The Tories dig in
The Conservative “This election isn’t about me, Stephen Harper” ad that reached airwaves during Friday’s Blue Jays game is remarkable. It is impossible to look upon it as anything other than an acknowledgment that the leader of the Conservatives has become a liability to his party.
Against a lively background of perpetual ly stumbling Liberal leaders—and that must include the prewrit version of Justin Trudeau — we have all come to know Harper’s Conservatives as the party of supreme message discipline. You might argue that they are more disciplined than they are conservative. It is the condition of their existence as a successful coalition of evangelicals, government reformers, Republican wannabes, Red Tories, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Part of the discipline is making an unrelenting show of optimism. People like a winner. A show of confidence will always have a positive feedback effect on the electorate. But part of the trick, I’m afraid, is just the good old Führerprinzip. If you can help it, you do not want the media discussing contradictions and deviations in the ranks of your caucus; you do not want your forces divided among scheming successors; and you do not want individual candidates running off at the mouth more than is necessary. Oh, hell, did I just accidentally write a sentence that sums up 20 years of Canadian politics?
All of these premises make political centralization in the person of the leader effective. If we elect someone other than Stephen Harper on Oct. 19, please do not kid yourself: you will be taught this lesson all over again. Logic all but demands that a party make nullities of its candidates. (Have we not heard surprisingly little from the wise men running behind Justin Trudeau? Where did the Brisons, the Garneaus, the Goodales disappear to?) This principle of voluntary cravenness is more important for the Conservatives, as matter of logic, because of the inherent enmity between themselves and the media; any show of weak- ness will be leaped upon, as the sudden emergence of the somewhat contrived niqab issue shows.
I should not say “inherent,” perhaps. The feud dates back to a period in which conservatives could not hope for a fair hearing from a very left-wing press, and is a condition of our political life that is now incorrigible. The primordial fault was with a totally different, less ideologically diverse, less geographically distrib- uted media. But as a consequence, persons still in their 30s will go to their graves bitching about a ravaged, threadbare “mainstream media.”
Running against“the media” is a permanent axiom of the Conservative party; it works, as a tactic; and it is bound to keep working, be- cause the media resist conscious regimentation as passionately as members of Parliament rush toward it. “The media” has no means of acting in concert to restore the trust once enjoyed, as an unearned legacy, by two TV talking heads and four newspaper columnists.
In the case of the Conservatives it must also be considered that the party is substantially a creation of its leader: in a real sense he is its god. The party’s post-Harper fate is unclear, but the chance of schism is obvious. And if it can hold together, the possibility of falling into a deep bog of mediocrity is equally obvious. So what does Harper represent to a Conservative partisan? He is everything. He is the horse on which the farm is already bet. Before he came, the conservative world, or perhaps more properly the anti-Liberal world, was without form and void. He is the worker of miracles. (If you had told anybody in 1990 what he would eventually accomplish, could they disagree with that description?)
But there is he on TV, complaining that the other can- didates want to make things personal and that they would rather talk about him than about their policies. It is an all but explicit appeal to voters who like what I sometimes think of as the Martin-Harper version of Canada, but who are tired of Harper and his callow Prime Minister’s Office myrmidons. The Conservatives had left behind the Mike Duffy trial, with its unsavoury revelations about PMO power, but now hints of PMO involvement with Syrian refugee applications have created an uncomfortable echo of the earlier difficulties.
The CPC has held back vast amounts of money for the final days of the campaign, and its chieftains do not pass wind without doing a focus group. The party was meant to be ready to strike with overwhelming advertising power at whatever front might seem most useful in a three-way battle. And they are investing in ... defence! I never would have believed it if it hadn’t been for the ball game.
Running against ‘the media’ is a permanent axiom of the Conservative party; it works, as a tactic; and it is bound to keep working