Canadian Cincinnatus

Liz Mair, just another member of the GOP consultant class

Who is Liz Mair? She is the head of the anti-Trump Make America Awesome PAC. Last week, her PAC released an ad in Utah attacking the character of Donald Trump’s wife. As a result of this tin-eared, ham-fisted effort, Ted Cruz was forced to play on the defence all week, all thanks to an attack ad made behind his back by somebody else. Way to go Liz! Instead of going on the offensive against Trump in the lead-up to the crucial Wisconsin primary, Ted was forced to spend crucial time defending the honour of his wife – who Trump had attacked in retribution.

Trump charged that Cruz new about the Melania ad. Personally I doubt it. I think Cruz is too smart to have green-lighted something that counterproductive. But Trump’s charge is credible enough that Cruz can’t completely shake it.

In her own defence, Liz Mair pointed out that her ad was in Utah, a must-win state for him. In fact, Cruz received 69% of the vote to Trump’s 14%. Trump wasn’t even a factor in Utah. One could question why any money at all should have been spent attacking Trump there. This isn’t just 20/20 hindsight. All the pre-caucus polls showed Cruz way ahead of Trump.

Hey Liz, do you think that – maybe - those very same conservative Utah Republicans that you were trying to appeal to might be put off by an ad attacking a candidate’s wife’s character? Even if it is the wife of Donald Trump. Hmmmmm?

In the past, she distinguished herself as the lead for “online communications” for the Scott Walker campaign. In that capacity, she made the following tweet about the good people of Iowa:

“Morons across America are astounded to learn that people from *IOWA* grow up rather government-dependent. #agsubsidies #ehtanol #brainless.”

Followed by this gem:

“The sooner we remove Iowa’s frontrunning status, the better off American politics and policy will be.”

Following this electronic escapade, Walker did the right thing and fired her. Some background information: while the Iowa caucus is critical to all candidates, it was even more critical for Walker. As the governor of a neighbouring state, the Iowa caucus would be seen as a referendum on his administration.

When Walker pulled the plug on his presidential campaign, Liz Mair and the other consultants Walker had hired turned on him with a vengeance. I guess loyalty to her former client isn’t a virtue she’s really into. This particular article is entitled, Liz Mair on Walker Washout: Ex-Aide Tweets Dozen Reasons. Scott Walker was - and still is – the finest governor on America. His steely-eyed leadership is an example to us all. Even more, everything he achieved, he did without help from the GOP establishment, which is more than can be said by his in-state opponents, who were backed to the hilt by the DNC-MSM-academia-big union complex. Walker’s victories were all his own.

But back to Mair. Two of the reasons she listed for Walker’s failure on the federal stage were:

“Hiring staff who did not know him well and did not understand his record or his reputation across all segments in Wisconsin.”

and

“Hiring people who spent a to build a massive operation that would not be sustainable unless financing remained amazing forever.”

Was Mair referencing herself in these tweets?

A while back I wrote an article about the infestation of corporate climbers in the Republican establishment, people skilled at flattery in the court, but whose skills in the real world are marginal. I think the reason the GOP is floundering in an easy-win electoral climate is because of the prevalence of these bounders.

To win in the future – and to preempt the rise of more Donald Trumps - the Republican Party needs a new class of leaders.

Rob Ford and Donald Trump

Yesterday, former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford passed away at age 46 from a rare form of cancer.

Superficially, it is easy to equate Rob Ford with Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, as they are much alike on the surface. Both were born well off, both are populist politicians with a strong working class appeal, and both have a proven ability to dominate the media. Both also have the same exquisite taste in enemies. The elites of Toronto hated Rob Ford with the same intensity that the Republican and Democrat elites hate Donald Trump.

