opinion), his work schedule has been pretty light. A writer and director as talented as him should have had three times the output.

When it comes to Mel Gibson, in spite of the fact that has a track record of producing blockbusters as well as one inarguably brilliant film (The Passion of Christ), his latest film Get the Gringo (which was good enough to get an 80% approval rating by critics on Rotten Tomatoes), never got wide theatrical release in the US. You ever heard of it before now?

Rather, conservatives who are more adept at office politics covertly insert conservative themes into their work, thereby avoiding the liberal blacklist.

For instance, Soprano’s creator, David Chase said of himself, “I am very, very, very traditional.” Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that? (This quote used to be found in the Wikipedia page for The Sopranos but has since been removed.) 

Or take Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, who described his philosophy of life thus: 

"If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for Biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.'"

Yup. Sounds like a conservative to me.

An example of an almost-out-in-the-open crypto-conservative, who practically spells out his themes in countless interviews, is Neill Blomkamp. He nevertheless still manages to deceive critics of his true intentions. The left-wing critics hear what they want to hear, and his right-wing critics, who never bother to read the interviews, can’t see past the liberal smokescreen in his films. For instance, conservatives widely denounced his latest film, Elysium, for being ‘left-wing’, even though it was a critique of America’s open border policy with Mexico, as he eludes here:

"And then the third thing is painting this realistic image of a future Earth that is my realistic version of a future Earth, which meant the borders being erased entirely and having this fluid population group that basically moves from Chile all the way up to Canada. … I just wanted that to feel real, like, as real as possible, and the numbers of people that are Latin are going to overwhelm the numbers of people that aren’t. And if you, again, hold true to the metaphor, the wealth would have gone to the station."

And here (where he describes his first experience in Mexico):

“We were walking through these totally impoverished, insane areas with feral dogs and crying babies and people making fires, and on the horizon I could see the floodlights from the U.S. shining into Mexico, and there were multiple Black Hawks flying the perimeter, and it was like science fiction on Earth,” he says. “Nothing has changed, but now you’re on the other side of the border.” His goal with Elysium, he says, was to put all of us there."

About his career prospects he says:

"The next film I want to make is far lower budget than this and is f**king mental. And the next film after that, I think it may end my career. It’s like a, it’s a comedy that may — I don’t even know what will happen. And I like that I don’t know what will happen, you know? If it’s like too volatile, and people just hate it, and I get booted out of Hollywood."

Notice how he uses 60’s language to cloak conservative intentions.

Christopher Nolan, the director of the spectacularly successful Batman movies is another almost-out-of-the-conservative closet, especially with his last of his trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, which an explicit attack on Occupy Wall Street. But I guess his conservative themed films make too much money for Hollywood to blacklist him…for now.

But perhaps I am being too optimistic here. Could it be that many of the filmmakers I supect as being conservative are really not so much deliberate crypto-cons but rather unreflective liberals harbouring an inner conservative id? This ideological schizophrenia may simply be a product of a conditioned reflex response. If one has to hold liberal politics in order to get by at work, but if, at the same time, your marketplace rewards work that is at least nominally conservative, then an unexamined duality is perhaps the path of least psychological resistance.

I had always suspected that Martin Scorsese was a closet conservative, as most of his films depict humanity as Hobbesian savages, where life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Not too many of his movies show people to be the Rousseauian noble savages (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”) that utopian socialists think we must be. But perhaps Scorsese just hasn’t examined the contradiction within himself, enjoying enough worldly success and acclaim that he doesn’t feel the need for much introspection.

Oh noooo: John Tory is thinking abour running for mayor

Just when you thought the Rob Ford scandal could not get worse, it does: former mayoral candidate and former Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leader John Tory is mulling another run for Toronto’s mayor.

In many ways, John Tory is the mirror image of Rob Ford. Tory is sober, industrious, and conscientious, with a presidential bearing who is completely incompetent. Until Tory arrived on the scene, I had always believed Joe Clarke to be the most useless politician to ever exist – of any party, any level of government or even any country. But John Tory’s bungling reign as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party dethroned Clarke as the most useless political leader ever.  As I argued yesterday, while Rob Ford’s personal life is a train wreck, his track record as Mayor of Toronto has been solid.

Both Ford and Tory are perfect examples of how personal and public virtue need not go together. 

