Dodging Icebergs

Over the years, David Brooks has expended a great deal of editorial ink gently -- and at times not so gently -- satirizing the baby boom generation, of which he is a card carrying member. Last week, in The New York Times, he pointed out how we, who used to insist that the world was our oyster, are becoming "hippocampically challenged." Citing a common experience of those of us on the other side of sixty -- not being able to remember the name of an old acquaintance -- he detailed the "evasive vagueness" we employ to save face.

He then suggested that what happens to individuals also happens to countries. He wrote that "great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget they've forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments."

All true in a tongue-in-cheek way. But in an article for the May 1st edition of The New York Review of Books, British historian Tony Judt claims that we in North America have not learned the lessons of the century we have just left behind. "In the West," he writes, "we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise."

Not that we haven't built memorials to twentieth century history. But, says Judt, "the twentieth century we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nastalgo-triumphalist -- praising famous men and celebrating famous victories -- or else, and increasingly -- they are opportunities for the recollection of collective suffering."

This is particularly true in the United States, he writes, where "we have forgotten the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. In much of continental Europe, Asia and Africa, the twentieth century was experienced as a cycle of wars. War in the last century signified invasion, occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction and mass murder." In contrast, "the United States avoided almost all of that. . . . The U.S. was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swaths of territory as a result of occupation or dismemberment."

But, he says, those who have experienced war know that it touches everyone and everything. Even among the victorious "the very structures of civilized life -- regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges -- disappear(s) or [takes] on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself become(s) the leading source of insecurity. . . . Behaviour that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances -- theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of others' suffering -- become not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself." War leaves the battlefield a no man's land. But it also eats away at the social fabric of the home front. And, in the end, it dissolves the bonds which hold a nation together.

We have forgotten what the twentieth century should have taught us about war; but we have also forgotten what it taught us about the economy. For the last twenty-five years, the best and the brightest have told us we live in a "new economy," where the old rules don't apply. But, as the tech and housing bubbles burst, wealth was increasingly concentrated at the top of society; and now the world financial system hangs in the balance. At the same time, we have -- in Pat Moynihan's words, "defined deviancy down;" and the institutions we relied on -- schools, the health care system and the family -- have buckled under the strain.

We have chosen to live in a state of willful ignorance. How else to explain -- in Richard Reeves apt phrase -- the "high I.Q. fools" who predicted a brave new world of peace and prosperity? One thinks particularly of Paul Wolfowitz (former Deputy Secretary of Defense and former President of the World Bank) who confidently predicted that, after an American victory in Iraq, oil would sell for $20 a barrel. This week oil hit $115 a barrel. Wolfowitz was trained as a mathematician. Clearly, he missed something.

This was also the week when we memorialized one of the first significant events of the last century -- the sinking of the Titanic. Equipped with the latest technology and piloted by a superbly experienced crew, it was said to be invulnerable to the elements.

History is a social science, not an exact one. So its predictive powers are not always reliable. At the very least, though, history helps us dodge big obstacles, like icebergs. Try as we might to forget them, they are still out there -- floating in the North Atlantic.

Assuming Responsibility

In his book, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, Christopher Moore reminded his readers that Canadian parliamentary democracy was based on a fundamental principle which, in the 21st century, strikes many as romantic and quaint: "In the middle of the nineteenth century, responsible government meant that the survival of the prime minister and his cabinet depended, day by day, on the verdict of a vigilant Parliament. Members of Parliament were chosen by, close to, and dependent on (for those times) a broadly based and well informed electorate. Contemplating the results of the election of 1997," Moore wrote, "I found myself wishing we lived under conditions more like these."

He is not alone. Last month, Mr. Justice John Gomery -- the man who was the bane of the Chretien and Martin governments -- turned his guns on the man and the party who roared against Liberal self dealing and obfuscation. Pointing out that, for years, power has been transferred from elected members of Parliament to the unelected advisers in the Prime Minister's Office, Gomery asserted that, instead of reversing this process, the Harperites have accelerated it. "I suggest this trend is a danger to Canadian democracy," he told the government operations committee; and it "leaves the door wide open to the kind of political interference in the day to day administration of government programs that led to what is commonly called the sponsorship scandal. We have a government where one man seems to have an ever increasing influence upon what government policy is going to be. If you look back historically at prime ministers in the past, I don't think they had the same hold over their party and Parliament that the present prime minister has."

The Harper government is notorious for keeping its elected members on a short leash. All government communication is controlled by the PMO; and policy announcements belong to the Prime Minister, not his cabinet. Moreover, whether the policy is Afghanistan or consumer protection, the same PMO routinely sits on information. Increasingly, the only way to pry that information from the government's hands is to apply for it through the Access to Information Act. Former Ontario cabinet minister Sean Conway -- who now teaches at Queens University -- has said, "It is one of the assumptions of a democratic society that its citizens are going to be provided with timely, relevant and understandable information." Mr. Harper and his minions, says Conway, "are doing something quite destructive to one of the key pillars of democratic society."

And the government is not the only body who is acting irresponsibly. Mr. Dion and the Liberal opposition have failed to hold the government's feet to the fire. As Jim Travers wrote in the Toronto Star, "An opposition leader who even temporarily abandons the core responsibility of holding the government to account needs to explain the reasons for directly or indirectly endorsing ruling party policies on war, the economy and climate change." Dion has refused to do this; but his reason is obvious: according to the polls, Canadians don't want an election now.
The result is that government policy becomes law by default.

So, ultimately, the responsibility for our situation rests with us, the electorate. We give the government -- which needs to answer for the vanishing federal surplus, for the hot air behind its environmental policy, and for the "financial considerations" it offered Chuck Cadman if he voted to bring down the previous government -- a pass.

John Kenneth Galbraith -- a man for all seasons -- wrote, "There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose." If we understand the concept of responsible government (and insist that it be practiced in all seasons) we will always be on the right side.

By the Awful Grace of God

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It had been five years since the historic March on Washington, and four years since he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. He was in Memphis to lead a strike of sanitation workers.

Some interpreted his presence there as a sign of his diminished status. He was, after all, far from the haunts of the powerful. But anyone who had followed his career knew otherwise. For, while he marched against racism, he also marched against poverty. "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age," he wrote in 1967. "It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time for us has come to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."

In the years since his death, some -- citing King's personal failings -- have dismissed him as a hypocrite. But they fail to note that King was at home in the temples of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor. And, despite the rising tide of violence -- which threatened to engulf the Civil Rights Movement -- King remained true to his faith in non-violence. "Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time," he said when he accepted the Nobel Prize. For, more than anything else, the challenge of the time was " the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence." Non violence was the way to achieve and maintain justice: "the foundation of such a method," he said," is love."

Robert Kennedy, who was running for president when King was killed, spoke to a largely African American crowd on April 4, 1968. Kennedy's biographers claim that, after the death of his elder brother, he read the plays of Aeschylus, with whom he had little acquaintance -- until November 22, 1963. And it was to Aeschylus that Kennedy turned, knowing what would follow King's death :

He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep,
Pain that cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Kennedy's words have a particular poignancy, because he, too, had a date with an assassin's bullet some two months later. For those of us who came of age in that time, King's death marked a turning point. As Jesse Jackson has said, that day has divided life into two segments: before King and after King. His death marked the death of our innocence and the birth of a new cynicism.

But that dichotomy is too simple. We have, in Dickens' phrase, lived through the best and worst of times. Perhaps every generation does. But the challenge every generation faces is to arrive at some kind of wisdom, "by the awful grace of God." The jury is still out on the question of whether or not we have learned anything.