It is less known that both rose politically with the same issue – immigration. While Donald Trump famously wants to build a wall along the Mexico border, the role that immigration in Rob Ford’s career is less well known. In the final debate before the 2010 mayoral election, a reporter asked Ford a gotcha question. Recently a boatload of illegal immigrants had landed on the shores of British Columbia. Aware that Ford’s support was centered on Toronto’s multicultural suburbs, he asked Ford if he was in favour of housing those refugees in Toronto. Ford replied, “absolutely not!” Until that point, he and his Liberal challenger, George Smitherman, had been neck-and-neck in the polls. On election night, Ford won in a landslide, absolutely dominating the multicultural suburbs.

This contradiction in Ford’s appeal is encapsulated by this anecdote by National Post reporter Chris Selley:

“Not by design, I wound up moderating the first mayoral debate after Ford came out of rehab. As I pulled into the parking lot, there was a mostly black group of Ford supporters trading abuse with a mostly white group of protesters insisting Ford was horribly racist against black people.”

Donald Trump has that same contradictory appeal, strongly nationalistic while garnering support from the same minorities that he is supposedly racist against.

Nevertheless, I contend that Ford and Trump are really opposites. The first difference between the two men lies in their faults. With Ford, all of his failings were personal. Primarily, Rob Ford had a serious drug and alcohol problem that wrecked his mayoralty. In contrast, Donald Trump is a teetotaller.

Trump has faults as well, but a lot of them are public. Take his relationship with the political establishment. While Trump plays the role of the outsider, he has been gaming the political system his entire life, donating to every Democrat and establishment Republican in sight. Not Rob Ford. Ford was never part of Toronto’s political establishment. All throughout his three terms on City Council, he was always the maverick outsider, often casting the lone dissenting vote. Even his father, Doug Ford Sr., was an outsider. He was a Member of the Provincial Parliament (MPP) in Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative government during the Common Sense Revolution days. It seems that bucking the establishment was in Rob Ford’s genes. In contrast, Donald Trump is a pay-to-play real estate developer born to a pay-to-play real estate developer.

Take also political consistency. Today Trump is a conservative champion but in the not-so-distant past, Trump held left-wing positions on a whole panoply of issues (some of which are 180° opposite of those he champions today). For instance, he was for illegal aliens before he was against them. Trump comes across as little more than an unprincipled opportunist.

In contrast, Ford was so consistent in his message that one of the criticisms levelled at him was that that he sounded like a broken record. He repeated his election slogans, “stop the gravy train” and “respect the taxpayers” endlessly. But if consistency is any guide, he meant it. As a Councillor, many of those lonely nay votes were against unnecessary spending and he was actually censored by Council because he spent zero money on his Council office (which he funded out of his own pocket).

As Mayor, he was driven by two goals: better services, and less spending. He fought relentlessly to keep municipal taxes low. To save money, he privatized half of Toronto’s garbage collection and weakened the ‘jobs for life’ provision that the previous mayor had placed in the union contract. To ensure critical services would not be disrupted, he declared the transit commission and the paramedics an essential service so they couldn’t go on strike. Most important of all, he championed subways against the neighbourhood-killing streetcar right-of-ways that his predecessor fetishized over. His crusade only stopped when City Council stripped him of his mayoral powers after his crack scandal surfaced. Powerless to stop it any more, the gravy train started moving again. Unlike Donald Trump, no fair-minded person could accuse Rob Ford of being mercenary in his causes.

One of Ford’s best virtues, one that is both public as well as private, was his genuine concern for the average person. This concern was often demonstrated when the cameras were not on. As Ezra Levant relates in this embedded video, Rob Ford loved to coach football and he loved his team, helping the players out if they were in trouble. As Levant asks, how many politicians do you know who would let a troubled youth sleep on his couch if they were in a spot? Not Trump, that’s for sure.

When cancer forced him out of the last mayoral race, he ran for City Councillor in Ward 2 instead. He won 58% of the vote while immersed in chemotherapy. The reason Ward 2’s constituents were loyal to him was that he had been loyal to them. When he was first a Councillor, he took his responsibility seriously. If you had a compliant about city services and called his office, he called you back – personally. And then he fought for you – personally. Stories about his dedication and tenacity got passed along the rumour mill. What the media could never figure out was that this was one of the reasons for his enduring popularity, allowing him to survive scandals that would have totalled the career of any other politician.

