Jonathan Cohn headlines his latest plea to ignore a Brown win and pass health care anyway “Pelosi Isn’t Panicking. Her Party Should Listen.” Umm, call me cynical, but maybe the reason Pelosi isn’t panicking is that Pelosi’s got one of the safest seats in the country? I mean, take this for what it’s worth but if Brown wins today, my advice to Blanche Lincoln, and Ben Nelson, and their counterparts in the house? You should panic. They’re coming for you next.
Hell, If I were Blanche Lincoln, anyone in the leadership who wanted to get me to the floor for a health care vote would have to pry me out of the darkened room where they’d find me huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth and crying. Maybe Cohn’s right and the thing’s too far gone to save, so you might as well vote for it anyway. But that’s not exactly soothing, is it?
Megan McArdle, “Time to Panic”, Asymmetrical Information, 2010-01-19
January 19, 2010
QotD: Time to panic
September 26, 2009
Rick Mercer explains voter apathy
Rick Mercer has diagnosed the real reason nobody really wants a fall election in Canada:
It may be a myth that the Inuit have 100 different words to describe snow; it is an absolute truth that people on Parliament Hill have twice as many words to describe Stephen Harper’s various levels of angry.
[. . .]
Voting Conservative is not a problem for a majority of Canadians; we’ve done it before. Voting for an angry guy who thinks we’re stupid and will believe anything? That takes some getting used to.
[. . .]
The Liberals should have a bit of an advantage this time around. Having been beaten badly in the last election, they quickly took Stéphane Dion out behind the barn and he hasn’t been seen since. Immediately afterward, there was a puff of white smoke and the Liberal party suddenly had a brand new leader in Michael Ignatieff. He is by all accounts highly qualified, having dazzled many people at dinner parties for decades.
Mr. Ignatieff is, as we speak, surrounded by a brigade of young people in pointy shoes and designer glasses who work for him, worship him and twitter about him. Why we should vote for him? I’ve read the tweets; I’ve yet to see an answer.
[. . .]
Canadians have never come close to electing a New Democrat government federally, and yet Jack dreams. This is fine, as dreams are important.
The problem with Jack is, we all saw how excited he got when he actually thought that he was going to be a part of a coalition government. It wasn’t a normal excitement; it was the kind of excitement that scares other passengers on a plane.
Three excellent reasons to stay away from the polls. If there’s an election this year, I’m hoping there’ll be a smaller party I can cast my ballot for (without needing to hold my nose).
August 3, 2009
The twittering Tories
Victor Wong looks at some well-intended-but-bad advice offered to prospective Conservative candidates:
There are times when I wonder if, out of some misplaced maternal instinct, we’re teaching the next generation of politicians to be cowards.
Don’t know quite what I mean? Have a look at this story in this week’s Hill Times:
” ‘At least one of you is going to get disqualified for something you put on Twitter or on Facebook. I don’t know which one of you it’s going to be but it will be at least one of you,’ ” Jenni Byrne, director of issues management in the Prime Minister’s Office, told a group of candidates last week, according to a Conservative source.
The problem with this sort of statement is that it gives your prospective Tory candidate the impression of only two options: either pull out of things like Facebook or Twitter altogether (which cuts you out of at least 20 percent of the potential voting audience) or get your site vetted by Tory higher-ups (which, inevitably, leads to “cookie-cutter” sites, which would make your national campaign happy (so free of controversy!) but which make you look like a mindless clone.
Of course, from the point of view of the PMO, a pack of mindless clones is exactly what they want. Trained seals are so last-century.
July 25, 2009
Quebec voters’ relationship with the rest of Canada
Publius outlines exactly my suspicions about the way a significant number of Quebec voters view the rest of Canada:
The hard truth of Canadian unity, and why Quebecers “park” their votes with the Bloc, is that each of the two solitudes views Canada differently. To anglophones Canada is — save some of the more Balkanized ethnics ghettoes — their country. To francophones, especially in Quebec, Canada is simply a vehicle to advance their cultural interests. If French culture can be better preserved by keeping Quebec in Canada, so be it. If independence — or whatever half-way house euphemism the separatists are using at the moment — looks like a better option, vive la independence!
The Bloc Quebecois is monumentally useless if your political aims is something humdrum, like forming a government. But if the goal is to extort concessions form the rest of the country, by raising the specter of national destruction, the Bloc is wildly successful. Stephen Harper has to run a national governing party. The West wants to scrap the Wheat Board and the Long-gun Registry. The typical Ontarian couldn’t tell wheat from cauliflower and is terrified of being caught in a drive-by, while touring the less scenic parts of Toronto. A certain measure of negotiation and compromise is required to run so disparate a group, how much is another matter. Giles Duceppe, the longest serving party leader in Canada, doesn’t have to face such wide cultural chasms. He leads a nearly monoethnic one issue, one note party where the internal debate is about when to pick up and leave. The swing voters who alternately support the Bloc, the Tories and the Liberals, aren’t Canadians mulling over policy options, but foreigners in spirit trying to get the best deal. Expecting them to put Canada’s interests above their parochial concerns is a fantasy.
