Canadian Cincinnatus

Just say NO to Kevin O’Leary

I don’t know how many times we have the relearn the lesson that celebrities make bad politicians. Whether it is Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, and now Donald Trump in Washington, the results are almost never good. They come with no executive experience, no coherent governing philosophy, and no understanding of how political consensus is to be achieved. Being the leader of a country like Canada is not be an entry-level job. Making Kevin O’Leary Canada’s next Prime Minister is a really bad idea.

But what about Ronald Reagan, I hear you say. Wasn’t he a B-list Hollywood celebrity who ended up being a successful President? Yes, but he was also a successful two-time California governor first. That matters. He also read and thought deeply about conservatism. By the time he became Governor, he was well versed in conservative thought.

In contrast, most celebrities lack an intellectual compass. This is because they haven’t thought anything through. Our first clue that Kevin O’Leary has this problem are all his wildly inconsistent pronouncements. Unfortunately, ideological ignorance often works to the advantage of celebrity-politicians – at least initially. Because they boldly say things that no ordinary politician will dare utter, many voters get the impression that they are not afraid to ‘tell it like it is’. People really hate it when politicians speak in scripted, focus-grouped phrases. It comes across as cowardly and disingenuous – as it often is.

What adds fuel to the celebrity-politician’s bombast is that they often do not understand what is politically possible and what is impossible. As a result, they make bold promises that can’t be delivered, but they don’t know it. This faux courage, delivered with a showman’s flair, gives the celebrity-politician a charisma that most career politicians can only wish for. Unfortunately, the source of this boldness is ignorance and inexperience.

Also, their celebrity status confers upon them a false sense of familiarity. With Arnold, a lot of Californians said to themselves, I saw Terminator 2 and Kindergarten Cop, I know what Arnold is like. Er, no you don’t. Arnold is an actor delivering lines written by other people. This phenomenon is worse if they come from reality TV. This is because many people think reality TV is real. It is not. It is scripted. There is the old joke about a good Samaritan telling an accident victim, “Don’t worry, I am not a doctor but I play one on TV.” The same can be said about O’Leary and Trump. They play businessmen on TV. (And before anybody protests, yes, I know they are businessmen in real life. But here’s the thing: their TV shows do not tell you anything about what kind of businessmen they actually are.)

At this point, some of you may be wondering where I am coming from. I have been very supportive of conservative insurgents in the past. I was a big-time supporter of Preston Manning and the Reform Party, and I even supported (and still look back fondly over) Toronto’s crack mayor, Rob Ford. But here’s the thing, while Manning and Ford were outsiders, by the time they took center stage they were not politically inexperienced. In addition, both possessed a consistent set of political principles that gave their actions a unifying theme.

Preston Manning may not have been elected prior to 1993, but he had been in politics since 1967, when he and his father, Ernest Manning, began working on the long-term prospects of Canadian conservatism. They noticed that about every twenty years or so a grass-roots rebellion against Ottawa erupts in Alberta, but each time it fizzles out due to lack of unifying principles and leadership. They reasoned that the next eruption would take place sometime in the late 1980’s but if they were ready for it, a political realignment might be possible for Canada. They were right. If you are interested, read Murray Dobbin’s “Preston Manning and the Reform Party.” This hostile but informative book explains how the Reform Party was able to burst onto the Canadian political scene, seemingly fully-formed. Whatever you can say about Manning, he was not just ‘winging it’. Nor was he ignorant of what he was doing.

At first glance, Rob Ford sounds like just the kind of radical insurgent I am railing against. Not so. What is often forgotten is that Ford was a City Councillor for 10 years prior to becoming mayor. In his time on City Council, Ford focused like a laser beam on his two signature issues, fiscal conservatism and serving constituents. His dedication to constituent concerns were legendary. He dealt with every concern personally, often answering the initial call himself. He gave out his home phone number to every resident who asked, even after he became mayor. Jimmy Kimmel said that when Ford was in the limo with him being driven to the studio, he was busy on his cell phone talking to constituents! While Ford’s mayoralty was ultimately destroyed by his substance abuse issues, his first couple of years were very productive. This was due to the experience and knowledge he acquired from a decade of working in city politics.

Another problem with celebrity-politicians is that the source of their charisma is often the source of their downfall. Because they are ignorant of what can and cannot be done, they drive heedlessly into traps, either failing to deliver on their bold promises (the best case), or creating foreseeable disasters (the worst). As well, the unconventional behaviour that is the source of their initial appeal begins to wear on the voters after a while. This is because the people insist on statesmanlike behaviour just as much as they like boldness and originality. The celebrity-politician rarely appreciates this. They think they have rewritten the rules, when in fact the rules were just temporarily suspended. When their probation period ends, the immutable rules of politics return – often with a vengeance.