If you don’t believe me, answer this question: what election has Tory ever won? Aside from his PC Ontario leadership bid, his only electoral success among the general public was a by-election win in the safest conservative seat in the province when he was the new leader of the PC’s. That’s it. In the general provincial election, he repeated Ernie Eves’ shameful shellacking, except that he added to Eves’ failure by losing his own seat as well. When he tried to get back into the Provincial Parliament, he lost the second safest conservative seat in the province. As a political strategist, he managed Kim Campbell’s 1993 election campaign (!), the greatest single loss of any party in Canadian history (losing 154 seats, from an original 156 seats). You would think that would be enough for anybody to reconsider a career in politics. 

In his private life, Tory has had a lot of big jobs, but – at least as far as I can tell - all (or almost all) of them were due to either to his father, or his father’s friend, Ted Rogers.

The prospect of John Tory becoming the standard-bearer of conservatism in Toronto scares me a hell out of a lot more than the next salacious revelation about Rob Ford’s personal life.

Andrew Coyne: elitism vs. Ford Nation

In the struggle between the elites and the populists – as personified by Toronto’s embattled mayor, Rob Ford, and his Ford Nation supporters - the National Post’s Andrew of the well-heeled Coyne family takes the side of the elites:

“And of all his enablers, the most culpable are the strategists, the ones who fashioned his image as the defender of the little guy, the suburban strivers, against the downtown elites, with their degrees and their symphonies — the ones who turned a bundle of inchoate resentments into Ford Nation. Sound familiar? It is the same condescending populism, the same aggressively dumb, harshly divisive message that has become the playbook for the right generally in this country, in all its contempt for learning, its disdain for facts, its disrespect of convention and debasing of standards.” 

Hmm. Sounds like Canada’s populists are pretty dumb.

But then again, by any objective standards, Rob Ford has been Toronto’s best mayor. Why do I say that? Look at the record. The current City of Toronto was amalgamated in 1998. In that time, we have had three mayors: Mel Lastman, David Miller and Rob Ford. In terms of greatness, I would rate them this way: OK, awful and good – respectively.

Why would I rate Ford as good? Forget about his personal life for a moment and look only at his public record: he eliminated the car tax, eliminated the plastic bag tax, he balanced the budget, he privatized half of Toronto’s garbage collection, he took many steps to clean up the corruption at Metro Housing caused by Miller’s cronies, and he browbeat a Scarborough Subway extension out of the subway-hating Ontario Liberals. 

Which other mayor can match this record? Not Lastman; and certainly not David Miller, whose reign was an unenviable string of failures and screw-ups. From Miller’s war on the car (i.e. the tax-paying commuter), to the unnecessary cancellation of the island bridge (which triggered contractual penalties that Porter Airlines used to purchase its initial aircraft fleet), to his bungling of garbage collection (each one of his decisions in this regard seemed to have been designed to increase costs, add complexity and reduce efficiency), to his neglect of subways, and to his insane fetish for streetcars (the most inefficient and inflexible means of public transit known to man), which resulted in his neighbourhood-killing St Clair Avenue streetcar right-of-way, David Miller was a sober, respectable catastrophe.

So between a knuckle-ragging Ford Nation Neanderthal like me and a well-bred elitist like you Andrew, this is why Rob Ford generates such strong residual good will among Toronto’s residents. We don’t care if he isn’t respectable in the eyes of Jon Stewart.

In contrast, none of the personal failures and ‘criminal activities’ that Coyne catalogues have any direct bearing on his job. Underlying all the salacious details Coyne provides is this fact: at the time of this writing, Ford has not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and that many of the criminal activities that Coyne lists are guilt-by-associations (assuming that they are true in the first place).

But Coyne’s article and my response raises a larger question: where is the truth ultimately to be found, among the elites or among the populists? Who can you trust more? 

The correct answer to this question is that no group of people is a reliable repository of truth. On some things, the elites are right, on others, the populists are right. It all depends on the issue and the circumstance.

What we can however be sure of is that one of the great strengths possessed by free societies like Canada (at least for the time being) is that our elites enjoy no monopoly, and that they can be replaced over time. The great strength of our country is that we are governed by conflict – free-market competition, political competition and an adversarial legal system – not by an org chart, like the Soviet Union or the Assyrian Empire. This ensures that nobody becomes complacent and that truth can be a useful ally of the underdog.

Recently I find myself sympathizing more with the populists than the elites. This is because the centralization of today’s society has swollen the power of today’s elites to unhealthy extremes. One would expect a small government advocate like Andrew Coyne to appreciate that.

Howard Levitt: “How Rob Ford can not only keep his job, but weather the storm and become a political legend”

Over at the Financial Post, Howard Levitt has the best piece I have yet read about the unprecedented situation Toronto faces with its mayor.