Mr. Obama's Speech

Barack Obama was two years old when Martin Luther King -- standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial -- declared, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Mr. Obama's generation is the generation on which Dr. King's hopes were riding. It is not too much of a stretch to conclude that -- even after "the searing injustice" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- King, upon hearing Obama's speech in Philadelphia, would have nodded in agreement: "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together -- unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we have common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all have to move in the same direction -- towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

But Obama did more than reaffirm King's core conviction. He was more than a spokesman for his race. He illustrated what I have returned to more than once in this space: he showed that he has the ability to get inside the skins of people on both sides of the racial divide and truly understand their grievances.

Speaking of his pastor's racial intolerance, he reminded his audience that Jeremiah Wright grew up in an era when "legalized discrimination -- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force or the fire departments -- meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations." In that context, said Obama, Mr. Wright's anger and intemperance were understandable, if not condonable.

But then Obama turned his attention to white families whom affirmative action policies have disadvantaged. "Most working and middle class white Americans," he declared, "don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they 're concerned no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures and feel their dreams slipping away . . . ."

In that context, said Obama, "when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

No one, to my knowledge, has ever tackled the problem of race in America from the perspective of Mr. Obama. His opponents have tried to make his lack of experience his Achilles' heal. The question is, "Which experience, and how critical is it?" It would appear that Mr. Obama's experience has been particularly unique and -- I suggest -- absolutely critical.

Whatever he and his countrymen have been asked to face, they have always been citizens of a nation divided -- fundamentally divided by slavery and its legacy. If the United States is to survive the brave new world of global terrorism -- which, at root, is the result of the same kind of cultural schism which led to a Civil War and segregation -- it will have to heal itself. Martin Luther King knew that. That's what King saw from "the mountain top." He knew that, like Moses, he would not make it to the promised land. But he hoped that his children would. Mr. Obama's run for the presidency is a sign that Dr. King's children have arrived.

The Return of Bob Rae

When I began this venture a year and a half ago, I suggested in one of my first posts that the Liberal Party should choose Bob Rae as its next leader. Obviously, they did not heed my counsel. But, like a lot of Canadians, I was willing to give Stephane Dion a chance to re-create the Liberals. His efforts to date have not been impressive. However, Mr. Rae's arrival on the Opposition front benches may give the party the real world and rhetorical skills Dion lacks -- not to mention a sense of genuine wit.

Rae is not without his faults. As a teacher in Ontario during his time in power, I worked my share of "Rae Days" without pay. And, for that, Rae was despised by a majority of Ontarians. I never felt that way about the man -- although I should confess that I didn't vote for him. Nor did I vote for the man who succeeded him. But I was taken with Rae's idea that it was better to lose pay than a job. And, while the central premise of his approach to the recession of the early nineties was to share the pain, it was not a popular message. Voters want politicians to relieve their pain, not spread it around. Unfortunately, while Rae himself was one of the most gifted politicians of his generation, his cabinet lacked depth. They simply did not inspire public confidence. The combination of an unpopular message and a weak cabinet doomed Rae. He is still one of this country's most able politicians. The difference this time is that he adds considerable strength to the Liberal bench.

Rae will be a target for the Conservatives. Jim Flaherty, the Minister of Finance -- and Ontario's former finance minister -- will remind the public that Rae's tenure coincided with hard times. But Rae did not instigate those times. And, sticking to the playbook he used when he was in charge of this province's finances, Flaherty has chided premier Dalton McGuinty for not cutting taxes on business. He will fulminate, claiming the federal Liberals are as incompetent as their provincial cousins. But he conveniently ignores the fact that the downturn in the United States has dried up demand for Ontario products -- particularly automobiles. Cutting taxes will increase the supply of goods. But, if the public cannot afford to buy what you make, all you will do is stock your warehouses and fill your parking lots.

Mr. Flaherty's panacea comes at a time when the whole supply side experiment has proved to be, literally, bankrupt. E. J. Dionne, in The Washington Post last week, offered an accurate evaluation of the economic policies of the last thirty years: "Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends," he wrote, "about how brilliant capitalists are, and how much they deserve their seven figure-salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy." For now that it has all blown up in their faces, "they are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard."

Mr. Rae will be quite prepared to make that argument; and, when Mr. Flaherty pushes back, Rae will remind Canadians that the man who railed against debt left Ontarians a five and a half billion dollar deficit. Mr. Flaherty's stewardship of the economy was no brief, shining moment. And, as a lawyer, he will be remembered for his proposal to deal with the homeless by sweeping them off the streets and housing them in jail for the night.

I used to work for a man who was fond of saying that "stupidity is its own curse." I have no idea who will win the next election -- it is too soon to tell. But I suspect that, when it comes to stupidity, Mr Rae will draw public attention to it, eloquently and in two languages.

The New Okies

It seemed that every time I sat down to watch the news this week, a picture of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer appeared on the screen. The fall of Spitzer reads like a Greek tragedy. But there is a bigger tragedy unfolding -- and it has been unfolding for sometime now. Despite the media's fixation on Spitzer, what riveted my attention this week was another series of images, broadcast during the BBC's nightly newscast. In Ontario, California -- not far from Los Angeles -- a tent city has sprung up. "Over the last six months," reported The Los Angeles Times, on February 3rd, "more than 250 homeless people have pitched tents near the Ontario airport, creating a burgeoning shantytown that sprawls across vacant lots and spills into side streets." The story continues, "Pregnant women, parolees, alcoholics, the mentally ill, people fallen on hard times: They're all here living on donated food and water." The scene has been repeated in cities throughout North America for over a generation, to the shame of both Canada and the United States.

But, according to the BBC, a new wrinkle has been added to the story. Since the report in The Times, the number of residents in this refugee camp has swollen, because many of the newcomers have lost their homes to the foreclosure crisis which is sweeping the United States. If a home owner loses his or her job, if a relative requires expensive medical care, or if the new monthly payments are out of reach when their mortgages reset, thousands of people are finding themselves in the same position as those in California. It is a scene out of Steinbeck"s The Grapes of Wrath.

While the homeless were taking refuge in tent cities, dismissed investment bankers were testifying before the American Congress. Stanley O'Neil, who used to run Merrill Lynch, walked away with a severance package worth $161 million, even though the organization, under his stewardship, lost $10 billion; Charles Prince of Citigroup walked away with $61 million after staggering losses at his bank; and Angelo Mozelli reportedly pocketed some $115 million, after his nearly bankrupt company, Countrywide Financial, was gobbled up by Bank of America. Angry shareholders, however, forced him to give back $37.5 million of that.

According to salary surveys in the United States, between 1996 and 2006 CEO pay went up 45%, while the pay of the average worker went up 7%. And therein lies the problem. Economic policies of the last generation have led to an unconscionable concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. As Robert Reich (Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labour) wrote this week,"We're reaping the whirlwind of many years during which Americans have spent beyond their means and most of the benefits of an expanding economy have gone to a relatively small group at the very top."

The story is the same in Canada. As Tom Walkom reported a year ago in The Toronto Star (see my post of March 7, 2007) "the richest 20% of Canadians own 75% of the nation's wealth" and "we allow the country's 100 chief executive officers to make, on average, 240 times more than the typical worker, up from 106 times the average wage in 1998.)"

All this is the consequence of supply side economic policy. The fallacy of that policy, says Reich, is the belief that if you juice the supply side of the economic seesaw, you will (as if by magic) stimulate demand. The problem, however, is that -- because of the concentration of wealth at the top -- there is no money at the bottom to demand anything. And, until recently, the money available was borrowed money. Now even the borrowed money has dried up. To put this situation in perspective, Reich quoted Merriner S. Eccles, who was Franklin Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve: "As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption in turn implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had, by 1929-30, drawn into a few hands an increasing proportion of currently produced wealth."

