Torture and Obsession

President Obama found himself in the middle of a crossfire last week, when his administration released four memos written by Bush administration lawyers, in support of what Dick Cheney has called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman insisted that "the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how [torture] happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible." Meanwhile, in The Washington Post, David Broder wrote that, while Krugman's argument is "a plausible sounding rationale, . . . it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance."

And, as the week went on, the rationale for using such techniques became increasingly clear. As Frank Rich reported in Sunday's Times, " . . . Major Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantanamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: 'A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.'"

The Bush White House was certain there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden -- they sold the invasion of Iraq on that claim -- and they were convinced that, if they simply kept applying the appropriate pressure, that link would become clear. They needed that link to justify what they planned to do, something former Secretary of Commerce Paul O'Neil confirmed was part of Bush's first cabinet meeting, eight months before September 11th. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney entered office obsessed with the idea that there was unfinished business in Iraq and -- come hell or high water, or "enhanced interrogation techniques," -- they were going to arrange a do-over.

The job of administration lawyers was to provide a legal rationale for those interrogation techniques. With law degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Michigan, they could be counted on to deliver. And, as the memos make clear, they did. Their defense now is, essentially, "it seemed like a good idea at the time;" and, anyway, they did not torture; they were merely offering policy options. Countless policies have been abandoned in the light of history and experience.

The problem is that others have been prosecuted and vilified for implementing those policies. Ordinary enlisted soldiers like Lynddie England and Charles Graner found their names placed in the docket. They were then court martialed, imprisoned and labelled "just a few bad apples." What is required is not vengeance, but justice.

The torture debate reveals a recurring pattern -- whether on Wall Street, in Washington or -- for that matter, as the Omar Khadr case make clear, in Ottawa. The folks at the bottom pay for the misjudgments and mistakes of those in authority. And the advantage of authority is that it buys immunity. Mr. Obama -- and Mr Harper -- have been confronted by a call for justice. They may not wish to respond. But the longer justice is denied, the angrier the reckoning will be.

Patrician Patriotism

During the past week, Michael Ignatieff was all over the newspapers and the air waves, promoting his new book, True Patriot Love. It's a catchy title; and it will probably top the Canadian bestseller lists. It is sure to be reviewed in the New York Times. In a difficult period for publishers, it should make money.

But there is more at stake than money. The leadership convention for the Liberal Party of Canada is just around the corner, and -- even though the outcome has already been decided -- Ignatieff is using the book as a means to breathe life into his party and into his bid for the brass ring.

As he told Michael Valpe in the Globe and Mail last week, what he is trying to do is offer his country a vision for the 21st century. And part of that vision is based upon the idea of a National Dream -- in the sense that John A. MacDonald's transcontinental railway or Pierre Trudeau's Just Society were national dreams.

For Ignatieff, it is a shared dream which holds a country together. And it is the reason the federal government exits. "The job description of a federal government," he told Valpe, "is just one job -- hold the country together, make it stronger." To do that, Ignatieff said, "we need a public life in common, some set of reference points and allegiances to give us a way to relate to the strangers among whom we live." Those common allegiances find expression in common projects -- the railway, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, National Health Insurance.

The problem for the present government, says Ignatieff, is that it has no common project. I has nothing big that has yet to be accomplished. "The fatal flaw" of Stephen Harper's government is that it "fits a country that is finished, but it doesn't fit a country that is not yet done."

The problem for Ignatieff is that many Canadians fear that he himself is not yet done.There is much about him we still need to discover. He is no common man. His father's family were members of the Russian nobility. His mother's family are members of what passes, in this country, for nobility -- Ontario's Family Compact. And Ignatieff has spent his whole life coming to terms with that legacy.

Now that he is a potential prime minister, Canadians need time to come to terms with that legacy, too. Most of all, Ignatieff needs to convince Canadians that his patrician patriotism is as unshakable as the patriotism of the common man. And that his return to Canada was not just a career move -- that it was, instead, an act of true patriot love.

