In many democratic systems, Brazil and Mexico, for example, political parties confer standing. Without formal party endorsement, you cannot seek election. Democracies like ours allow independents to stand, but most have a hard time getting a hearing from an electorate. Parties still retain their preponderant role in choosing who gets to stand for office, but their capacity to deliver standing for their candidate is declining. Electoral choice has become less an expression of party allegiances, held in place by family, religious or regional ties, and much more a matter of individual preference. I should know: our party had been slowly leaking members for twenty years before I arrived on the scene. The decline in the number of people who identify themselves as party members underlines a general shift toward a more individualized and volatile electorate. With only weaker allegiance to appeal to, parties are losing their capacity to deliver votes for their candidates. The machines that do get the vote out are personal. Every candidate in our party had to build his or her own machine. Obama’s organization delivered the vote in 2008 and 2012, but it was his machine, purpose-built for his election, and the next candidates for president in 2016 will have to build theirs from scratch.5
First-time candidates, like myself, learn soon enough that party selection, authoritative endorsement and our supposedly impressive CVs do not entitle us to standing with voters. If you think standing is an entitlement, you are bound to lose. You have go to out and earn it, face to face, doorstep by doorstep, phone call by phone call.
As voters decide whether to give you standing, they listen to the political parties as well as to neighbours and family members, but increasingly they make up their minds alone in front of a computer or television screen. Instead of empowering the voter, this solitude disempowers: it increases the influence of big-buy advertising, the negative attack ads that were used so effectively against me. The solitary voter faces the negative ad onslaught alone, and if there is no one out there prepared to contradict those ads, their impact shapes how voters see you. In our response to the Conservative onslaught, we turned to mediators and institutions to defend us, third parties who would help us make our case to voters, and without exception, we found ourselves without allies. The party itself lacked the membership base and the funds to mount a counteroffensive; unions, women’s groups, university commentators stayed out of the fight, concluding—quite understandably—that I had better defend myself. Few if anyone saw the attack ads as an attack on democratic politics itself.
Public opinion polling accelerates the effect of negative advertising and plays an increasingly large role in determining standing. When the polls say your numbers are slumping, you can talk all you want, but you won’t get a hearing. By the time the negative attack ads had done their work and the polls had confirmed that we were in trouble, it had become a commonplace among political journalists that I was a dead man walking. I remained determined to prove that rumours of my political demise were exaggerated, but it was an uphill struggle.
Where does all this leave the voters? How do they make up their minds about standing? It would be easy to conclude that voters’ decisions are prisoners of the ads and the polling firms. It’s easy to think that voting itself has degenerated into a form of impulse buying. Certainly there are plenty of political strategists who try to convince politicians that political choice can be manipulated the way advertisers manipulate the purchase of a bar of soap, but this analogy between political and consumer choice strikes me as wrong. It’s not just that voters are smarter than most politicians and marketing experts give them credit for. It’s that voters attach a meaning to voting that they do not give to buying a skirt or a pair of pants. To vote is to express your belonging to a political community, to say what you believe in and to join in the collective act of choosing a country’s direction. Voting is an expression of symbolic allegiance more than an instrumental expression of interests. Most voters know that their individual vote will not make much difference to the outcome, but they still come out to vote because they believe it matters to take part in democracy.6 It’s impossible to understand why voters in many American states waited hours in line to vote in the 2012 election unless you accept that they wanted to be heard, to count, to have their voices registered in a national contest. Those who actually turn out regard voting as a social act, one they feel an obligation to justify to neighbours and friends. They wouldn’t have to justify their choice of a bar of soap or their choice of a dress, but they do feel they have to justify why they chose a certain candidate. They know that only some kinds of justification will work. You can say you bought the dress because you liked the colour; it’s more difficult to get away with saying that you voted for someone simply because you liked the way the candidate looked. Voters have to give reasons for electoral choice, and this obligation to justify separates voting from impulse buying. I’d go so far as to say that this obligation to give reasons is what makes voting rational.7
Too many defeated politicians blame voters for their defeat. Defeated candidates will tell you that they just can’t understand why voters rejected them, why their message didn’t get through. Having been defeated myself, I can admit it’s easy to blame the irrationality of voters. But it is a mistake. Putting the blame on voters is just a way to duck your own responsibility.