It is too soon to know whether history will repeat itself. But the parallels are obvious -- and the burgeoning tent city in California underscores them. I have previously quoted George Santayana in this space: "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." John Kenneth Galbraith chronicled the political folly which spawned the Great Depression in his book, The Great Crash, 1929. The root of the problem, Galbraith wrote, was the inability of policy makers to recognize that "Money differs from an automobile or a mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not."

In their inability to recognize that fact, the policy makers of the 1920's share one characteristic with the policy makers of the last twenty-five years: they had and have (as Galbraith also noted) an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion.

Harper Agonistes

Stephen Harper found himself fighting battles on several fronts this week. First, there was the controversy surrounding the insurance policy which two senior Conservative operatives allegedly offered independent MP Chuck Cadman shortly before he died in 2005. Harper maintains that Cadman was offered "financial considerations" to help him pay election expenses, if Cadman's vote to defeat Paul Martin's Liberals forced Cadman to run in the next election. But whether Cadman was offered an insurance policy or money to pay election expenses is immaterial. The whole story doesn't pass the smell test. Cadman had been evicted from the Alliance Party, the original vehicle which Harper rode to the leadership of the new Conservative Party of Canada; and the new party had already chosen its candidate to run against Cadman. Why would the Conservatives offer financial support to their rival? The implication is that Harper, or envoys acting as his agents, were trying to buy Cadman's vote. When the Liberals had the gall to level that charge, the Prime Minister vowed that he would see them in court.

Then there was the leak of a memo from the Canadian consulate in Chicago, claiming that, while Barack Obama was threatening to reopen NAFTA, he really wasn't serious about it. The memo led to charges that Canada was interfering in the American Democratic primary. When ABC News released the story that Obama's apparent duplicity on NAFTA originated with Ian Brodie, Harper's Chief of Staff, Harper denied the claim -- until it was verified. Now, he says, he will investigate everyone connected to the leak. As James Travers noted in the Toronto Star, discretion is the soul of diplomacy; and, while the Harper government is not the first to throw discretion to the winds, the whole affair suggests diplomacy is not this government's strong suit.

And, two nights ago, Dan McTeague's private member's bill (which offered parents an annual $5000 tax break for each of their children who eventually attended institutions of higher learning) passed the house. The cost of the program was estimated at one billion dollars a year. Claiming that the government didn't have "money to throw around" the Conservatives vowed to kill the bill in the Senate -- a body they want to abolish. Having decreased the government's revenue stream by $10 to $12 billion a year after cutting the GST 2 percent, Mr Harper and his associates claim that the cupboard is bare. They know how to cut costs. But this government, led by a professional economist, doesn't know how to invest in the country's future.

More and more, these folks are beginning to look like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Despite their sound and fury, their wounds are self inflicted. A recent Canwest Global poll suggested that one in three Canadians believes Harper is lying when he claims that he knew nothing specific about the offer made to Cadman. Mr. Harper is someone who insists that everything the government does be routed through his office. It's hard to believe that he was unaware of what was going on behind the scenes with any of these files. However, knowledge and judgment are two different things. One does not necessarily proceed from the other. And trying to mask that fact with half truths merely calls attention to one's shortcomings.

The last Conservative Prime Minister of Canada developed a reputation for embroidering the truth. That reputation haunts Brian Mulroney to this day. As Lawrence Martin wrote this week in The Globe and Mail, "it's hard to give the government the benefit of the doubt. . . its credibility is suspect." Like Samson in Milton's poem, Mr. Harper could bring the whole edifice down around his ears.

William F. Buckley

The man who several of his fellow pundits dubbed "The Father of Modern Conservatism" died last week. I first encountered William F. Buckley as a television commentator during the 1968 Democratic convention. Still an undergraduate, I was not far removed from my first encounter with J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; and Buckley, with his New York Brahmin dialect and polysyllabic vocabulary, struck me as a flesh and blood example of what the fictional Holden Caulfield called a "phony."

When I began to read Buckley's opinions, which he produced prolifically, I was horrified. His support for the late Senator McCarthy, the late General Franco and -- most importantly -- the late Jim Crow, struck me as instances of what Orwell called "the defense of the indefensible." Siding with Southern segregationists after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, Buckley wrote, "The central question that emerges. . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes -- the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

Even though Buckley spoke in the same cadences as Franklin Roosevelt and he flashed the same winning smile, he spoke for what Roosevelt called the "economic royalists." In fact, in the pages of National Review, Buckley declared war on the New Deal; and he considered Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, who had come to terms with Roosevelt's legacy -- leaving in place its tax structure and building the interstate highway system -- traitors to the cause.

But as an old university debater, I found myself tuning into the many debates Buckley held on his long running PBS program, Firing Line. What struck me most was the people Buckley invited to support the opposing side. Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith and Senator Gary Hart regularly crossed swords Buckley; and the quality of debate was stellar. It wasn't long before I read that Buckley and Galbraith -- the fervent anti-New Dealer and the passionate New Dealer -- were good friends. Clearly, Buckley did not let politics get in the way of friendship. He could get inside the heads of his opponents and see the world from their perspective -- or, as Robert B. Semple wrote last week in the New York Times, "He hated most of what the liberals stood for. He didn't hate them."

Unfortunately, even though he could get inside his opponents' heads, he never learned the trick which Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, suggested that his daughter Scout learn: to get inside someone's skin and walk around in it. One suspects that Buckley found that trick simply unseemly. If Buckley had truly understood what "separate but equal" meant for someone whose skin was black, he never would have thrown in his lot with Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

He did manage to get inside Ronald Reagan's skin, though; and Reagan's victory represented the triumph of Modern Conservatism. Reagan, the economist Milton Friedman, and Buckley were the most important spokesmen for that program. And we, in North America, have been living with the consequences of their success for nearly thirty years.

The last eight years have seen the fracturing of the coalition of national security conservatives, social conservatives and religious conservatives which Buckley helped build. He has watched the neoconservatives under George W. Bush destroy that coalition and bastardize the ideas for which he stood. Of Bush's invasion of Iraq, Buckley wrote "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed;" and he suggested that Bush administration policy going forward should be based on "acknowledgement of defeat." The Iraq War was, said Buckley, "anything but conservative."

Buckley's recognition of the disaster in Iraq was proof that he could change his mind. He told Michael Kinsley some years after his editorial declaring that southern whites were "the advanced race" that he had misunderstood the civil rights movement; and, having initially supported Richard Nixon for president, he eventually called for Nixon's resignation. Unlike the present occupant of the White House, Buckley could admit his own fallibility.

I found little to admire about Buckley's politics. But his insistence that politics was about ideas -- and that it was also about incisive and civil discussion -- should live long after his passing. Unfortunately, many of his successors on the right, like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, seemed to have missed that lesson. One can hope that it is a lesson which will not be lost on the next generation.

The Delusion of the Masses?

Last Wednesday, Robert Samuelson, who writes a column for The Washington Post, published a piece titled, "The Obama Delusion," in which he reached the following conclusion: "He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's problems when, so far, he isn't." On the previous day, in The New York Times, David Brooks wrote that he had encountered something he labeled OCS, short for "Obama Comedown Syndrome." Those who suffered from this affliction, he wrote, "began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, his Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for, then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?"

The tone of both pieces reminded me of what Walter Lippmann wrote of Franklin Roosevelt six months before Roosevelt was declared his party's standard bearer in 1932: "He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President."