This is why I am against Kevin O’Leary. If he were elected party leader and loses to Trudeau, we will have missed a golden opportunity. But if he beats Trudeau (as he brags he can do), the resulting Charlie Foxtrot might bury the Conservative Party of Canada for a generation. This I believe will be the current fate of the Republican Party, who chose a reality TV clown as its standard-bearer. I don’t want Canadian conservatism to suffer the same fate as our American cousins. Speaking as the former two-time riding association president in the Conservative Party, if O’Leary is selected to be our party’s leader, I will personally have much more spare time on my hands during the next federal election campaign. I will probably still vote Conservative (while holding my nose), but only because I think O’Leary is incrementally less of a celebrity airhead than Justin Trudeau.

why tax cuts are no longer popular

In Bloomberg, Megan McArdle recently argued that tax cuts are no longer good politics for Republicans. She asserts that pro-growth politicians have painted themselves into a corner. This happened incrementally over decades. In order to sell each particular tax cut to the voter-rich middle-class, conservative legislators sweetened each pot by cutting their tax rates more than the tax rates of the rich. Because this has been done for each tax cut iteration, the overall effect has been to evolve the tax code towards a progressive direction over time. In the end, the tax cutters had undercut their own message by solving the tax problems of the middle class. As a result, the tax issue no longer resonates today with them.

To counter McArdle, I suspect pro-growth economists will argue that tax cuts are nevertheless still effective at stimulating economic growth, which brings prosperity to all. For this reason, tax cuts are still in the long-term interest of the middle-class even if they only directly affect the rich. They can point out that the tax rates of the rich have a much bigger impact on the economy than the tax rates for everybody else. This is because a larger percentage of their income is directed towards productive investment. The more this income stream is taxed away, the less money there is available for capital investment. In contrast, poor people invest very little. If they are taxed more, they will definitely feel the pain more acutely. But because they have no choice but to carry on as best they can no matter what, the overall effect of their tax burden for the economy-at-large will be small. Perversely, this means that the economic benefits of tax cuts have increased because the US tax code has become less hated.

So who is right, McArdle or the Club for Growth economists?

I argue that both are. This is because McArdle is talking about political policy, while the economists are discussing public policy. One is about winning elections; the other is about the economy. Unfortunately, there is no law of nature that requires good policies to also be good politically. Beneficial economic policies can repel voters as much as attract them.

The challenge for the conservative political strategist is to devise a way of winning elections while at the same time enacting good policy. I don’t think that this is an insoluble problem. In fact, I don’t think it is even a particularly difficult problem. The first step is to recognize the distinction.

McArdle posits a good suggestion on how to square the circle:

“Republicans may well be able to have tax cuts as an add-on to other things that actually promise benefits to that vast middle swathe of voters. But it can’t be the entrée, much less the whole meal.”

I think this is right. You must package tax cuts with a larger package of policies that are both consistent with free-market principles and widely popular at the same time. These are not hard to find. One would be a crackdown on crony capitalism, the system whereby businessmen connected to the government game the system. This is a good way of demonstrating that you are pro-free market rather than pro-business. (Of course, K-Street lobbyists won’t like this but hey, ask John Boehner what K-Street did for him lately.) Another would be to emphasize the importance of work and savings on economic success. The Protestant work ethic has long been appreciated in our culture and its champions are always welcome. Of course, going after the freeloaders on welfare is also both good politics and policy (particularly if you make sure to emphasize how similar they are morally to the Wall Street freeloaders). And this is just what I came up with on the spur of the moment. There is much more.

As an aside, one of the few mistakes in McArdle’s article is to lump deregulation in with tax cuts. The politics of overregulation are completely different. While it has been true that the deregulation issue has been very poorly sold by the Stupid Party, I don’t see any reason why this needs to continue. I think there are plenty of ways to sell deregulation. For instance, how about: deregulation = freedom. But that is a topic for another post

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The Battle over Gay Marriage is lost: now let’s concentrate on winning the War On the Family

One of the greatest sins in strategy is failing to see reality as it really is. This is because conflict is an unforgiving accountant. If you make your plans in la-la land you will pay the price. It is in this spirit I declare that the Battle Over Gay Marriage is lost.

It certainly brings me no pleasure to do so. I am no supporter of gay marriage. Rather I think the traditional nuclear family is one of the greatest organizing principles that the human race has ever developed and it would be a catastrophe to lose it. The decline in the female Total Fertility Rate in every country where the New Morality has taken root is a harbinger of bad things to come. In declaring the Battle over Gay Marriage lost, I do so as the bearer of bad news, fully aware of what happens to the heads of such messengers.

Nevertheless, the War Over the Family can still be won but only of we jettison the failed tactics that caused this defeat. We need to adopt newer, better tactics. I have been unsuccessfully preaching this for years but, thanks to the resulting paper trail, I can hold my head high and proudly say it wasn’t me who lost this battle. The social conservatives who failed to take my advice did.