The first part succinctly explains the durability of Rob Ford’s popularity:

1) Ford’s supporters feel disenfranchised from municipal government, perceiving themselves as receiving little benefit from City Hall. … They perceive Ford’s agenda … as in their interest.

From my perspective, personal problems aside, Ford has racked up more substantive achievements than any mayor our Megacity ever had. Under Ford’s predecessor, David Miller, Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough were irrelevant.

2) On the theory of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend”, many Torontonians recoil at the prospect of the re-enactment of the tax and spend David Miller regime or its present day embodiments of Adam Vaughan or Olivia Chow.

The Toronto elites really do not fathom the extent to which the arrogant David Miller and the sanctimonious Adam Vaughan make the skin of ordinary people crawl with disgust.

3) Similarly, they are reflectively suspicious of the left-liberal media or downtown left-wingers like Clay Ruby, the vanguard of those attacking Ford.

Ditto. 

4) …They see his opponents as an elite whose interests are inimical to their own and who never gave Ford a chance. That is why the more these groups attack him, the more popular he has become.

Ford’s opponents have the Toronto Star to thank for the people’s perception of them. The Star has gone out of its way to attack him unfairly every chance it got, such as when they printed an ‘expose’ about how Ford cheated on his diet by eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. On a more substantive note, the failed lawsuit to unseat him was a transparent attempt by anti-Ford partisans to use lawfare to achieve what they couldn’t at the ballot box.

5) While they don’t want a crack smoking Mayor, that seems the lesser of the two evils.

Well said. I don’t want a crack smoking Mayor either, but a crack smoking Rob Ford is better than a stone-cold sober David Miller – or worse, Adam Vaughan. Yeechhh!

The second part of the article offers excellent political advice:

Ford should explain, with humility, the relentless, ruthless and unprecedented (in this country) pressures he has been under since becoming Mayor. He can truthfully portray that his opponents never accepted him as their Mayor or gave him a chance, that their attacks have descended to repeatedly trespassing on his property, frightening his daughter and attacking his family.

The pitiless and public brutality of Ford’s enemies is his strength.

He should say that he has never experienced such viciousness before and was not, personally or temperamentally, equipped for this bullying. But he can claim that, rather than succumbing to his detractors, he stuck to his mandate and focused on doing his work.

As I keep saying, Ford’s substantive record is very good.

However, he must acknowledge that these personal attacks upon himself and his family have taken a severe emotional toll. He responded, he should explain, by turning to drink and, a couple of times, something stronger, as an unfortunate escape.

Since the underlying facts are true and the reaction understandable, most will believe and sympathize with him.

He then has to advise that he is seeking treatment and using his accumulated vacation time to obtain that assistance now. He should provide a definite return date. If he does not do that, his opponents will resist his ever returning.

If he does all of these things and returns rehabilitated and refreshed, his resurrection could become a political legend and he, to his opponents’ chagrin, an unstoppable force.

 If things really end up this way, heads will explode at the Toronto Star.

But first, go read the whole thing.

Rob Ford at Toronto’s Remembrance Day Ceremony: An Eyewitness Account

I happened to attend the City of Toronto’s Remembrance Day Ceremony, held at the Cenotaph in front of Old City Hall yesterday. As a result, I saw first-hand Mayor Rob Ford’s ‘controversial’ attendance.

His speech was well received by those in the crowd, but a really interesting thing happened after he laid his wreath. The way things were set up, the main dignitaries sat to the left of the Cenotaph, and the old war veterans sat directly to the right (these would be the people this ceremony honours). The script called for the wreath-layers to approach the Cenotaph from the left and depart from the right, walking directly past the vets. As an invited guest of the City, I sat in the block of seats in the center so I had a good view of everything.

After Ford had laid his wreath, and was about to walk past the veterans, they waved him over. When he got there, many of them wanted to shake his hand. Some of them wanted to have their picture taken with him.

He was the only dignitary the assembled veterans showed any interest in. All the others – Karen Stintz, Denzil Minnan-Wong and an angry-looking Thomas Mulcair - elicited no reaction at all when they walked past the old soldiers. 

While the media was over this ceremony like a pack of hyenas, I am not sure how many of them will report this Rob Ford story.

 

The Republican establishment lost Virginia

In the Virginia Gubernatorial election on Tuesday, the Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, lost to the Democrat, Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, in a race that was much tighter than predicted. Cuccinelli lost the state-wide office by only 50,000 votes. An interesting fact about the campaign:

 “The RNC put only $3 million into this race. Ken was outspent by a margin of something between 4:1 and 10:1, if you believe the Associated Press.”