And, if one is looking for reasons to explain Obama's rise, it seems to me that what happened in 1932 is instructive. George W. Bush likes to think of himself as another Harry Truman -- a common man of strong convictions who was reviled when he left office, but who history has vindicated. However, Mr. Bush may be more like Herbert Hoover than Harry Truman. Hoover was a dedicated public servant, whose solutions to the economic crisis of his time were classic economic orthodoxy. He never understood that what he faced required a new set of solutions -- what Roosevelt called "The New Deal."

In reaction to Hoover's inability to perceive how much the world had changed, the public rose in revolt and put a man in office who some people referred to as "a feather duster," and who spent a good deal of his time in a wheelchair.

But Roosevelt -- like Obama -- was a quick study, who attracted a brain trust of superb advisers and who thought outside the box. The results were remarkable: Roosevelt abandoned the textbooks and experimented: the benchmark for success was, "Does it work?" Not everything worked; and when that happened, Roosevelt did not make the mistake of confusing policy with dogma. He simply tried something else.

If anything, Mr. Bush has been the opposite of Roosevelt. His mantra has been, "stay the course." The members of the Bush administration are right when they proclaim that the world changed after September 11th. Unfortunately, they have not had Roosevelt's flexibility of mind. And those who Bush has chosen as his Brain Trust have suffered from what the American historian Barbara Tuchman called "woodenheadedness." (See my post of April 9, 2007) The cure for woodenheadness, wrote Tuchman, is moral courage. Unfortunately, history is replete with examples of moral courage being equated with steadfastness. Often, she declared, the true measure of moral courage was the courage to change course. The man in the wheelchair had learned something about moral courage long before he became president.

What Obama is advocating is a change of course. Like Roosevelt, he is saying that the change will only be effective if it comes from the bottom up. And, like Roosevelt, the forces of fear are aligned against him. But he understands that -- in these extraordinary times -- our most potent enemy is "fear itself."

Sometimes the people have an instinctive knowledge that the man who can meet the challenges of their time is in their midst. My guess is that Obama will be elected President. If I'm right, the Walter Lippmanns of our own day will either be proven right or history will force them -- like Lippmann -- to reassess the man.

Adios, Fidel

Fidel Castro resigned his office today. The man who haunted my adolescence has left, not with a bang (a consummation for which many have wished) but with a whimper. I remember the day in October, 1962, when I went off to school, not knowing when I got home -- and I viewed my arrival there as problematic -- if the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war. As a student who had recently entered high school, I sat riveted when, over the intercom, our principal piped in a radio report, updating us on the confrontation between American and Russian ships off the coast of Cuba.

I breathed a sigh of relief when it appeared that the Russians had blinked. It was only years later that I discovered the Kennedy brothers and Nikita Khrushchev had quietly brokered a back channel deal by which Khrushchev agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba if President Kennedy removed American missiles from Turkey. Amid the hysteria of the Cold War, reason -- something which appeared to be in short supply -- prevailed. It is worth remembering that Kennedy's military advisers and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson were advocating an invasion of Cuba.

Even though rational and pragmatic men avoided Armageddon, the Kennedys remained obsessed with Castro. They renewed their single-minded attempts to eliminate him. The most Machiavellian of their efforts -- and the lowest point in the Kennedy administration -- was their plot to enlist the mob's help in Castro's assassination. As the recent release of C.I.A. files confirms, Robert Kennedy arranged a hit on Castro, orchestrated by Johnny Rozelli and Sam Giancana, Al Capone's successor in the Chicago mob. It was no profile in courage -- either for the Attorney General, who had declared war on organized crime, or for the president, who was sleeping with Giancana's mistress.

Castro was no innocent victim. He wielded power ruthlessly and tolerated no dissent. He would not allow opponents to write, as he did in 1952 -- in his effort to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, "But my voice will not be stifled -- it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it."

And, not content to liberate Cuba from Batista's tyranny, Castro sought -- through his alliance with Che Gueverra -- to export his revolution to Central America, South America and Africa. But, on the positive side of the ledger, he provided all his citizens with universal education -- from kindergarten through university -- and universal health care. Those who seek to understand Castro's longevity should begin with those two policies.

In the final analysis, however, what Castro cared most about was the acquisition and maintenance of power. And it has been that overarching quest that has tainted whatever good he has done. There are those who think that, with Castro's departure, the road to democracy is inevitable. George W. Bush greeted Castro's resignation by declaring, "Eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections -- and I mean free and fair -- not those kind of staged elections which the Castro brothers foist off as true democracy."

Mr. Bush, whose attempt to export democracy to the Middle East has been about as successful as Castro's attempt to export Communism to Central America, would be wise to let the Cubans work out their own political destiny. It would be a new twist on the Monroe Doctrine. For, as today proves, if you are patient enough to wait out your opponents, you may wind up in a much better place than where war and assassination leaves you.

The Fat is in the Fire

All minority governments eventually engineer their own downfall. Stephen Harper has indicated that, within the next two months, the House of Commons will be presented with three no confidence motions. The budget, by definition, is one such motion. But why bring the Afghanistan mission to a vote, and why now? Likewise, does the Senate's attempt to revise the government's crime legislation merit the no confidence threshold?

Mr. Harper will claim, of course, that all three pieces of legislation are matters of principle. But the truth is that the clock has been ticking on the Harper government for a long time. Moreover, this government has lasted longer than the average eighteen month tenure for minority governments in Canada. The simple fact is, as James Travers pointed out in The Toronto Star on Saturday, the tide is turning against Harper. The economic downturn in the United States is about to hit us -- in Ontario and Quebec's manufacturing plants it already has -- and the political tide, which long ago went out on George W. Bush, is now turning left. Mr. Harper will find it harder to deal with the next American president and Congress.

And, besides, the political war room which the Conservatives established a year ago has been given precious little to do -- except to produce attack ads against Stephane Dion. Those ads are going to be the chief weapon in Mr. Harper's arsenal. And, truth be told, the awkward Mr. Dion is a ripe target for parody.

Even if France provides enough troops to meet the reinforcement threshold recommended in the Manley Report, those troops will still not be enough to turn around the situation in Afghanistan. And there will not be a significant shift in NATO troop deployments until after the American election. The decision to extend the mission does not have to be made now. If an extension is needed immediately after the American election, that extension can be for six months, not two years. The British and the Russians knew something about invading Afghanistan -- but Mr. Bush and his enablers disregarded their experience, then left NATO holding the bag. Mr. Harper seems to feel that there is something heroic -- like Horatio at the bridge -- in holding that bag.

The crime bill, which echoes American sentencing guidelines -- and has led to one of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world -- is also a flawed piece of legislation. And the budget, as many economists have pointed out, makes paltry investments in human capital and infrastructure. Instead of investing the surpluses of the last several years, Mr. Harper and Company have reduced taxes in an across the board fashion, rather than targeting areas which require government support to secure the nation's future. Government investment in the Conservative lexicon is an oxymoron. The textbook says that investment is the job of private entrepreneurs.

For the Prime Minister, a true believer in Milton's Friedman's Revolution, holds fast to the economic dogma of the last thirty years, even as the evidence of its failure mounts. All he can offer in its defense is a set of personal attacks, which he has used most recently against Linda Keen -- and which he will use against his political opponents. His confidence belies a deeper sense of desperation. What he wants is a majority government before he is declared irrelevant. The next few months will determine whether or not he gets his wish.

Mr. Edwards Takes His Leave

Today Americans head to the polls to decide who the nominees for both the Republican and Democratic parties should be. The betting is that John McCain, like Lazarus, will enjoy a political resurrection. On the Democratic side, the outcome is not so clear. The only thing Democrats know for sure is that John Edwards has left the building.

