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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 19, 2008
More than time
I am very tired of electoral politics, and I would expect my readers are, too. This after a model five-week Canadian general election campaign, quickly resolved in a few minutes of vote-counting last Tuesday night -- in addition to what feels like a century of still-unfinished jousting between presidential gladiators in the gigantic republic to our south (to say nothing of the bears, bulls, wild cats, donkeys and elephants in their congressional forum).Indeed, I retired to bed last Tuesday evening feeling a nearly smug satisfaction in the day's principal event, and muttering, "Vive le Canada!" For, with all but one seat reporting before midnight, the Tories were then elected or leading in 140-plus, and quite unchallengeable. Most of those seats were settled away, without risk of nasty overnight swings, and the ones that weren't didn't really matter. All Tories I half-way liked had been re-elected, together with a selection of backbenchers I half-liked in other parties. And overall, the best available result: all party leaders farther away from power, except Stephen Harper, who wasn't any nearer. A boring election; an unsurprising result; no serious consequences. A vindication of everything our nation stands for. A (seeming) century into the American campaign, where everything is (apparently) at stake, one comes to appreciate the pleasure in a good yawn. And although I despise Mr. Harper, for reasons I have supplied in previous columns, I can live with him as well as can any other Canadian. All the serious moral and civilizational issues having been taken off our table, by common consent of the five major political parties, we might as well have a bean-counter in a grey-striped suit, calmly minding the national accounts while the international financial crisis explodes around him. The length of the American campaign is a real evil. It is an evil made nearly inevitable by fixed terms of office -- something our political masters in Toronto and Ottawa have been trying to introduce up here, that is considerably worse than the evil it would cure (sitting governments in control of the timing), and will not in fact remove that evil (for a government can as easily adjust its electoral bribery tactics to a fixed schedule). Like almost every other electoral or legal "reform" proposed up here, the fixed term mindlessly introduces an alien U.S. convention into Westminster Parliamentary arrangements that were never designed to accommodate them. The argument for the "hundred years of solicitude" approach is that competition for the world's toughest job requires a trial by ordeal. This is an argument that is reversible on its own face, for one might equally say that the surviving candidate arrives in office already mortally wounded. But the idea is more deeply offensive to reason than that. In the classical analysis of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," and in this case, what is given a figurative century will certainly take a figurative century. At the end of that time I am still looking, and I should think most of my readers are still looking, at two deeply flawed candidates for Captain of the Free World, one of whom we fear and despise even more than the other. To be still more candid, the trial by ordeal has evidently failed, both in the direct sense (neither of the candidates has yet perished, even though one of them is 72 years of age), and in the more subtle sense (we know no more about the murky Chicago past and unfathomable outlook of the other candidate than we did when we first saw him). For the reality today is that, whether five weeks or a century is available for the discussion, political correctness makes it impossible to raise any of the more interesting and pertinent questions. We may darkly observe that, for instance, Barack Obama has had to distance himself from every named, significant patron or associate from his past -- from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, to Tony Rezko, to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to dubious organizations such as ACORN (and throw in a few more names known only to the readers of Chicago newspapers). The question should naturally arise: Had he any significant early connections with persons who were not former Weather Underground terrorists, Chicago mobsters, corrupt party-machine fixers, race-baiting radicals, or systemic perpetrators of voting fraud? And, given a voting record in the U.S. Senate to the left of every other member, and a potentially controversial register of past campaign contributors, is there any indication that he has moved beyond the sordid political environment from which he emerged? Moreover, having granted that he is a smooth and engaging speaker, a paragon of cool, and the rhetorical master of the emotive empty phrase, what has he ever done to suggest he even might be presidential material? Nothing that I can find -- and this after a very long and excruciating campaign in which every candidate who has run against him (from Hillary Clinton to John McCain to Sarah Palin) has been subjected to an extended media mudbath. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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