If I've lost Walter Cronkite...

...I've lost the war, LBJ famously fretted when the CBS anchor, a champion of America's Vietnam conflict, finally turned against the ongoing tragedy in Southeast Asia.

Political columnist Andrew Coyne takes a backseat to no one in having promoted the movement that united the Canadian political right, and having promoted its prospects of supplanting the Grits as the country's new Natural Governing Party.

So it's astonishing - and astonishingly honest - to see Coyne take Stephen Harper to the end of the dock and gut him like a freshly caught bass. I think the problem here is that Harper's shift to the centre, a tack I explained he would have to take of political necessity in a This Magazine essay two years ago - you simply can't govern Canada as a right-wing theocracy - is giving the kind of minimalist government Coyne has for so long fought for a bad name. Harper turns out to be no minimalist - a betrayal for Coyne and like-minded - but as we've seen it's electorally successful.

Still, the new, cuddly Hockey Dad style of governing is anathema to a free-market purist. In this Coyne lament, excepted at length, we see that it requires a sporadic or, in Harper's case, sustained departure from principle. I doubt we'll soon see as effective a vivisection as this for some time:

"Harper’s reputation as a 'strong leader' (the central message, as I take it, of the Tory campaign) is undeserved, and that so far as it is earned, derives largely from his penchant for slapping people about: his party, his opponents, senior bureaucrats.

"Usually, the term 'strong leader' is reserved for someone who sets out a vision, sticks to his principles, takes risks, invests political capital, and ultimately prevails in the face of entrenched opposition, whether through the strength of his ideas, the force of his oratory, his own personal magnetism, or sheer doggedness.

"None of these, I argue, apply in Harper’s case. He has not set out a vision: rather he has spent much effort persuading the public he has none. He has not stuck to his principles: he has abandoned them at every turn. He has not taken risks or invested political capital, but rather has stuck to sure-fire crowd-pleasers (GST cuts, tough-on-crime) and precisely targeted pandering (tax credits for children’s sports, the “nation” resolution).

"He has generally bested his opponents by the simple but effective tactic of the jaw-dropping about-face: discarding convictions, breaking promises, saying one thing and doing another, even (in the case of fixed election dates) going so far as to make hash of his own law. This has given him the element of surprise, it is true, but only because of a serial inability on the part of his opponents to imagine he could be quite so untrustworthy. [Emphasis added.]

"None of this is to deny that Harper has the capacity to be a strong leader. Indeed, for pure talent he is easily the most impressive federal leader since Trudeau: intelligent, self-assured, strategic. But he has not yet put those talents to use in a way that would merit the title."

Opposite: The housebroken Hockey Dad

Comments

[bill]

Nice to see you remain totaly unbiased and "above the fray"
LOL

[DaHata]

We'll see how cuddly Harper is when he gets a majority: that's when the agenda he and his cronies have wanted to implement all along.