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, I wrote an article on this topic. Rereading my words two years later, I see no need to change what then wrote. In part, this is what I said:

 “To avoid repeating past mistakes, they [the social conservatives] must understand why they lost. To do that they must remember something Napoleon once said, that battles are often decided before they are even fought. By this he meant that a key factor in victory is the terrain. If all things are equal, the general with the keenest eye for the battlefield landscape will prevail. At Gettysburg, Meade chose good ground and Lee chose bad ground. When the proponents of gay marriage came up with their political strategy in the late 1980’s, they chose good ground. In other words, the traditionalists lost the Battle for Gay Marriage because they were forced to fight uphill.

To turn things around they need to quit launching Pickett’s charges against entrenched positions and, instead, find good ground. In specific terms this means: forget the gay marriage debate and face the fact that gay marriage is here… at least for the time being. Learn the lessons of the gay marriage battle and reframe the terms of the marriage debate in ways that favour traditional marriage.

My first clue to what this reframe might look like came about around 5 years ago after a gay marriage proposition in Oregon (I believe it was Oregon) was defeated in a referendum. Venting their anger after their loss, some gay rights activists proclaimed that perhaps all heterosexual marriages should be annulled after five years if the couple fails to produce children. While this was clearly an attack on traditional marriage, I thought: hmmm. It is an interesting proposition, clearly meant to turn the pro-traditional marriage argument - that heterosexual marriage is important because it produces children - against itself: if a heterosexual couple doesn’t reproduce, why should the state provide legally support their marriage?

While perhaps too radical, I think they are inadvertently on to something. From now on, traditional marriage supporters should advocate that all government marriage benefits should flow towards married couples with children, and that this cornucopia should be paid for by subtracting such benefits from childless couples.

This approach has a number of advantages:

First, it is an easy position to intellectually justify in secular terms. The production and raising of children is, in the language of economics, an external good, but one that is privately undertaken and funded. It has been estimated that it costs $250K to raise one child from birth to age 18. As the future of our society will one day be in the hands of this cohort, everybody benefits when these responsible adults enter the workforce. Even the childless gay activist benefits from fecund heterosexual families, such as when he is in the retirement home being tended by the grown-up children of these families.

In parallel fashion, everybody suffers when a sociopath or a parasite has been sired. So it is in everybody’s interest that good childrearing be supported as much as possible.

This reframe has many policy implications which I will explore in future articles.

Second, it turns the anti-traditional morality argument, that “the government has no business in the bedroom” on its head. If the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation then why should it mandate that pension funds and corporations provide benefits to spouses of employees or retirees? This made sense in an era when most women didn’t work outside the home – and when most women were busy raising children. In an era where most women work, shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect each spouse to arrange his own benefits? Unless, of course, one spouse stayed at home to raise the kids. In which case, the government does have a compelling reason to make sure that the spouse - who forgoes money and career prospects to perform one of the most important social functions (raising children) - is provided for.

And what business does the government have in regulating how assets can and cannot be dispersed in a divorce? Laws that favour one party (generally the wife) and courts that sometimes override contractual arrangements, like prenuptial agreements, only end up favouring gold-diggers. For this reason, matrimonial law should be converted into contract law as much as possible, with the exception, again, of those statutes that protect the interests of stay-at-home, child-rearing parents. 

And in the latter case, shouldn’t the party in a divorce proceeding who happens to be guilty of gross irresponsibility (i.e. infidelity) be punished financially to encourage others to stay married “for the children”? 

Third, by diminishing the advantages of marriage for non-childbearing couples, it removes the significance of gay marriage as a political issue and an ideological prize. Instead of defeating gay marriage, the issue simply shrivels up as the legal significance of childless marriage as a whole disappears.

With the overall decline in the total fertility rate in the developed world, perhaps a renewed focus on the production of respectable children is long overdue.”

Rereading my words, the only thing I want to add is a stress on the importance of a mother (a female role model) and a father (a male role model) in child rearing. There is plenty of scientific literature on this subject. You wouldn’t want to be against science, riight?

The Charleston church massacre and the wages of racial demagoguery

The sole responsibility for the horrible massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church lies with the deranged killer. Nobody else can be held to blame for the evil he committed. He should bear the responsibility for it alone.

On the other hand, responsibility for today’s social climate - which encourages deranged nuts to come out of the woodwork to avenge their grievances, real and imagined - is another matter. For this, the net of blame must be cast wider.

Specifically I am speaking about President Obama. Leading up to the 2012 Presidential election, the President deliberately adopted a strategy of stoking racial animosity with every local crime story that could be misinterpreted by demagogues. First came the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman circus, then Ferguson, MO, and next Baltimore. The goal of The Narrative appears to have been to anger black Americans in order to maximize black voter turnout.

The first group of nuts agitated by these reprehensible tactics were black rioters; in Ferguson, then Baltimore, then elsewhere, looters in the inner city black communities were provoked and encouraged. It was only a matter of time before some white maniac responded in kind. In Charleston, SC, the inevitable happened.