In many ways, Edwards was the most appealing of the three candidates. Here I must acknowledge that Edwards went to law school at the University of North Carolina, from which I graduated almost thirty five years ago; and he lives outside Chapel Hill. I loved going to school there; and, to me, the town always seemed an oasis of wisdom and tolerance in a state which at times -- particularly when Jesse Helms served as its senior senator -- lacked of both.

There are those who were unimpressed with Edwards' angry populism. And some -- noting that Edwards could afford four hundred dollar haircuts and that he lived in a palatial home -- accused him of hypocrisy. But, so far as I know, discovering and using one's talents for good, even if those talents lead to the accumulation of some wealth, is not a sign of moral turpitude. Another way of thinking about Edwards is that he simply didn't forget where he came from. And where he came from is a small South Carolina mill town, the working class of which used to be referred to -- pejoratively -- as "lint heads."

These are the folks, Robert Reich wrote, whose incomes have stagnated for thirty years. Until recently, they have adopted three strategies to cope with this situation. First, working women entered the work force. In 1970, 38% of American women worked outside the home. Today that number is 70%. When that was not enough to keep them from slipping into poverty, working class Americans simply worked more hours. "The typical American," wrote Reich, "now works two weeks more each year than 30 years ago." And, in a final desperate attempt to avoid being caught in an economic undertow, they went into debt -- lots of it. Now, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis threatens to take the entire financial system down, they have run out of options. Edwards has reason to be angry.

But anger is not Edwards chief legacy to this year's campaign. Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times last week that Edwards has left those who have survived -- Mr. Obama and Mrs Clinton -- a storehouse of good, workable ideas. "He made a habit of introducing bold policy proposals," wrote Krugman, "and they were met with such enthusiasm among Democrats that his rivals were more or less forced to follow suit."

Sometimes, however, the man with the ideas has to watch as others implement them. "Unfortunately for Mr. Edwards," wrote Krugman, "the willingness of his rivals to emulate his policy proposals made it hard for him to differentiate himself as a candidate; meanwhile those rivals had far larger financial resources and received vastly more media attention." Still, Edwards extracted from both Obama and Clinton a pledge to make poverty -- which he calls "the cause of my life" -- a centerpiece of Democratic policy. And good trial lawyer that he is, one can be sure he will hold both Obama and Clinton to that pledge.

I wrote a month ago that my money was on Obama. It still is. But regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, neither he nor she will has got there without the policies and the passion of John Edwards. He and his wife, Elizabeth, now move on to other more important battles. God speed.

The Manley Commission

The work of the Manley Commission has received generally good reviews -- largely because Manley and his fellow commissioners have refused to carry anyone's water. Tom Axworthy, one of Pierre Trudeau's principal advisers, wrote in The Toronto Star that their report "will make uncomfortable reading for everyone in Ottawa." Axworthy continued: "Perhaps the most depressing of Manley's findings is that the 'government from the start of Canada's Afghan involvement, has failed to communicate with Canadians, with balance and candor about the reasons for Canada's involvement or about the risks.' There can be no more serious indictment of a country's political system than going to war without telling the citizens why, or the severity of the risks involved."

It is that essential failure which undercuts Manley's recommendation that Canada remain in Afghanistan past February 2009, the scheduled date for the withdrawal of Canadian troops. Manley recommends extending the mission, providing that two caveats are met: that NATO deploy another 1,000 troops to the Kandahar region of the country; and that Canadian soldiers be provided with new and better equipment. NATO pledged today that it would find the troops. We shall see what comes to pass.

Manley has concluded, along with James Travers -- also writing in the Star -- that to withdraw from Afghanistan "might wreck NATO as well as Canada's reputation." One should not forget, however, that it was Donald Rumsfeld, with his distinction between "old and new Europe," who started to dismantle the alliance. The silliness about "freedom" -- as opposed to" french" -- fries didn't help.

And those developments point to the elephant in the room. What lies at the heart of NATO's reluctance to commit itself to Afghanistan is George W. Bush's decision to remove strategic assets from that country in order to invade Iraq. The Second Bush administration, in NATO's view, switched focus from the business at hand to what Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld saw as unfinished business, left over from the administration of Bush's father . NATO was left high and dry; and Osama Ben Laden was left to roam the mountainous no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And now NATO is awaiting the results of the American election. The alliance will make no significant decisions until it knows who will succeed Bush the Younger. Until the members of the alliance know that the next president makes better decisions than The Decider, there will be no real movement on Afghanistan.

That is a insight which apparently has eluded Stephen Harper, whose foreign policy continues to echo that of the Bush administration. His current claim that his government does not make changes in policy regarding Afghan prisoners -- the military does -- sounds remarkably like Bush's assertion that politicians shouldn't decide what happens to the nation's troops, the generals should. George W. Bush is a tragic example of The Peter Principle played out on the world stage. It may not be long until Canadians conclude that Mr. Harper, like Mr. Bush, was not the right man not to lead his country.

An End to Magical Thinking

The last two weeks on global stock markets have been a roller coaster ride with which no theme park could compete. And, while many people saw it coming, what is most remarkable is that the so called best and brightest didn't. The question is why?

In the last thirty years of his life, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith saw the Keynesian consensus, which he had helped build, crumble. A new generation of economists, in an attempt to transform economics into a natural science, tried to build a set of mathematical models which could predict the future. It was, in fact, Milton Friedman -- Galbraith's academic antagonist -- who claimed that any theory should be judged, not on its realism, but on its predictive capacity.

The problem was that, at the heart of the new economic models, lay the bedrock assumption that human beings are rational creatures who make rational decisions. If one buys that assumption, mathematical economic models work. Galbraith contended that economics existed as part of a matrix which included politics and history, both of which offered a plethora of evidence that human beings often make irrational decisions. He claimed that any attempt to turn economics into a rational, self regulating system was, in effect, to believe in magic.

What the current gyrations on the world's financial markets proves is that Galbraith was right and Friedman was wrong. And, if there is any lesson to be taken from recent and future financial turbulence, it is that -- as Richard Gywn wrote this week in The Toronto Star -- we need to relearn that "when governments leave the marketplace to itself, as has been the prevailing ideology for the past couple of decades, the result is both an outburst of entrepreneurial energy and creativity but also a thundering great smashup."

The markets have taken some hope from the coordinated cutting of interest rates by central banks and from the American Congress's promise to cobble together a stimulus package. But, as Robert Reich wrote this week in his blog, "As a practical matter our only real hope for avoiding a deep recession or worse depends on loans and investments from abroad -- some major U.S. financial firms have already gotten key cash infusions from foreign governments buying stakes in them -- combined with export earnings as the dollar continues to weaken." Reich concluded that, "We're going to need the rest of the world to bail us out." We have been reminded again that, whether the subject is global finance or global warming, we are all in this together.

And we have been reminded that, whether the movers and shakers sat in the executive offices of Enron, or the White House, or City Bank, the story ended the same way. The new technocrats know a lot about statistical analysis. It's a shame they know so little about Sophocles, Aeschylus or Euripides. The Greeks could have told them that this was going to happen. Their predictions were based on a thorough knowledge of human nature -- not magic.

Radioactive

In defending his government's decision to sack Linda Keen, the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Stephen Harper cast himself and his confreres as guardians of the public trust. "We had to intervene to stop a course of action from the president of the nuclear commission which would have needlessly jeopardized the health care system and the lives of Canadians and people around the world," he told reporters in Prince Albert this week.

Former Conservative (now Liberal) MP Garth Turner saw a pattern. "Stephen Harper dumped me," he wrote in his blog this week, "for being an MP who tried to speak for principle first and party second. Bill Casey was fired as an MP for speaking for his constituents first, and being a follower second. Michael Chong was outed for putting the concept of Canada ahead of vote pandering to Quebec. Now Stephen Harper has done it again, firing Linda Keen for doing her appointed job of making sure nuclear reactors are safe."