Therefore, I think it is fitting that he died completely undefeated. He will be missed – at least by the little guy. And though they might seem alike in superficial style, Donald Trump is no Rob Ford.

Justin Trudeau’s destructive promise to lower the retirement age back to 65

One of the reasons I consider Stephen Harper to be best Canadian Prime Minister in my lifetime was his willingness to go out on a limb for politically problematic but beneficial reforms. One such policy was gradually raising the retirement age in the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) from 65 to 67.

Because this was to be phased in gradually over time, it didn’t have an immediate impact on the bottom line of the federal government. As a result, it didn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. It has a huge effect on something even larger, Canada’s unfunded liability burden. While Canada’s federal debt is $616 billion as I write this, Canada’s unfunded liabilities are measured in the trillions of dollars. One reason this amount is less talked about is that it is not money that has already been borrowed. It is the tally for promises made, but not yet paid. A big part of this total comes from promises made to future retirees by the CPP.

The good news is that a relatively small modification to government promises can have an outsize effect on how much the government owes in the future. Think of this as a pivot point or a fulcrum that you can use to move a large boulder with a lever. One such pivot point is the retirement age. Raising it by a couple of years can have a big effect in the unfunded liability column. While such a change doesn’t make the CPP solvent for all time (only raising Canada’s birth rate can do that), it is an important step in the right direction. By raising the retirement age by two years, Harper saved Canada untold billions of dollars and pushed the insolvency date for the CPP much further into the future.

And because it was to be phased in gradually over time, Stephen Harper was able to implement it relatively easily. Perhaps this is why conservatives did not hail it as a great reform like we should have. We shrugged, taking Harper’s leadership for granted. As a result, we made it easy for Justin Trudeau to backtrack on it.

That Justin Trudeau is reversing this beneficial change to Canada’s entitlement system shows how shallow he really is. Say what you will about Jean Chrétien (and there is a great deal negative that can be said about him), Chrétien was wily enough to know a good policy when he saw one. While he may have promised to repeal the GST and renegotiate NAFTA when he campaigned against Mulroney and Campbell, he never really meant it. His method was to get all the political benefit by publicly opposing these measures while owning all the benefit from these wise policies when he broke his promises.

In the real world, a Machiavellian schemer is usually better for a country than a glib underwear model. Of course, an uncharismatic but steadfast reformer is better still.

Why the recent anti-Trump attacks strengthened Trump

In the past week, there was a spate of attacks on Donald Trump that fizzled. The reason why the attacks made by former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney belly-flopped is that Romney looks just like the kind of establishment insider that Trump’s supporter’s hate. All Romney’s attacks did was to remind Trump supporters of all the people that they hate.

Then there were accusations that Trump is sympathetic to National Socialism, Italian fascism, and white supremacy. First, Trump was accused of employing Nazi imagery when a picture of his supporters holding their right hands in the air, as if they were giving a Heil Hitler salute, was circulated. A related incident occurred when Trump failed to denounce white supremacist David Duke when he endorsed Trump. A third occurred when Trump supposedly quoted Mussolini approvingly. The latter attack fizzled quickly when World War I scholar John Schindler pointed out in a tweet that Mussolini never said it. Rather, it was a popular saying among the Italian military at the time.

Here’s the reason why the first attack backfired: the charge is ludicrous. In order to be a National Socialist, at the bare minimum, your world-view has to be animated by a belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. If you don’t believe at least that, then you aren’t really a Nazi. Given that Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism, and that his first lawyer was Dick Morris’s father, it is incredible to assert that Donald Trump is a National Socialist.

Reckless accusations of this sort are exactly the kind of thing that makes people hate Political Correctness, and opposition to Political Correctness is one of the main forces propelling the Trump candidacy. For instance, I am personally so sick and tired of specious accusations of racism that whenever I hear somebody accuse another person of racism, my automatic assumption is that the accuser is a slanderer and that the reputation of the accusee is being unjustly maligned. Why? Because 99% of the time that is the case.