Instead of pushing a false narrative (Zimmerman attacked Trayvon, the Ferguson police officer assassinated an unarmed ‘gentle giant’, etc.), and instead of spreading the lie that the American justice system in general - and the local police force in particular - are out to get African Americans, a responsible authority figure would have responded firmly but fairly every time a crime story threatened to disrupt racial harmony. President Obama should have had a calming influence. He should not have been the one to amplify historical grievances and animosities. He should have been the voice of reason but he wasn’t.

Why is he doing this?

In politics, it is said that he who frames the debate, wins the debate. The left is framing the debate in terms of its agenda items: discrediting Southern culture (i.e. banning the Confederate flag) and imposing gun control. Any conservative who goes along with their arguments is a fool. Instead, conservatives should point out that racial discord occurs whenever people are treated as groups rather than individuals. He who whips up racial grievances for fun and profit only ends up fermenting unintended – and nasty - consequences. But just because those consequences are unintended, it doesn’t absolve the demagogues of their responsibility. The US Constitution is based on the treatment of American citizens as individuals. In a diverse society consisting of more than one race, the only way that everybody can coexist peacefully is if everybody is treated firmly but equally, and judged only by their own individual actions, not the actions of their distant relatives. If an American politician were willing to stand on this principle, he would win the Presidency - easily.

How do I know this? Because that’s how Barack Obama got to the White House. It was his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 - when he said, “There is no white America or a black America. There is only the United States of America” - that catapulted him to national prominence and jump-started his Presidential bid. It resonated with American voters who sincerely want to put America’s racial problems behind her. As the first black President in US history, he was uniquely qualified to do this.

Too bad he didn’t mean it.

The Alberta and UK elections: how to deal with insurgencies and how not to

On May 5, Albertans voted to end the longest unbroken streak of success that a governing party has ever enjoyed in Canada. The Alberta Progressive Conservative Party had been in power for 44 years straight. Today, the NDP, a socialist party, runs Alberta. The formerly governing Progressive Conservatives, led by Jim Prentice, went from 70 seats down to 10. They aren’t even the official opposition. In contrast, the British Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, was widely expected to lose seats, possibly even losing power to the Labour Party. Defying the pundits and the pollsters, David Cameron went on to win an outright majority on May 6. I believe the difference in outcome was due to the different way they handled their respective right-wing challengers.

The Alberta PC’s were challenged on the right by the Wildrose Alliance; the British Conservatives faced off against the United Kingdom Independence Party.

The Wildrose Alliance has been around in one form or another since 2005. In the 2004 and 2008 provincial elections, it won one and zero seats respectively. However, in 2012 it jumped to 17 seats. Trouble was brewing for the PC’s and everybody knew it. After an internal struggle to remove a horrible leader - Alison Redford, the ruling Conservatives decided to do something about Wildrose. On Dec 17, 2014 Wildrose leader, Danielle Smith and eight other MLA’s crossed the floor to sit with the Progressive Conservative government. Problem solved, or so it seemed. Unfortunately for the PC’s, Wildrose climbed from 17 seats in the 2012 election to 21 seats in the 2015 election – more than making up for the defections.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, David Cameron was grappling with his own right-wing threat: UKIP. An Alberta-style decapitation strike wasn’t in the cards: UKIP hardly had any seats in Parliament (except for some Conservative turncoats). Instead, Cameron stole some of UKIP’s thunder by promising to hold a referendum on EU membership and negotiate a better deal for the UK in Europe. He also made encouraging noises on immigration. Whether he will carry through on any of this now that he has his majority remains to be seen, but it was enough to keep UKIP from toppling Conservative MP’s through vote splitting.

Until this year, the classic example of this strategy was the Australian federal election of 2004 when John Howard won his fourth term as Prime Minister. While the vote share of his Labour rivals remained steady at 38%, his vote share increased by 3.6%. How did he do this? Simple. He co-opted the program of his smaller, right-wing competitors. For instance, the One Nation Party, led by Pauline Hanson – the ‘fish and chips lady’ - saw its vote share drop by over 3%. With new, revised policies on immigration, many One Nation sympathizers voted for John Howard instead, because he was actually in a position to deliver.

The classic example of what not to do occurred in the 1993 Canadian federal elections when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives went down in flames. After winning the 1988 federal election over the US free trade deal, Mulroney chose to systematically humiliate his right-wing base. Once free trade was passed, he veered left. He instituted a value added tax, passed draconian gun-control laws, and presided over chronic sky-high deficits. If this wasn’t enough, he tried - twice - to fundamentally rework the Canadian constitution in order to enshrine left-wing labour laws, multiculturalism, socialized medicine, and an apartheid system for native Canadians into its text. Thankfully he failed. When Canada’s right inevitably revolted, he thought, where are they going to go? Where they went to was the Reform Party, which went from one seat in 1988 to 51 seats in 1993. Thanks to vote splitting, the formerly dominant Tories went from 156 seats to two in 1993. Yes, you read that right, two.