Looking for the Exit

Last week, National Post columnist Don Martin suggested that the prime minister might be "polishing his resume." Whether or not that's true, as Tom Walkom wrote in the Toronto Star last Tuesday, "there is a quiet air of desperation around Stephen Harper."

For, essentially, the economic axioms upon which Mr. Harper built his academic and political career have crumbled. In 1991, the year he completed his Master's thesis in Economics, he wrote, "The record indicates that particularly activist Keynesian policy has been rare in the post war period. The results indicated that it should remain so." In the last six months, the prime minister has tried to throw that conclusion down the memory hole. The problem is that this is Canada, not Oceania.

Mr. Harper is certainly not the first politician whose words have come back to bite him. His real problem, though, is that his actions -- more than his words -- have done him in.

Like Richard Nixon, he is his own worst enemy. Taking his cue from Canada's last Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney, Harper planned to achieve power by building crucial support in Quebec. But, in the last election, his failure to understand the importance of cultural issues in that province spelled the difference between a majority and a minority government. Then, in November, desperately trying to save his government from defeat, he took direct aim at the Parti Quebecois, who represent the vast majority of Quebec voters. The result was that his support in that province evaporated.

Finally, in an effort to distance Harper from Mulroney -- who is presently in his own pot of boiling water -- the prime minister's office leaked the news that Mulroney had asked that his name be removed from all party lists. Mulroney exploded and called the perpetrators of that information liars. The feud with Mulroney has opened up the old divide between the two wings of the prime minister's party -- the Progressive Conservatives and the hard right Reform Party members.

It comes as no surprise that a man with a talent for wounding himself should be giving interviews to American and international media, singing the praises of Canada's banks -- which the previous Liberal government refused to cater to when they suggested mergers to help them bulk up and play in the same league as their international competitors. These are the same competitors that have received large bundles of taxpayer money, because they have been deemed too big to fail.

Mr. Harper has conceded that, like many of his fellow citizens, he "may eventually lose" his own job. Like any man with a wife and young children, he is looking around for something else before the axe falls. And, not a man to go backwards, Harper is fishing in international waters -- for "something like a lofty academic position at the London School of Economics," Martin suggests,"or a United Nations gig. In other words, he might have to follow Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's career path in reverse."

As countless party leaders could tell the prime minister, there is life after politics. The trick is finding your way to the exit.

Remember the Studebaker?

The man who taught me high school Physics drove a 1958 Studebaker Golden Hawk, like the car in the picture. It sat in the parking lot, a kind of elegant dinosaur, an emblem of the man himself. To his students, the car was the source of both humour and admiration. It couldn't match the Mercedes 300 SL, driven by another teacher, who was independently wealthy. But it did suggest a kind of dated opulence.

I thought of high school physics, and the chariot which carried my teacher to work, when Barack Obama removed Rick Waggoner from the chairmanship of General Motors last week. Like the Golden Hawk of another time, General Motors has become a symbol of dated opulence -- and, in some ways, GM's demise is emblematic of an age of, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, "greed and stupidity."

Studebaker is just one of many automotive nameplates which have disappeared over the years. Its sister car, the Packard, died before the Studebaker. My youth was littered with automotive eulogies -- for cars like the Nash, the Hudson and the DeSoto. If memory serves, one of the first automatic transmissions arrived on the 1949 DeSoto. That innovation could not save a car which people did not wish to buy.

Most of these cars died because they could not weather various recessions -- and because the luxury they represented was incongruent with the times. As Frank Rich reminded his readers in Sunday's New York Times, as a culture we have been comfortably deluded, driving "self indulgent, wealth depleting gas guzzlers." And the management of GM drank the Kool Aid. But that delusion, like the economic bubble, has burst. "Any citizen or business that overspent or overborrowed in the bubble, subscribed to its reckless culture," Rich wrote. "That culture has crumbled everywhere now, and a new economic order will have to rise from its ruins."

What is truly sad is that the lives of millions of people have been shattered by the hubris and the stupidity of those in charge. Mr. Waggoner will go into retirement with a pension of $23 million. Like Charles Prince and Robert Rubin of Citi Bank, Angelo Mozello of Countrywide Financial, and Stanley O'Neil of Merrill-Lynch, his empire has crumbled. But, also like them, he rides off into the sunset, with more than enough money to pay the bills. That is how trickle down economics works.