Having fought three elections in five years, I came to appreciate the rationale of voters’ choices. They know their country’s problems are complicated and they know that if solutions were easy, the problems would have gone away by now. They suspect that the solutions politicians offer are no miracle cure and that, in any event, they haven’t got the time or the information to decide which of the miracle cures on offer might be the better one. It is rational for them, in other words, to shift their evaluation from areas of decision where they feel the issue is either moot or just too difficult to decide to areas where they have confidence in their own judgment. As the cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown, when we are faced with cognitive difficulty, we shift effortlessly from hard questions we can’t answer to ones that seem intuitively easy. Everyone has some confidence in their ability to decide whether to trust another human being, and this is the fundamental evaluation that goes on in an election.8 The rational reason why issues matter less than personality in politics, why elections turn on which candidate successfully establishes standing, is that voters are good at deciding who is worth hearing and who is worth trusting. To decide whom to trust, voters focus on the question of whether the candidate is like them or not. The question a citizen asks when determining whether another citizen should represent them is whether that person is representative of them. Voters want a candidate to recognize who they are, and candidates do this by showing that they are one of them. Voters ask further questions, like: “Is this person who he says he is?” This is where negative attack ads that dredge up some inconsistency in a candidate’s narrative can be so devastating. The voters don’t necessarily trust the ad, but they begin questioning whether they can trust the politician who has been attacked. In my case, the “just visiting” ad left voters wondering whether I was who I said I was. The ad that said “he didn’t come home for you” questioned the motives for my homecoming. If a politician cannot succeed in convincing voters that he is in it for them, he cannot win standing. Without a narrative that defines the messenger as one with the audience he wants to reach, no message can get a hearing.
Barack Obama showed democratic politicians everywhere how to get a hearing, when he came under attack in his first presidential campaign. His famous speech on race in Philadelphia in the spring of 2008 was actually about standing—defending his right to represent black Americans, but also his capacity to understand the resentment of whites passed over in the name of affirmative action. With that speech he established the joint standing necessary to become the first black president of the United States. His rocky path in office also confirms that incumbency is no guarantee of standing. Once in office, the “birthers” dogged him with allegations tha
t he had not actually been born in the US, forcing him into having to make public his Hawaii birth certificate. In the 2012 election year, his opponents did their best to once again deny him standing as a real American, but voters supported him overwhelmingly, and in doing so, they changed the rules on standing in American politics forever. Race has ceased to be a bar to standing for the presidency, and in elections to come gender and sexual orientation will no longer be an issue. America and the democracies that take inspiration from it are inching a step closer to that place glimpsed by Martin Luther King when he spoke of a distant country where people would be judged not by their characteristics but by their character. Despite the victories that Obama has won, however, that country is still distant. Democratic societies that have outlawed discrimination nonetheless retain a complex code that still allows class, education and citizenship to be used to deny standing and to turn citizens from friends into foes in our politics. The best that can be said about the battle for standing is that the voter remains the arbiter. In the stubborn instinct that standing is not an entitlement but a privilege to be earned, there is hope for democracy. As Abraham Lincoln once asked, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?”9
At the same time, there are grounds for concern when the entirety of politics is consumed by the battle for standing. In a healthy democracy, you would not question an adversary’s right to be in the ring, or that peron’s citizenship, patriotic attachment, motives or good faith. You would question competence, experience, vision, platform and ideas. In the degraded politics we are enduring, the explicit goal of attack is to avoid debate, to avoid the risks that go with a free exchange of ideas. Once you’ve denied people’s standing, you no longer have to rebut what they say. You only have to tarnish who they are.