The lesson for political parties in first-past-the-post electoral systems seems to be this: if you have a challenger who competes against you for your core voters, you had better take them seriously, even if they have achieved little to date. They will continue to be unsuccessful until, all of a sudden, they are no longer. The best way to alleviate the threat is to co-opt at least part of their policies. Because the people who join protest parties are animated by principles rather than ministerial limousines, a decapitation strike - like the one Alberta Premier Jim Prentice expertly executed against Wildrose - won’t work. The absolute worst thing to do is what Brian Mulroney and his hapless successor Kim Campbell did: spit in their faces.

There is a cautionary note for the victorious David Cameron in all of this. Just because UKIP won only one seat (out of 650) in the British Parliament, it nevertheless should not be ignored. UKIP received the third highest number of votes in Britain; its problem is that its supporters are spread out evenly across the UK. The Scottish National Party only got 4.7% of the vote but, because their supporters are concentrated in Scotland, they won 56 seats. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, a party can win many votes and have nothing to show for it, until they cross some critical (but ill-marked) threshold. The thing Cameron must remember is that the Wildrose Alliance won almost no seats in its first two outings, but look where they are now – 11 seats ahead of the once-dominant Alberta Tories. Cameron had better not be as complacent with UKIP as the Alberta Tories were with Wildrose. One day, the insurgents might just cross that threshold. In 2004 and 2008, Wildrose received 9% and 6.5% of the vote respectively. In 2015, UKIP won 12.6%, so watch out David.

The NRA won because it fought

Every now and then I receive a comment along the lines of, what’s the use, we can’t win, they’re too powerful, Putin can’t be stopped, our leaders are too weak and decadent, the left controls everything, the media is out to get us, etc.

I just stumbled across the best antidote for this breed of defeatism I have yet heard. It is a PJTV video of famed law professor Glenn Reynolds, covering the recent NRA convention in Nashville. The clip is short, only 2 minutes long, but it packs a punch. Here is a partial transcript for those who don’t have time to watch the whole thing:

“The real reason they’re happy is because they’re winning. It hadn’t always been that way.

 I have been writing about gun rights for 20 years and 20 years ago people weren’t winning. And they weren’t happy. 20 years ago, the media was all against people interested in gun rights, they were losing battles and there was a real temptation to hunker down and to see how long you could hold out. Instead, they fought back. They won. …

The reason why they are winning is simple: it’s because they fought. You can’t win without fighting and they fought. They fought everywhere, they didn’t give up, they made arguments year after year, they campaigned in elections, when all they could get was half of what they wanted, they took it and went for the rest later. They fought and they won.

That’s a lesson for people in other parts of the conservative and libertarian movement. … I think gun right is a real model of what you can do if you are just willing to fight. … If you don’t show up, you don’t win. If you want to win, you better show up and you better fight. That’s the lesson here from the NRA convention.”

In Canada, in the early 1990’s, the odds against gun owners were even worse. The first round of gun laws were passed by the Progressive Conservative Party and Canada’s then-Justice Minister (and future Prime Minister), Kim Campbell. We were in a real pickle, because the closest thing that Canadian gun owners had to a political ally - the Progressive Conservatives - had just declared total war on us. We had no allies and we were under assault on all sides, including by a uniformly hostile media. But we had one advantage. We were on Death’s Ground. We had no choice but to fight - no matter what. And we did. And we won.

To see how hard the road facing us back then was, consider this: our first order of business was to destroy the ruling Progressive Conservative Party. And we did that. Gun owners were the shock troops of the newly formed Reform Party, which led to vote-splitting in the 1993 federal election. This was followed by 10 years of Liberal dominance – and even more draconian gun laws. But in the fullness of time, we defeated them too. And the newly reconstituted Conservative Party that replaced them proved to be friendly to us – because we were involved, from the get-go, in reconstituting the party. As a result, the long-gun registry has been repealed and significant deregulation of current gun laws are in the works. So don’t tell me it can’t be done. If scattered and disorganized and politically inexperienced Canadian gun owners could do it in the early 90’s, so can you today.

So here is my message to pessimistic, defeatist conservatives: Go Away. Far away. Your weakness and fecklessness means you won’t accomplish much good even if you stay, and your cowardice might spread to others. Fear is contagious.

Instead, go join the Liberal Party. I’m sure you will do some good for our side over there.

Sea change in attitudes on gun control

As reported by Instapundit last week:

‘Gun-control advocates are seriously losing public opinion. Well, good. “What’s most striking in Pew’s new data is that views have shifted more in favor of gun rights since then among nearly every demographic group, including women, blacks, city-dwellers, parents, college graduates, millennials and independents. The two groups that haven’t budged? Hispanics and liberal Democrats. These numbers may capture the short memory of many Americans. But the long-term trend is undeniably grim for gun-control advocates, who seem to be losing ground even among their strongest traditional sympathizers.”'