And -- what is even more tragic -- this train wreck could have been avoided. Those who crafted the economic models which underpinned this economy were mesmerized by their own creations, assuming that human beings always make rational decisions. A little knowledge of history and the Greek and Roman classics would have relieved them of that notion. But, like the previous American administration, they considered those deposits of wisdom -- like the Geneva Conventions -- "quaint."

That Golden Hawk struck us as quaint, too. We were comfortable in our ignorance.

Remembering Mary

Mary Saunders died last week. Her name probably has little significance for readers of this space -- except for those who are members of my immediate family. She would be uncomfortable knowing that I mentioned her here. She did not seek the limelight.

But she needs to be remembered here because she touched so many lives. She was the dear friend of my wife's mother. They met each other when they discovered that their children attended the same elementary school. They also discovered that they shared a passion for bridge and parish bizarres. Most of all, they were each other's confidants.

When my mother-in-law died sixteen years ago, Mary stepped in and took her place, as grandmother to our three sons. The picture shows her in that role with our youngest son, who was three months old when it was taken. She sent the kids cards at Christmas and always slipped in money for presents. Most of all, my wife would call her frequently, as she had called her mother, to talk about their mutual activities.

When we returned to Montreal -- usually twice a year -- we would meet Mary at a local restaurant for lunch. The only times we ever disagreed were when it came to paying the tab. We eventually agreed that we would alternately pay the bill.

Mary spent her entire life in Montreal. Despite the political storms of the sixties and seventies, she and her husband Robert (who everyone called Nuffy) continued to live in the house they built at the end of World War II on the western side of the island. They raised two sons there: one who stayed in the city, and one -- who like so many of our generation -- headed down the road to other provinces and towns. She and Nuffy took great pride in their children and grandchildren. She was of that generation who stayed home and raised her children as a vocation. She was no shrinking violet, however. She could spot foolishness long before it arrived; and she could laugh appreciatively at human foibles.

When Nuffy died in the late eighties, she stayed put. She lived on her own, even as her knees made it increasingly difficult for her to walk. And, even though she did not go out regularly for errands, when she did go out, she drove herself to her destination.

The value of a human life is not measured by the money a person makes or the fame he or she achieves. It has everything to do with the intersection of that life with the lives of others -- and in what happens when those lives touch. In her nearly ninety years, Mary touched a lot of lives. All of us in this family were blessed because our paths crossed hers. We miss her terribly; and we still have a hard time getting our heads around the idea that we will no longer be able to meet her for lunch. But the good news is that -- as my sister-in-law reminded my wife -- her mother has her bridge partner back.

They've Had Enough

In his book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore quotes James Madison, one of his country's founders, and one of its first presidents: "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction," Madison wrote. It is for that reason that "the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of [the nation] must secure the national councils against any danger from that source." Hence, it was essential for any democracy to establish a separation of powers; and to build in a system of checks and balances to guard against the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.

The rise of neo-conservatism has been couched in religious language, says Gore. But, essentially, the goal of the movement has been to wed wealth to power -- something not new to human history. Before the rise of Reagan and the two Bushes, there was the unmitigated frenzy of the Jazz Age, which ended in The Great Depression, and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt. Before that there was the Gilded Age, and the countervailing forces put in place by Roosevelt's cousin, Teddy.

Wealth seeks Power as a consort. And so it has always been. The difference now, writes Gore, is that an "informed citizenry," which the founders saw as the antidote to concentrated power, now relies on television as its main source of information -- not the printed word. The problem with television is that it is a one way medium. Information is passed down from elites to ordinary -- as in "undistinguished" -- citizens. There is no opportunity to carry on a two way conversation. Democracy is founded on the principle of reciprocal communication between those who govern and those whose consent makes that government possible. That is why the notion of a legislature -- whether it be the Mother of all Parliaments in London, the federal and state governments in the United States, or the federal and provincial parliaments in Canada -- is at the center of those democracies. And in those legislatures, decisions are supposed to be made on the basis of collective reason.