 It is not unreasonable to believe that even a modest level of financial support would have pushed Cuccinelli over the top (and dealt a stinging blow to McAuliffe’s supporter, Hillary Clinton). More here:

“The Republican National Committee spent three times as much in 2009 on the same race as they did this year.

The Chamber of Commerce spent one million dollars in the last Governor’s race, and not one dime on Cuccinelli.

While it’s often claimed that Tea Party candidates do poorly among independents, Cuccinelli actually won independents by 9 points, 47 percent to 38 percent.

‘McAuliffe outraised Cuccinelli by almost $15 million,’ and in the last weeks of the campaign, this left Cuccinelli with nearly no media exposure.

Even Politico wonders if Cuccinelli was beginning to turn the tide against the ‘War on Women’ narrative, as he drove down McAuliffe’s lead among women from 24% in polling to 9%.”

On the air, Mark Levin has accused the Republican establishment of wanting Tea Party candidates to lose because they perceive them to be a threat to the party’s internal status quo. Did RNC chairman, Reince Priebus, intentionally torpedo Cuccinelli because he thought he was Sharon Angle or Christine O’Donnell?

Either way, Reince Priebus has a lot to answer for.

And if his answer isn’t satisfactory, he should be fired.

John Ivison on the need for Senate reform

The most intelligent thing I have read about the Mike Duffy whoop-dee-doo in a long time was written by John Ivison last week:

To win again, Mr. Harper has to start using his dominance of the centre-right of the political spectrum to turn losing issues into winning issues.

Yes, yes, yes. Trying to change the subject is a trick that everybody will see through.

The way out of the Mike Duffy imbroglio, it seems, is to double down on Senate reform, while having a plan to abolish the Red Chamber in the back pocket, if reform proves impossible.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the Conservatives are much better placed on this issue than their opposition. While the NDP favour abolishing the Senate, they have never been as enthusiastic about it as the Conservatives have been about reforming it. In the case of the Liberals, Justin Trudeau actually favours keeping the Senate as is.

When the debate turns towards matters of substance, Duffy’s venality will be forgotten.

Rather, he said, the Conservatives would be the only party to give Canadians a voice in the next step in democratic evolution.

He concluded with John Diefenbaker’s quote when the Bill of Rights was adopted by the House of Commons: “ I am a free Canadian … free to stand for what I think is right; free to oppose what I think wrong; free to choose who shall govern my country.”

This sounds very much like tentative steps toward a national referendum on the future of the Senate, even though Mr. Poilievre said “there is no plan for that at this time." 

When the 1988 federal election became a referendum on free trade, Mulroney ended up winning an election that he was set to lose over petty scandals. 

The lines and arguments road-tested by the minister of state will no doubt be repeated and amplified as we head towards the next election. By that time, the hope must be that when Canadians think of the Conservative Party and the Senate, they think of Prairie-style grassroots democracy, not Mike Duffy and his per-diems.

 

Ann Coulter on conservatives: stop abandoning your leaders when they get into trouble

Ann Coulter has for a long time made the point that a key difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives throw their own to the wolves the moment they get into trouble while liberals circle the wagons and fight to the bitter end for their people. Contrast the way liberals defended Bill Clinton over his countless scandals and the way conservatives threw South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford under the bus in 2009.

While the Bill Clinton tale is well known to all, perhaps you have forgotten Sanford. He was the conservative governor of South Carolina who proved to be one of the best dissenting voices against Obama during the early years of his presidency. Before Sanford’s scandal, the Cato Institute rated him the best governor in America. The reason for his fall from grace: for several days nobody knew where he was.

It was subsequently found that he was in Argentina with his mistress. Conservatives competed with each other in calling him a creep and a pervert for cheating on his wife. For his heinous crime, the man who was the leading conservative governor was censured by the State House with a vote of 102 to 11. To my knowledge, the South Carolina Governor does not carry the launch codes of the Plametto State’s nuclear arsenal with him. 

Ann’s point is that when you don’t back your leaders, you can’t expect people to step up to the plate to be your leader, and therefore champion your causes. This dynamic is operative in Canada as well. Consider all the “law and order” conservatives who call for Rob Ford’s head over his (yet unseen) crack video, in spite of the fact that Ford has proven himself to be – in spite of his myriad personal failings – the most effective conservative leader the City of Toronto ever had.

If, at some later date, you find yourself complaining, “how come there aren’t there any real conservative in poltics these days?”, you only have to look into the mirror to answer that question. 

Who wants to be your champion?