In the US, the march of liberty was greatly aided by smart policy. In the 1990’s, gun rights activists focused on getting shall-issue concealed carry laws enacted at the state level. This has had the effect of turning people who are not intrinsically interested in firearms into gun-rights supporters. They started to see the practical benefits of gun ownership when it became possible to use guns for self-defence.

'The turnaround on this over the past 20 years has been astonishing, and should serve as a lesson to people who think we can’t see a sea-change on a civil rights issue, even when the media is overwhelmingly opposed.’

This statement applies to Canadian gun rights activists even more than their counterparts in the States. When the terrible wave of gun laws began in the late 1980’s, it was championed by the party gun owners were the most closely allied to ideologically – Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party. Unlike gun owners in the States, who could rely on the GOP, even in their darkest days, Canada’s gun owners first had to destroy the federal conservative party in order to save it. We had no media allies, we had no political allies, and – unlike the NRA - our political lobby groups were nearly broke.

And yet we persevered to the point where the long gun registry is a smoking ruin and the Canadian political landscape has been rewritten. As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds points out, it is amazing what ordinary people without resources can do when they stubbornly fight for civil rights, and keep it up without compromise over a long period of time.

There should be a lesson for all conservative activists in this story. Unfortunately, we have too many ‘conservative’ pundits, who are eager to obscure this message with empty slogans and false dilemmas, with stories like: “How to stay centrist and win Republican nomination.” As if the choice is between conservative purity (which ordinary people supposedly hate) and centrism (which ordinary people supposedly like). If this really were true, why are moderates presidential candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney such losers?

In fact, the choice is between passion and commitment on one hand (which ordinary people actually love), and insider deal-making on the other (which they hate).

“The Lost Art of Political Persuasion” and the Red Tory Death Spiral

One of the themes I write about is political strategy: how do you win political debates and elections, and affect change. On this subject, an important article has appeared in the Ricochet website, penned by Herbert E Meyer, detailing how politicians’ today fail to persuade voters. He begins thus:

“Persuasion used to matter in politics. A good politician was someone with the inclination — and the skill — to convince people who weren’t among his supporters to endorse his preferred policy or legislation.”

 “There are many ways to accomplish this. Lyndon Johnson operated at the retail level, so to speak. … In contrast, Ronald Reagan worked wholesale. He had a genius for convincing millions of voters he was right and — through them — convincing his political opponents that supporting the president’s policies was the best way to keep their jobs.”

One thing that made the Gipper the Great Communicator was that he was willing to communicate. He actually tried to persuade people about the ideas he believed in - systematically and consistently. The problem with most politicians is that they don’t even try.

Closer to home, I believe the fatal weakness of Tim Hudak, the former leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, was just this. While he put forward conservative policies, he thought that was enough, that they would sell themselves. He made no effort to explain to voters why jobs needed to be trimmed in the Ontario government. The same goes for his predecessor, John Tory, with regard to the faith-based funding issue.

 “George W. Bush, for example, genuinely wanted to convince people he was right about Iraq. But he had absolutely no talent for persuasion; nor, alas, did he have the sense to bring anyone who did have a talent for persuasion into his administration. After two terms in the White House, the total number of Americans who changed their minds in favor of the Iraq War was, roughly, zero.”

When public support for the Iraq War plummeted in 2004 and 2005, the White House was passive. After 2008, Rush Limbaugh asked Karl Rove why he didn’t fight back against the accusations made against Bush. His response was that he thought the American people would see through the anti-war propaganda. Duh! And people call you the Architect?

“President Obama is on-track to match that sorry record. He exudes contempt for anyone who disagrees with him about the war, Obamacare, or about any other issue ….”

The case of Barack Obama is different. His brilliant 2008 election campaign was not designed to persuade, but to deceive. He wanted to ‘fundamentally transform America’ but knew that such intentions wouldn’t fly with the American people, so he ran a ‘blank slate’ campaign, where Obama was presented as “a blank sheet of paper upon which the most beautiful poems can be written on” (to borrow a phrase from Chairman Mao). Because he couldn’t repeat this tactic in 2012, he was left with one alternative: playing to his base. Speaking of which:

“In politics, the alternative to persuasion is playing to the base. You identify your natural supporters … and then you throw as much raw meat at them as you can. You tell them whatever they want to hear, precisely as they want to hear it.”

While it may be the polar opposite of persuasion, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. It is very difficult to win an election when your base is not energized. Look at the obstacles Obama overcame in 2012 by motivating his core voters.

 “Persuasion, on the other hand, is hard. Convincing people to change their minds often requires that you appeal to their intellect rather than their emotions. You actually have to make your case, and you have to make it in a way that your audience will grasp and consider worth pondering. And because so many of the people you’re trying to convince don’t share your ideology, you must choose words and facts that will overcome their doubts and suspicions, and thus help close the gap between you.”