We can do better. I would advocate a ban on party advertising outside of election times. Let’s leave the poor voters alone and confine our arguments to the halls of the legislature. Libel laws should also be used to punish the worst lies. Eventually, a negative politics poisons everyone’s well. A politician who needs to unite a country in a time of crisis may find, having vilified his opponents, that he has betrayed the trust he needs to rally and inspire. If you win ugly, you are unlikely to govern well. None of us wants a democracy where elections become nothing more than referenda about standing, with the result determined by the most vicious attack ad. If standing becomes the only question in politics, none of the issues a society has to solve will get decided in elections. They will cease to be referenda on the kind of country we want. Of the three elections that I fought, none was a debate on the country’s future. All were vicious battles over standing. It is striking that in five and a half years in politics, none of my opponents ever bothered to attack what I was saying, what my platform said, or what I wanted to do for the country. They were too busy attacking me. I’m not complaining, and I’ll never regret fighting my corner, but the country’s politics was the loser.
EIGHT
ENEMIES AND ADVERSARIES
MY OPPONENTS DENIED ME STANDING in my own country, but truth be told, I made plenty of mistakes myself. Having voted for the government’s budget in January 2009, our party developed a bad case of buyers’ remorse. Having turned down a coalition with the opposition, we were now in reluctant coalition with the government. Such are the miseries that befall centrist parties when in opposition. Trying to break free in September 2009, I authorized an ill-advised attempt to move a motion of non-confidence in the House of Commons and thus bring down the Harper government. Having supported them in February, I was now trying to upend them in September. The country was in no mood for an election, and the other opposition parties, led by Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, who had previously opposed the government, now gleefully propped it up so that I would endure maximum embarrassment. Voters punish politicians who look like they’re playing games or changing their tune. I looked like both and paid the price.
In the aftermath of this debacle, I replaced my chief of staff, Ian Davey, and most of our team with party professionals more experienced in the ways of opposition. It was an ill-handled changing of the guard, and while I was certain I had to do it, it left bitterness in its wake. I was sacrificing my original leadership team to my own survival. They were paying the price for their mistakes but also for my own. I had lost my praetorian guard and now I had no one I could be sure was watching my back. It was a lonely time: poll numbers kept plummeting, the caucus was miserable and so was I.
We had deeper problems that went beyond tactical mistakes. Once we had voted for the government’s budget, we surrendered the economy as an issue. We could claim that they wouldn’t have brought in a stimulus package without our pressure. We could say that it had been a Liberal government’s good stewardship throughout the 1990s that had saved our banking system and our public finances. But voters rarely remember what you did for them yesterday. They’re interested only in what you’ll do for them tomorrow. And there, in the domain of differentiation, we struggled. We could quarrel with the government at the margins—and we did, seeking to make the absurd regional variations of our employment insurance program an issue—but with about 90 percent of the country employed, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about the 10 percent who were struggling to find jobs. Everywhere I went, especially in the manufacturing districts of central Canada battered by slumping orders, unemployment and a high dollar, I met victims of the recession, but the story line Canadians bought was that we were in better shape than the Americans, and if so, the government deserved the credit. Just to make sure they got the credit, they plastered every construction site in the country with their Economic Action Plan signs. Re-describing reality so that voters believe your account of it is an essential gift in a successful politician. With disbelief, mixed with reluctant admiration for his skill, I watched as Prime Minister Harper re-described the world, air-brushing away the inequality and misfortune and calling the country into a tent of happy illusion. To put it another way, Mr. Harper described the country’s problems in such a way as to make himself the only solution.