So why did Trump not denounce David Duke? He did. His accusers assert that he didn’t do it vigorously enough, or quickly enough, or often enough. But here’s the thing, if Trump had denounced David Duke as often as his critics demanded, then the only result would have been Donald Trump’s face constantly on TV with the words “David Duke” coming out of his mouth over and over again.

An essential principle of Public Relations 101 is to never repeat a charge. The paradigmatic example of why doing this is bad occurred when President Nixon said, “I am not a crook”. Instead of seeing a denial, the public who saw an image of Nixon with the words “crook” coming out of his mouth. As a result, the denial ended up proving the charge, at least in the minds of the voters. In trying to skate away from a denial of David Duke, all Trump was trying to do was PR 101. He did it badly, but that’s his only sin in this affair.

To Trump’s supporters, and to any honest observers, it is transparently obvious that these accusations are unfair. The end result was that more people sympathized with Trump so that his vote tally increased.

Now, I am not a Trump supporter. I prefer Ted Cruz. But when people criticize Trump in such a transparently unfair manner, all they succeed in doing is immunizing him from the substantive attacks that could be made.

I am from Toronto. Our previous mayor was Rob Ford. Perhaps you heard of him and his crack cocaine scandal. Have you ever wondered why he was able to survive this scandal? Why his conservative support remained rock-solid? It’s because of how unfair the local media was to him leading up to that scandal. To give one example among many, the Toronto Star published a front-page expose of Ford eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in his car. The car was parked. (I am not making this up.) The cumulative effect of all these specious ‘scandals’ was to inoculate Ford when substantive charges finally did surface. But by then, many people (myself included) had concluded that the Star just had it in for Ford.

And its not like there aren’t credible lines of attack that can be made against Trump. There are many. There is Trump University. There is his ideological “flexibility”. There is his past dealings with Democrats and establishment Republicans (including making donations to Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell). There is his past support of amnesty. There are also possible ties to organized crime. (Hey, he’s a New York City real estate developer who set up a casino in New Jersey. What is the likelihood that he doesn’t have such ties?) Interestingly, when these charges were leveled, just prior to Super Tuesday, Trump significantly underperformed in those primaries.

The lesson here is that if you want to hurt Trump, cut out the nonsense and stick to the facts. Going after him with transparently bogus allegations only makes him stronger.

The Camp of the Saints

I just finished the novel that everybody has been talking about, The Camp of the Saints, but Frenchman Jean Raspail.

First the good stuff: boy is this book prophetic. It was written in 1973 and predicts the Syrian migration into Europe with remarkable perspicacity. The book is at its best in its depictions of Western decadence. Self-hating left-wing intellectuals, Catholic monks just going thought the motions because they lack faith, left-wing labour unions sabotaging the efforts of the French government (and everybody else), soldiers who desert rather than fight because they don’t believe in France anymore, a Mainstream Media that promotes a self-destructive narrative, do-gooders heel-bent on making the problem worse, a left-wing Pope pushing cultural suicide as a Christian virtue, all-pervasive Political Correctness – it’s all there.

Of course, being forty years out, he gets a few details wrong. In his book, the third-world migrants storming Europe come from India not the Middle East. They sail from the Ganges to southern France in a vast flotilla of broken-down ships. However, the book is not meant to be an accurate depiction of reality but rather a warning to the West about its self-destructive attitudes and policies. For instance, he predicts the total collapse of Western civilization by a huge armada of unarmed and starving Indians because, by the time the events takes place (the date is left uncertain), nobody believes anything is worth fighting for.