There are several tricks to the art of persuasion. First, is that you must put yourself in the mind of the person you are trying to persuade. What do they think? What do they value? What do they know?

The last is a particular sticking point for political junkies like us. Because we live and breathe politics, we are familiar with so many details the general public is scarcely aware exist. This is particularly true for conservatives, because the people we seek to relate to get their news from the MSM. A good illustration is a conversation I had with a conservative friend prior to the 2012 presidential elections. He was convinced Obama would lose, and in support his opinion, he listed a whole host of Presidential screw-ups and gaffs. While I was familiar with everything on his list, I asked him how many of them were known to the average American.

It is also important to remember that the people you seek to persuade are not everybody. In fact, if your base is motivated, you don’t really need to persuade all that many uncommitted voters. Remember that your supporters are already persuaded, and you do not need to persuade your opponent’s base. They are unreachable. All you need to influence are enough Low Information Voters to give you 50% plus one on Election Day. In Canada, with three or more parties in contention, it is more like 40% plus one. In reality, you are talking about 5 to 10% of the voters, tops.

The arguments you need to make are not so much broadcast to the general public, but aimed at a particular subset of the voters. It therefore follows that it would be a good idea to know who exactly they are.

“And you must do this in a way that broadens support for your policies without losing your original base.”

This is the most important sentence in Meyer’s important essay. The RINO/Red Tory believes that you need to jettison your more controversial policies in order to persuade unaligned voters. Unfortunately for them, by watering down your platform, all they end up doing is repelling core voters. And when the marginal voters see a revolt going on among their supporters, they defect too because nobody wants to back a loser. This is what I term the “Red Tory death spiral.”

The best recent examples of the Red Tory Death Spiral are the 2003 and 2007 Ontario Provincial Elections. The Red Tories spiraling to their political deaths were Ernie Eves and John Tory, respectively.

Why do Red Tories and RINO’s prefer the Red Tory Death Spiral to persuasion? I think it is because they realize that persuasion is, as Meyer points out, hard, and they have no idea how to do it.

How Tim Hudak could have won – even after he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants

The conventional wisdom is that Progressive Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak lost the last Ontario provincial election because he promised to fire 100,000 civil servants. I believe, in this case at least, the conventional wisdom is correct.

However, in looking for lessons to be learned from the last election, I nevertheless think the conclusions that the Conservatives should never broach the subject of public sector layoffs again is wrong.

To see why, we must go back to the 2011 provincial election to understand why Tim Hudak said what he said in 2014. In 2011, Hudak made the fiscal incompetence of Dalton McGuinty the centerpiece of his campaign. With annual deficits running over $10 billion, and more billion-dollar boondoggles than you can count on your toes, it seemed like a good strategy.

The problem was that the Liberals had an effective counter. They asked Tim what government programs he was going to cut. And Hudak couldn’t tell them. He mumbled something about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Unfortunately, this was not a particularly convincing because if it were possible to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse without implementing painful and controversial budget cuts to do so, even the NDP would support them. No matter how much McGuinty pressed, Hudak didn’t have a serious answer. End result: Hudak looked weak.

To avoid this trap in 2014, Tim Hudak admitted that 100,000 positions needed to be eliminated. While this promise ultimately backfired, many conservatives – myself included – lauded Hudak for his candor. Tell the people the truth, level with them, and you can win… not with ease, but it can be done.

But it wasn’t to be. So does this mean that it isn’t possible to get elected in Ontario by telling the voters the truth? That to govern this province, you must first lie like a Liberal, and then stab your supporters in the back, like Kathleen Wynne will likely have to do in the coming four years? At this point in time, it certainly seems so, but I think there is a way where you can level with the voters and win a workable majority at the same time.

I believe that the weakness with Hudak’s campaign strategy wasn’t its content but its execution. The promise to eliminate 100,000 provincial jobs was just blurted out without any warning, or preparation, or context, or justification. As a result, it was a blank slate that his Liberal Party and public sector union opponents could write the most beautiful propaganda on.

A better campaign would have begun the same way as in 2011: attack the Liberals for their reckless fiscal irresponsibility, highlighting their many fiascoes. In making similar opening moves, the Liberals would have been steered towards the same reaction - calling Hudak out on the specifics of his planned cuts. At this point, the trap could have been sprung.

But first, the campaign would have stretched the moment out, by refusing to answer, in order to emphasize the point, allowing the charge-counter-charge cycle to build up to a dramatic crescendo. Then Hudak could have dropped the hammer, and answered them directly – by introducing a serious plan for balancing the budget, one that wouldn’t have skimped on the hard details.

Why would this have worked, when Hudak’s actual promise to fire 100,000 civil servants went over like a lead balloon?