"The pattern is unmistakable," Turner wrote. "It reminds me of a famous Humphrey Bogart movie, 'The Caine Mutiny,' in which an insane naval commander abused his power after seeing imaginary threats all around him." Some might see Turner's take on things as nothing more than sour grapes. But the communitariate has been uniformly critical of Harper. In The Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin wrote, "Since taking power two years ago this month, this type of behaviour has been a hall mark of this government. It confuses class with crass." Martin did not side automatically with the opposition parties, who "typically took their case way overboard, comparing the Keen affair to Communist witch hunts in the U.S. following the Second World War." And, Martin pointed out, the opposition parties voted for a bill to overule Keen and restart the Chalk River reactor-- which she had ordered shut down because Atomic Energy Canada had not installed required safety upgrades -- even though various medical experts did not see the shutdown as life threatening. There is more than enough blame to go around. But the blame should not rest on Keen's shoulders.

Harper is no Joe McCarthy. But his paranoia is reminiscent of Richard Nixon, whose penchant for vengeance was personal -- he had his staff draw up a list of "enemies" -- and whose establishment of a "plumbers" operation in the basement of the White House led to his downfall.

Writing in The Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert focused on Harper's paranoia. "Two years [after Harper's election] is seems that Canada has traded a government with a short attention span for one whose policy focus is so narrow that it often borders on fixation. The latter goes hand in hand with an unprecedented degree of micro-management from the top, an obsessive preoccupation with iron clad control over even the most fact based communications." The result, wrote Hebert, is that, "according to government insiders, that combination is well in the process of rendering parts of the federal policy apparatus inoperative."

As Nixon's paranoia became full blown, his government ceased to function. No one is suggesting that Harper has reached the point where, like Nixon, he is strolling down the corridors of 24 Sussex Drive having drunken conversations with the portraits of his predecessors. But his two year tenure has given Canadians enough time to take the measure of the man. And, before long, he will be seeking a majority government. Clearly, the principle of caveat emptor applies. A secure Harper administration would expose Canadian democracy to a lot of unhealthy fallout.

This is a government which has been conceived in one man's image. And, therefore, it should remain a minority institution -- until such time as Canadians choose a man in their own image.

The Falconer Report

Last week, Toronto human rights lawyer Julian Falconer released a report which was the product of an investigation ordered by the Toronto District School Board. Mr. Falconer headed a panel which looked into conditions in Toronto's public schools, after fifteen year old Jordan Manners was shot to death inside C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute. The report has caused waves throughout the system. Mr. Falconer and his colleagues found that "a culture of violence" exists in some public schools; and, in a press conference, he expressed the opinion that Jordan Manners died of " flat neglect, pure neglect."

Moreover, Falconer laid the blame for the present situation squarely at the feet of former premier Mike Harris and the policies he and his minions instituted in the last half of the last decade. "The Tory government of the late 1990's," Falconer wrote,"embarked on a deliberate course designed to net out 'equity' from the equation."

What that meant is practice was that the province assumed all funding for public education. School boards had no control over their source of funds, and no flexibility to meet individual needs. Each school board was funded by a formula which linked the number of students in a system to the amount of money the system received. Communities, which for years had looked enviously at the rich tax base Toronto's business and manufacturing communities provided the city's schools, felt that a blow had been struck for fairness.

But, for the board which served the province's largest immigrant community, the reality was that the support systems for new immigrants and economically disadvantaged students were gutted, because the money to support those systems disappeared. The Harris government decreed that guidance counsellors, social workers and after school programs were non-essential services.

On top of its new financial constraints, the board found that it had to apply a new Ministry of Education initiative called The Safe Schools Act . Falconer found that the consequences of this piece of legislation were particularly tragic: "The impact it had on youth" he wrote, "particularly African Canadian youth, is a stark example of the fallout of this government policy." In the name of "safe schools," students were expelled in "droves." The Safe Schools Act was implemented by Harris' first minister of education, John Snoblen -- himself a high school drop out -- who honed his administrative skills at the waste management company he inherited from his father. Unfortunately, for most of the students who were expelled from the system, the career opportunities which awaited Mr. Snoblen did not exist.

Mr. Snoblen was famously videotaped by one of the functionaries at the Ministry of Education, telling his employees that sometimes you had to "create a crisis" to initiate reform in a system. Snoblen's strategy should not have been surprising, because the Harris program came right out of the play book authored by the bright lights at the University of Chicago's Economics Department. (See my post for November 3, 2007)

The Chicago School's program has been applied in many places throughout the world -- and the results have been universally disastrous. In Toronto, writes The Toronto Star's Jim Coyle, "with the attack on social services, the dearth of child care and after school care, in those most critical hours for the young and restless, with the closing of community centres, the most vulnerable have been left to sink or swim in the wildest of seas."

Within the system itself a new spirit of competition -- for students and resources -- was set in motion. This fostered an ethic of self promotion: schools developed their own websites trumpeting their accomplishments; and staff who sought promotions did the same. In such an atmosphere, it made no sense to have a public discussion of a school's shortcomings. And, thus, the Falconer commission discovered that seven months before Jordan Manners was shot to death, according to The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford, "several Jeffreys students approached a female teacher to tell her that they believed a young Muslim girl had been sexually assaulted by a group of male students in the second floor boys bathroom." The teacher reported the incident to the school's administrators; but "for eight months, until Mr. Falconer and his investigators discovered what allegedly had occurred in June last year, nothing happened." The principal and two vice principals have since been charged with failing to report the incident, as they are required to do under Ontario's Child and Family Services Act.

They may well have to pay the price for their "pure neglect." But the responsibility for what has happened in Toronto's schools goes much higher. Mr. Harris retired from government and handed over the reins to his finance minister, Ernie Eves. Mr. Snoblen abandoned his seat before the next election and headed for his ranch in Oklahoma to herd cattle. Like the Buchanans in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "they retreated into . . . their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made." That job has fallen to Mr. Falconer and the members of his commission. They -- and the Toronto District School Board -- have a huge task ahead of them.

Primary Concerns

In 1814, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "An enlightened people and an energetic public opinion . . . will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." His opinion is worth remembering in a time which tends to echo the contempt in which H.L. Mencken held the American electorate, whom he referred to as "the booboisie."

But what happened last week in Iowa may be a signal that the common man has, in George W. Bush's phrase, been "misunderestimated." For, the caucus victories of both Barak Obama, on the Democratic side, and Mike Huckabee, on the Republican side, were striking rebukes to the elites in both parties.

There was a time when party bosses gathered in smoke filled rooms to choose their parties' presidential candidates. But, when president Theodore Roosevelt and governors like Wisconsin's Robert LaFollete ushered in the Progressive Era, the presidential primary became the vehicle by which an enlightened public wrestled control of the political process from entrenched interests.

Over the years, with the help of political consultants and the codified techniques of mass communication, the party elites have learned how to control the primary process. However, in the last eight years -- according to conservative commentator David Brooks in The New York Times -- there has been a catastrophic failure of what Brooks calls, "the leadership class." That class includes more than just politicians. It includes the Brahmans of the Fourth Estate and the uniformed military at the Pentagon. The consequence of that failure has been what Brooks has called "two earthquakes."

"This is a huge moment," Brooks wrote last week. "It's one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance." From the other side of the political spectrum, Brooks' friend, E.J. Dionne, wrote in The Washington Post that, "Iowa voters in both parties staged a rebellion against the status quo and against the past."