Clearly, when Raspail wrote the work in 1973, the events of 1968 were on his mind. As a result, he assumes that the industrial workers belonging to communist trade unions would be saboteurs. Today, they are the fountain of French patriotism and belong to the National Front. In Raspail’s world, the civilized people of Europe are completely lacking in any will whatsoever. From current events - the anti-Islamic Pediga marches to the formation of local vigilantes (such as Finland’s Soldiers of Odin) to skyrocketing gun sales across Europe to the rise of right-wing nationalist parties in every European country – we know that European people are much more capable of self-defence than Raspail assumes. I suspect his exaggerated pessimism was intentional. Unfortunately, this makes The Camp of the Saints a bleak, unrelieved dystopia that is hard to read.

Another reason it is difficult to read is that it is a poorly crafted story. Its main problem is the lack of a protagonist. George Orwell’s 1984 is also a dystopia, but it is a page-turner because the reader is given someone to root for. Though Winston Smith eventually fails in his struggle and dies, we don’t know that until the end. For this reason, Orwell has us glued to the page.

There is no Winston Smith in The Camp of the Saints. The book consists of many vignettes, each highlighting some local protagonist or villain playing a small but inconsequential part among the grand impersonal historical forces moving Europe inexorably towards its destruction. There is nobody we can root for (or against). Even worse, every protagonist is either ineffectual, or is a fatalist who knows ahead of time that his act of resistance will be only symbolic and futile. As a result, the outrage and horror Raspail depicts isn’t cathartic. There is no dramatic tension because we know right from the beginning that France (and the West) is finished. How do you keep reading a book like that? For me, it was a challenge. If Raspail had injected a hero, even a tragic hero, The Camp of the Saints would have been much easier to read.

While it is easy to admire all the things that the book got right, it is important to also take stock of all the things Raspail got wrong. His book is fundamentally Malthusian in its outlook. It is clearly influenced by Paul Erlich’s book, The Population Bomb (though this is never explicitly mentioned). In Raspail’s world, European civilization is washed away as much by a tidal wave of the third-world’s population explosion as it is by its own internal weakness.

He also fails to predict the beneficial aspects of globalism and free trade. In our world - but not in Raspail’s future world - China is getting richer, and so is India. In his world, India is a teeming mass of starving, fungible peasants. In our world, the World’s Biggest Loser (a TV show where fat people compete to get slim) is a hit in India. In our world, many Asian nations (like Taiwan and South Korea) have reached Western levels of prosperity.

Clearly, Raspail does not believe in win-win scenarios. In fact, Jean Raspail is a conservative in the 19^th century sense of the word. He is equally opposed to communism and liberalism (which on the continent means free-market libertarianism). He is a Catholic conservative and a monarchist. I think this outlook is both why he got right the things he got right – that cultural elements must be conserved if a civilization is to survive – but also why he got wrong what he did. This is because even though libertarianism has a blind spot for the importance of cultural capital, the things it does get right, it gets very right. People respond to incentives so fecundity can go down as well as up; free-market principles can work in China and India as well as France (and perhaps better); and people care about material well-being as much as they do about who they are and where they come from. Because of his philosophical stance, Raspail is led to unrealistic despair.

It is important to remember when you read gloomy forecasts of the future, not just Jean Raspail’s, good things happen as well, and they are also important. This is a lesson we should heed when we ponder today’s problems.

Bitter Mulroney-era losers are still hanging around

When the Reform Party (which had morphed into the Canadian Alliance) and the Progressive Conservative Party finally merged in 2003, not all the Progressive Conservatives came along. There was a small rump of PC’s left over - still too seething with resentment over Preston Manning coming along and spoiling their party - to bury the hatchet. They formed the Progressive Canadian Party.

In the last federal election, the Progressive Canadian Party fielded eight candidates. The most successful of these won 2.3% of the vote. (Five of the candidates each received less than 1%.) Yup, a political powerhouse to be reckoned with. But if you are bitter enough, lack of success will not deter you. For instance, over the weekend I received the following e-mail from the leader of the PC Party:

“Open Letter to Canadian Conservatives

The election result on October 19, 2015 is reason for Canadian Conservatives to think deeply. 