Because the promise to eliminate 100,000 positions wouldn’t have been made in isolation, but only as part of a much larger plan, one whose aims had been made clear, properly justified, and with accompanying mitigating details (such as the fact that many of these positions would be eliminated by attrition). Many people actually turned off in 2014 would have been convinced because they will have been prepared to accept the right answer.

As well, allowing this point to dangle in the air for so long would have ensured that everybody would have been paying attention, with a significant share of the voters agreeing with it. That such voters exist, I have no doubt. It wasn’t that long ago when Ontario voters endorsed Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution – twice.

At this point, an argument I had made at the time to defend his cuts – but one that Hudak didn’t employ –could have also been used. I said that the only difference between Hudak and Wynne is that he is honest and she isn’t. The issue of the cuts themselves is irrelevant. This is because no matter whom you vote for, the government will have to cut regardless of what promises are made. The iron laws of economics will see to that.

Notice that nothing in my plan waters down any specifics. The problem with Tim Hudak isn’t that he is ‘too extreme’ or that he needs to ‘moderate’, but that doesn’t know how to persuade people about the things he believes in. Mike Harris could do that, and so can, for that matter, Rob Ford. But Hudak can’t. And that is what disqualified him for party leadership.

 

Why the bottom isn’t falling out of Kathleen Wynne’s reelection campaign

At first it seems like a paradox. The 11-year reign of the Liberal Party in the province of Ontario has brought more misfortune – and certainly more farce – than the misbegotten NDP government of Bob Rae in the early 1990’s. And yet, public support for the current premier, Kathleen Wynne, is holding up much better than it did for Bob Rae. Considering all the billion dollar boondoggles her government has precipitated – almost all of them self-inflicted – this is almost unbelievable. Why?

The theory I have been nursing for a while is that, while a political party can lose an election for a whole host of reasons, it will only get creamed when it betrays its base.

Take Bob Rae. His party wasn’t wiped out in the 1995 provincial election because he completely mismanaged the provincial economy and drove the provincial government to near bankruptcy. Those things would only have resulted in a dignified loss. What turned defeat into unmitigated disaster was that he had attacked his base – the unions. His imposition of ‘Rae Days’ (unpaid holidays for provincial civil servants to save money and thereby avoid mass layoffs) was considered to be a fundamental betrayal. As a result, on Election Day, he had no supporters left. His base thought he was traitor, everybody else thought he was incompetent. 

When former premier Dalton McGuinty suspended collective bargaining rights for teachers, that was his Bob Rae moment. The teachers were outraged at McGuinty. Everybody else was outraged at the teachers – and McGuinty. Not having the integrity of Bob Rae to try and fix the mess he created, McGuinty took the coward’s way out and called it a career.

His successor, Kathleen Wynne, seems to have learned the ‘Bob Rae’ lesson: don’t abandon your base. She quickly awarded sweetheart deals to the unions and they are now joined at the hip with her Liberal Party. The unions, for their part, also learned a lesson. Don’t declare war on your patron. In going after Bob Rae in 1995 for “Rae Days’, they ended up with Mike Harris, the most libertarian provincial leader ever elected in Canada. Layoffs followed. 

(As an aside, I wonder if Wynne is planning on stabbing her union buddies in the back after the election – assuming she wins a majority. That would be the smart Machiavellian thing to do. With $12 billion deficits year-in-year-out, something drastic has to happen. Better to get the unpleasantries over with right away. Four years later, the unions will still hate her, but the rest of the people might see four years of prosperity and restraint, and award her a second majority.)

The lesson transcends Ontario politics. This is the reason Barack Obama’s poll numbers have not tanked like Jimmy Carter’s. Carter saw the error in his ways and began real reform. Airline deregulation and trucking deregulation were the first moves in Reaganomics, but they began under Carter. Conservatives saw malaise and defeat. Socialists saw a betrayal. In contrast, President Obama has the American left locked down. As a result, Obama’s popularity has a floor of 40% in the public opinion polls, below which it won’t go.

The lesson also transcends the political divide. The reasons Red Tories and RINO’s lose all the time, in spite of their vaulted ‘moderation’, is because their base - the people whose donations, volunteer time and moral support they need - hate them. The reason the poll numbers tumbled so badly for George W Bush was not Katrina, it was the immigration debate immediately preceding Hurricane Katrina, so that when the hurricane cane ashore, the people who normally would have stepped up to the plate to defend their President, didn’t. When Bush did all those bailouts and stimulus deals in the final year of his presidency, that sealed the deal. Conservatives abandoned him in droves, and he discovered that, as a result, there was no floor to his poll numbers. Iraq didn’t kill Bush (by his final year, he was winning that war), amnesty for illegal aliens and the bank bailouts did.

It’s also the reason John McCain (amnesty and McCain-Feingold) and Mitt Romney (Romneycare) lost to Obama. The base didn’t trust them.

The first rule of politics is, protect your base. The low information voters can always be can be corralled in at the last minute.