Of course, it will take more than the selection of two insurgent candidates to cure America's political ills. The common man and woman have learned a lot in the last seven years about Congressional math. They have learned you can win the popular vote and lose the election. They have learned that it takes 60 votes, not 51, to pass legislation in the Senate. The have learned that, if you believe in divided government, it's better to have one house of Congress at odds with the other house, than to have one house divided against itself. And they have learned that, even if both houses manage to pass a piece of legislation, the president -- through the use of "signing statements"-- can virtually ignore any clause, or, indeed, most of any bill that comes to his desk. During the second Bush administration, "the aristocratic spirit of government" has been given free reign.

We will have to wait to see if this rebellion has legs. The cynics claim that Huckabee will not do nearly as well in New Hampshire as he did in Iowa. But they speculate that John McCain, who used to be an insurgent in another political life, may -- with Obama -- walk away with a victory. However, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, the choices of their parties' elites, are taking off their gloves.

More importantly, the primaries which follow Iowa and New Hampshire have been -- up to this point -- the places where the traditional tools of mass communication have been employed by the powers that be to slap down political upstarts. It is worth remembering that, in 2000, the Bush organization put an end to McCain's presidential quest be starting a whisper campaign in South Carolina, to the effect that McCain was the father of an illegitimate black child. Such are the joys of politics as usual.

My money's on Obama. But I would be quite happy to see him run against Huckabee. That contest would have been ordained by the people. It remains to be seen if the people are willing to tolerate politics as usual. If they rejected the usual hokum this time around, Mr. Jefferson would be pleased.

Tribalism Run Amok

The assassination last week of Benazir Bhutto is a reminder that, as much as many of us would prefer democracy to any other kind of rule, there are certain prerequisites on which any democratic state must be founded. In many parts of the world, those prerequisites do not exist; or they are actively being undermined. And the first -- and most important -- prerequisite is the rule of law. All democracies are governments of laws, not men.

Whatever her faults, Bhutto was a democrat. David Ignatius, writing this past Friday in The Washington Post, remembered encountering her when they were both undergraduates at Harvard: "We had no idea she was Pakistani political royalty. She was too busy jumping into her future to make a show of her past." He recalled crossing her path a few years later at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union debating society: "She was wearing a Rolling Stones T-Shirt, the one with the sassy tongue sticking out, and I recall thinking that Pakistani politics would never be the same once she returned home." On that score, Ignatius was right. Elected to -- and deposed from -- the Prime Ministership of her country twice, her life and times were tumultuous.

The tumult continues; and it is impossible to predict how the saga will play out. Haroon Siddiqui has written in The Toronto Star that "the crisis has two faces -- one as seen by most Pakistanis and the other as seen by the United States and, by extension the rest of the West, including Canada. Most Pakistanis view the U.S.-Pakistan relationship as an unholy alliance, with [Pervez ] Musharraff doing America's bidding, which is partly why he is unpopular. And Pakistan's democrats deeply resent Washington's choice of a military man as its instrument."

In North America, says Siddiqui, "Bhutto was portrayed as 'Pakistan's last great hope' in the headline of one magazine. But most Pakistanis did not share that perception." Her party is a family business -- her son has been appointed her successor -- and, as Ignatius admits, " the corruption charges that enveloped her second term as prime minister were all too real."

Still, whatever her failings, she stood for the rule of law -- which meant that, ultimately, she agreed to play by the rules. No democracy can exist unless its citizens abide by that agreement. It is only that agreement which keeps the tribes from each other's throats. In the name of safety, several governments -- including our own -- have sought to overlook or short circuit the rules. No one can predict what will come next in Pakistan. But unless and until the rule of law can be re-established, the safety of every Pakistani is at stake. That is a lesson which also applies to those of us who are thousands of miles away in North America.

A New Year's Reflection (2008)

During the middle two weeks of December, I attended three funerals. The first was for my wife's cousin, who died much too early. He was 30. The last funeral was for a former officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. He was 89. Clearly, death has respect neither for youth nor age. That fact might cause one to reflect on the unfairness of things.

But what struck me at all three funerals was how one life touches so many other lives -- and, often, that one life reaches across barriers of age, gender, language, culture, race and ability. This was particularly true in the case of Simon Lortie, my wife's cousin. Simon was perfectly able bodied until the age of 19 when, swimming in the Atlantic -- not far from Boston -- he dove into a wave and broke his neck. The accident left him a quadriplegic.

He returned with his family to Montreal, where he underwent months of rehab and he began looking at the world from the perspective of a wheelchair. But the accident did not turn Simon into a narcissist. Self pity was not in his vocabulary. With a partner he started his own business. He had always loved music and the nightlife of Montreal; and he continued to make the rounds of the clubs and to enjoy the various musicians who, with other artists, give Montreal its unique elan. With help from a visiting attendant, he lived in his own apartment. Perhaps most importantly, he joined the Association des paraplegiques du Quebec (The Quebec Paraplegic Association) where he counselled others who found themselves in circumstances similar to his. And he became a community activist, lobbying for wheelchair access to public buildings and public transportation.

Simon's name became a watchword -- particularly in Montreal's French language press -- but he was thoroughly at home in both French and English. He even spoke a little Italian, his grandparents' native tongue. From his parents he learned tolerance for the many cultures and languages which gathered with human faces around the family table.

The church was packed -- there was standing room only. There were many people in wheelchairs, some on crutches -- white faces, black faces -- and personal recollections in two languages. The service was a reminder, for those of us who grew up in what used to be called Quebec's Two Solitudes, that so much of what separates us is mere claptrap; and, if we can take the time to build walls, we can also take the time to tear them down.

In the last two decades the tribes have been resurgent. Much time and blood have been been spent in ethnic cleansing. Simon's short life was a rebuke to the lie that there is salvation in the tribe. And, as the new year begins, his life reminds us all that the length of time we have is unimportant. It's what we do with the time we have that makes all the difference.

Bali: Success or Failure?

Much has been written over the last week about the UN Climate Congress, which went into overtime last week in Indonesia. The inability of 192 nations to agree to hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions has caused some commentators to despair. And one could, understandably, read the outcome as collective denial.

Certainly, the Harper government, for all its happy talk about its good intentions, continues to ape the position of the Bush Administration because, I suspect, the Prime Minister -- trained in Friedmanesque economics -- believes that any measures which apply brakes to an unfettered economy are clear and present dangers.

Most Canadian commentators found Environment Minister John Baird's performance at the conference embarrassing. And, given Canada's past environmental commitments -- which admittedly were not kept -- the Harperites refusal to accept hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions left several foreign observers flummoxed. Writing in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert referred to Mr. Baird's appearance as a Bali Flop: "For all intents and purposes, the Bali meeting was a multi- day communications disaster for the Harper regime. It set back a year of conservative efforts to re-brand the party on climate change and confirmed the issue as the government's Achilles heal."

But for Canadian commentators whose perspective was broader than Canada's role at the conference, there were signs of hope. Also writing in The Star, Richard Gwyn focused on the last minute concession by the United States to join the discussion -- after George W. Bush has gone back to Texas: "Almost any U.S. President, let alone Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, is bound to be more open and conciliatory," wrote Gwyn. More importantly, "at Bali, China and India hid behind the U.S. While it was being bashed, they could remain silent. The late U.S. concession, though, put the spotlight on these 'late polluters' and other comparable if smaller ones such as Indonesia and Brazil."