What is clear is that the party formed by the "merger" of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was rejected by Canadians who recognized the result of the merger was not the renewed Progressive Conservative party Tory voters had   thought they were voting for in elections since 2003.

New Conservative Party policy, politics, outlook and direction and political culture was imported from the Canadian Alliance and its predecessor the Reform Party.  Progressive Conservative policy, politics, outlook and direction and political culture was pushed aside and ignored.

Some former Canadian Alliance members are publicly revisiting Preston Manning's infamous "The West wants in" diatribe by claiming "The West wants out."  They echo Stephen Harper's firewall federalism, showing their contempt for democracy and insulting all Canadians in all parts of Canada, North, South, East, and West.  The party Stephen Harper shaped is not about Tory and Canadian conservative principle.

Integrity, parliament, and Canada matter: that is the message of the 2015 election. The party led by Stephen Harper, and previously by Stockwell Day and Preston Manning under other names, fails on all three counts.  They framed the ballot question in the 2015 election and Canadians voted to replace the party, leader, and government in power since January 23, 2006.

Progressive Conservatives remaining in the new Conservative Party are justified in feeling betrayed by the policy and leadership of the merged party.  It is time to reshape the Conservative Party of Canada to create a renewed Progressive Conservative Party of Canada or bring the CPC to an end..

Those of us who share the "progressive Conservative" vision of the Tory party Sir John A. Macdonald first spoke of in 1854 have reason to take heart in the decision of Canadians on October 19, 2015.  

The national vision of the party of Confederation, of nation-building, and of Sir John A.'s National Dream of One Dominion from Sea to Sea is endorsed by Canadians who put the divisive politics of the last ten years to rest.

Canadians have moved on.  It is time for what was purposely called briefly the "Conservative Party" to do so as well.

It is time for progressive - conservatives to restore vision in a party based on the principles which first built a strong, united Canada.

The Progressive Canadian party exists to provide a principled Tory home for Progressive Conservatives who have decided enough is enough should the Manning Centre Conference leave the directions of the Conservative Party of Canada unchanged.

We invite you to join us and we offer you leadership by example of what Sir John A. Macdonald's  "progressive Conservative" party should look like to Canadians today.  The PC Party on the ballot is a way forward to a renewed Tory government in a strong united Canada as Progressive Canadians and Progressive Conservatives.

Respectfully,

The Hon. Sinclair Stevens, Leader,

The Progressive Canadian Party (PC Party)”

How fitting that this party is currently being led by a Brian Mulroney-era cabinet minister whose career in the Mulroney government ended because of conflict-of-interest allegations. I am old enough to remember that disgraceful scandal play out on television.

Stevens talks as if Stephen Harper is some kind of failed leader. And yet, Harper was in office almost a year longer than Brian Mulroney. In addition, when Harper lost, he left his party in much better shape than Mulroney left his. When Harper resigned, his Conservative Party still retained 99 seats and was the undisputed official opposition. When the Mulroney/Campbell PC’s were crushed in 1993, they had only 2 seats left, and wouldn’t have even qualified to remain an official party except that the ever-crafty Jean Chrétien realized that it was useful for him to keep this rump of a party on life support.

And let’s not forget all the many anti-conservative betrayals that Prime Minister’s Mulroney and Campbell perpetrated on this country. They enacted draconian gun control laws; instituted a widely despised a value added tax; ran up huge deficits year after year; and to top it all off, attempted twice to change Canada’s Constitution. With the latter attempt, the Charlottetown Accord, Mulroney tried buy off every special interest group in sight. As a result, this amendment would have constitutionally enshrined multiculturalism, left-wing labour laws, socialized medicine, and an apartheid regime for our natives.

It is a natural human tendency to feel sorry for the downtrodden and the dispossessed, and to try to help them on their feet. Normally, such impulses are entirely virtuous and benign. However, in this case, given their treacherous past, any mercy would be misapplied. I think it’s better to put the boots to these people while they are on the ground so they never rise up again. Good riddance you losers!