Why weren’t we the solution? We were a big-government party struggling to find our way in a new era of recession and austerity. For all our credentials for sound fiscal management, we retained a reputation for high spending. This vision no longer connected with an electorate looking for relief from the economic pressures and uncertainties bearing down on their families. To address these deeper problems in our message, I convened a thinkers’ conference of several hundred prominent Canadians in Montreal, with thousands more across the country taking part through our online webcast. We opened the windows and doors of the party and we brought in thinkers and writers to tell us exactly what they thought of us in public.1 Some of what they had to say was hard to listen to. One of our most distinguished diplomats, Robert Fowler, said that our party had lost its soul. We no longer stood for anything: years of power had corrupted us. I didn’t agree but I was glad he said it. Renewing the party’s culture meant forcing us to see ourselves through others’ eyes.
During the conference, we began to work our way toward a sharper vision of government’s essential functions in a time of austerity. I told the assembly in Montreal that there were some things government could do, some things it might do, and then a few core things it absolutely had to do. It had to protect people against systemic risks and market failure. I distinguished between personal and systemic risk. In a good society, people take risks with their lives, their incomes and their ideas, and if they succeed, good for them, and if they fail, they, not government, should shoulder the responsibility. Systemic risk was something different. This inflicted harms that went beyond any individual’s capacity to shoulder and repair. The global financial meltdown had devastated savings, pensions and jobs for millions of innocent people. Government had to be a society’s defender of last resort against a global market system that had run out of control. It shou
ld be regulating risk in markets so that those who took them bore the consequences and weren’t allowed to impose the costs on fellow taxpayers and citizens. The second essential job of government was to guarantee a safety net, so people would feel there was granite under their feet in any economic storm to come. Government shouldn’t be there to take away personal responsibility, but it should be there to take fear out of common life—fear of income insecurity, poverty, loss and destitution. Finally, a government had to be there to fight for equality of opportunity for every citizen. In the new era of austerity, we couldn’t afford to waste a single person, and we were wasting hundreds of thousands on the unemployment lines. We needed to invest in education, training and infrastructure to get the economy moving, and we could do so without blowing the budget, since borrowing costs were low and our deficit was under control. It was an activist vision of government based on the idea that the key to our economic success, especially in a competitive global economy, lay in opening up channels of opportunity for all our people. We spent the next year taking this message out to the people, and in town halls across the country I thought we got a good reception.
Old hands in the press corps told me that being leader of the Official Opposition was the most thankless job in politics, a seemingly endless audition for the prime ministership, conducted before three hypercritical and restive audiences: the press, my own caucus and the public. With the press, I tried to play it straight, avoided creating favourites, stayed away from off-the-record briefings, and avoided any loose talk that would come back to haunt me. Most treated me fairly, though I don’t have kind words for the journalists who phoned my ex-wife in the middle of the night in London, England, to try to get her to say I was a bad husband and father. I don’t have good feelings about the ferrets dispatched to check out our modest family house in the south of France, hoping to find a splendid chateau that would fit their narrative of the spoiled expatriate. I actively despise the sheet that ran a doctored photograph purporting to show me grinning in front of a US helicopter with a team of US Special Forces. I record these incidents only because it never pays to underestimate the amazing lack of scruple in those parts of the press that are willing to lend themselves to the attack politics of political parties. I learned to live with the constant scrutiny of my private life and managed, for the most part, to keep Zsuzsanna and my children out of the spotlight. I also learned that I lived my political life in a dual world, the real world of contact with citizens who were, by and large, civil and engaging, and the virtual world of the Internet, where anything goes. It never ceased to amaze me that the same people who would never have dared insult me to my face did not scruple to engage in the most imaginative kinds of slander in the disinhibited world of the blog and tweet. As for the media, they were obsessed, as usual, with themselves, with the threat posed by the Internet to their traditional business model, but when they did turn their attention to the opposition, they treated us more or less fairly. The daily press, the ones who stuck their microphones in your face at the end of every caucus meeting, did their jobs professionally, and I can’t recall an occasion when they mangled my words or trafficked in private gossip, but the drumbeat of lofty disdain from the columnists and pundits could get you down, especially if, as in my case, I’d been one myself and knew just how easy it was to scorn the fighter in the arena from the safety of the stands.
Fire and Ashes Page 13