What or who was responsible for the change in American direction? Clearly, for the first time, the Bush administration faced a full court press from the international community. From the mighty to the humble, the message was the same. As a delegate from Papua, New Guinea told the American delegation: "If you're not willing to lead, please get out of the way." But, according to Gwynne Dyer, it was Al Gore who prevented the conference from running aground. Gore told the conference: "Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. . . there will be a new (presidential) inauguration in the United States." So the conference removed the call for hard emissions targets and bought Gore's argument that there was hope -- if nations kept talking and reached an agreement by 2009.

"So don't believe the cynics," wrote Dyer,"who say that public opinion does not matter. A large majority of Americans are far ahead of their government in their desire to see effective action on climate change, and the Bush Administration is fighting a delaying action." One wonders if the Harper government has got the message. Bali ended with an agreement to keep talking -- and the knowledge that the biggest polluters are now inside the tent. No one ever claimed that it was going to be easy to get 192 nations to agree to save the planet. But an agreement is within our grasp.

Mr. Gore's Speech

Scholars who focus on American Literature, when they set the boundaries of the American literary canon, always save space for speeches -- usually delivered at critical moments in the nation's history. There is, of course, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, delivered in August of 1963, not long before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And William Faulkner's speech, delivered in Oslo as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, is a favourite of those of us who made a living teaching the language and its literature.

My guess is that, likewise, the speech Al Gore delivered in Oslo last week -- in a decade or two -- will find its place in the literary canon. Employing wit, passion and a sense of history, it was a call to action. And, while it lacked the rhetorical flourish of Winston Churchill (who Gore cited) its simple but powerful rhetoric stands as a beacon in the swill of modern Orwellian spin.

Gore began with a reference to Alfred Nobel who, like Gore, got the chance to read his own political obituary, "a judgment, which seemed to me harsh and mistaken -- if not premature." But like Nobel, Gore said, "that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose."

It is, indeed, one of the ironies of history that Gore, the wordsmith and teacher, has been far more effective outside government than he ever was within. When it came to warning of the danger we face, Gore -- like Churchill -- did not mince words: "We the human species are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here." Every day, Gore said, we dump "another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet." And, every day, scientists tell us that "something basic is wrong." Pulling no punches, Gore declared, "We are what is wrong and we must make it right."

But, as dark as the skies and the future might look, he was no pessimist. His parents' generation met the same life or death challenge in World War II. And, Gore believes, this generation has the power to rise to the occasion. Reminding his audience that Mahatma Gandhi "awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called 'Satyagraha -- or 'truth force'"-- Gore proclaimed that, "in every land, the truth -- once known -- has the power to set us free;" and the truth is that we need "a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide. And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution."

Gore ended his speech with a call for both China and "my own country . . . to make the boldest moves or stand accountable before history for their failure to act. We have everything we need to get started," Gore said," save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. . . . So let us renew it, and say together,'We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise and we will act.'"

Those simple declarative sentences have stark beauty and power -- the same beauty and power of The Gettysburg Address. One day they will take their place in the canon beside Lincoln's address. My hope is that, just as Lincoln reminded us that we need to be guided by "our better angels," Gore's words will do the same.

Greasing the Political Wheels

There is little to recommend Karlheinz Schreiber. It is not difficult to understand why, when John Crosbie and Peter Lougheed were asked to meet with him, they turned down the invitation. Self promotion is nothing new; but Mr. Schreiber appears to have been on the make for a long time -- and he is unapologetic about it. Moreover, the only truly credible piece of information he has offered the House Ethics Committee is his own assertion that he "was born ugly, not stupid."

Still, before we send him back to Germany -- where the mess he is in seems, ironically, as putrid as the mess he finds himself in here -- we should hear his tale, as convoluted and as incredible as it may be. And, as the House Committee and the public inquiry heed Mark Felt's advice to "follow the money," Canadians need to ask themselves if, indeed, they have been stupid.

Lawrence Martin, in The Globe and Mail, points out that the real "outrage" in the midst of all the noise surrounding Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney, is how Schrieber and his associates helped engineer the campaign to dump Conservative Party leader Joe Clark -- which paved the way for Mr. Mulroney's ascension to power. "Back in 1983," Martin writes, "when backers of Brian Mulroney were leading a campaign to unseat Joe Clark as party leader, Tory strategist Dalton Camp noted how something strange and alarming was going on." Camp claimed that "'foreign money' was fueling the anti-Clark drive. It was a grave allegation -- foreign interests hijacking the Canadian political process. But he offered no proof."

Mr. Schreiber does not inspire confidence. But, if he is credible on this point, we now have the proof. According to Martin, "Walter Wolf, an Austrian, and Mr. Schreiber, a German, secretly funded the dump Clark campaign to the tune of estimates that run to the hundreds of thousands. Then Bavarian premier Franz Joseph Strauss was orchestrating the drive, and also may have helped bankroll it. Mr. Wolf and Mr. Strauss detested Mr. Clark's moderate brand of conservatism. They wanted him out, and with their plotting, they succeeded. Few words in protest were heard then -- or since."

No one should be shocked to discover that money greases the wheels of politics. Sir Hugh Allan donated large sums to John A. Macdonald's Conservatives, hoping that he could buy a controlling interest in the new Pacific Railway. And, as the Gomery Commission discovered, Jean Chretien's Liberals rewarded Quebec advertising agencies with large contracts, on the understanding that a significant portion of that money would find its way back to party coffers. Mr. Mulroney stands in a long line of Canadian Prime Ministers who have known how to use money to accomplish their political goals. If Schreiber's claims -- and what Martin reports -- are true, Mr. Mulroney's sound and fury about John Turner agreeing to the appointments PierreTrudeau made before he left office qualify as comic relief.

Some will say that all of this is simply more of the same. But, in the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, there are differences. Those differences are the source and the amount of the money. It is not news that politicians can be bought and sold. But who is doing the buying and selling has always been important. Mr. Schreiber seems to offer Canadians a take on one of their Prime Ministers which -- like several others -- is far from flattering. However, it is not enough to take comfort from the fact that the people eventually sent him and his party -- at least temporarily -- into oblivion. The question is, were they had? And, if so, how do they ensure that it will not happen again?

Echoes of Isaiah

We are just about three weeks away from Christmas. As a child, I was taught that Advent was the Season of Expectations. For a kid who was focused on what would find its way under the tree, it was easy to relate to the Season of Expectations -- as crass as mine most assuredly were.

But as we began Advent this week, I found it hard to imagine any truly realistic expectations. The world, as Wordsworth wrote, is "too much with us." From Karlheinz Schreiber putting on a peekaboo performance in front of the House of Commons Ethics Committee, to the announcement that the United States has signed an agreement with the Maliki government to establish permanent military bases in Iraq, to the report which declared that Toronto is the poverty capital of Canada -- and that the number of poor children in this country is 20% higher than it was in 1989 -- there was more cause for disappointment than there was for expectation last week.

But I was taken aback yesterday when I came across a passage from Isaiah -- which everyone has heard; but the source of which few, I would guess, know. Like most of my generation, my acquaintance with the Book of Isaiah comes from secondary sources. My introduction to Isaiah came from attention to the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. He returned to Isaiah again and again: "I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." That was Isaiah. He could be the bearer of bad news; but he was also the prophet of possibility. And then there was his faith that natural enemies could build a peaceable kingdom -- the lines behind John A. MacDonald's vision of Canada: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. . ."

It was Isaiah who made me think of King and MacDonald yesterday, when I came across the lines, "they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."

One could argue that we have always been a long way from the future Isaiah imagined. But it was he who inspired King and MacDonald. And it was that inspiration which led both men -- living a hundred years apart -- to accomplish what many thought was impossible. Such is the power of expectations. Down through the centuries, like Isaiah, Christmas has raised our expectations. What matters, in the end, is what we do with those expectations.