One way conversation makes it easy to concentrate power in the hands of those who view themselves as a special, gifted class. The last fifty years has seen a shift away from decision making by the peoples' representatives to what David Halberstam in the 1970's called "The Best and the Brightest," or what later day journalists have called "The Smartest Guys in the Room." Our reliance on these so called experts has led to the general certitude that they know better than the uninitiated what is best for their country.

But this first decade of the new millennium has proved that the best and the brightest can be breathtakingly stupid, whatever their supposed area of expertise. Whether it be the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or the global financial system, the people who have been in charge have left ruin and chaos in their wake.

That is what the furor over executive bonuses at AIG or the protests in France last week were all about. Venality piled on top of incompetence will no longer get a free pass. The "undistinguished" are taking their cue from the movie Network. Like Howard Beal, they have declared that they are "mad as hell" and they're not going to take it any more. They are insisting that they be heard, and that communication become a two way street again.

Those in power who misread their anger will reap the whirlwind. As Frank Rich warned in Sunday's New York Times, "in the credit mess, action must match words." And, as James Travers wrote in Saturday's Toronto Star, "sooner rather than later" the Prime Minister "must tell the country what this government will do for ailing industries and their workers." If Mr. Obama, Mr Harper or Mr. Sarkosy get it wrong, they will be washed away in a tide of public anger which the world has not seen in a long time.

The Angry Right

David Frum -- who has been burnishing his conservative credentials for two decades now -- has recently found himself the target of attacks from the political party he supports. Frum has written several books; he has written for William F. Buckley's National Review; he has written speeches for the second President Bush (it was Frum who coined the phrase "axis of evil"); and he has been a resident scholar at The American Enterprise Institute.

But, as he revealed in a cover article for Newsweek, his credentials are being questioned by some who consider themselves true believers. On March 3rd, radio talk show host Mark Levin was apoplectic. "There are some people who have claimed the conservative mantle . . ." he fumed. "They're so irrelevant . . . It's time to name names . . .! The Canadian David Frum: Where did this a-hole come from? . . . Hey Frum: you're a putz."

Frum, like many Canadians, has dual citizenship. His father is Canadian; his mother, who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, was an American. But Frum has had the audacity to question the wisdom of some of his party's loudest voices -- particularly Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, wrote Frum, is "a man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self indulgence." The problem for conservatives, Frum contended, is that Limbaugh appeals to the shrinking Republican base. "From a political point of view, Limbaugh is kyrptonite, weakening the GOP nationally."

Frum has been joined in his criticism by New York Times columnist David Brooks. "Let's face it," wrote Brooks in the Times last week, "the current Republican response [to the economic crisis] is totally misguided. The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a Federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate."

If the angry white men who have become the party's spokesmen take the time to peruse Brooks' birth certificate, they will discover that he, like Frum, was born in Toronto. No doubt, some will question whether both pundits are "real" Americans. These are the same folks who wondered if Barack Obama was truly an American because he was born in Hawaii; or, if John McCain was truly an American because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. (American law stipulates that, to be president, you have to have been born in the United States.)

What all the noise indicates is that, like the financial system which modern conservatism did so much to engineer, the movement itself is now intellectually bankrupt. Frum and Brooks are questioning the only thing the movement has left, which is dogma. They are asking the movers and shakers in their party to rethink their view of the world. Unfortunately, the old adage is still true: empty barrels make the most noise.

Of Trains and Automobiles

Outside the train station, in Belleville, Ontario, there is a plaque. It proclaims that the building was erected in 1841 -- more than 25 years before Canada officially proclaimed its existence in 1867. The nation was born in the 19th century, during the first attempt at globalized trade -- a period which roughly corresponded to the reign of Queen Victoria. One hundred and fifty years ago, railroads formed a loosely woven quilt which covered all of North America. They symbolized the riches produced by the Industrial Revolution; and they were the source of treasure for a few of the robber barons who bestrode the era.

Canada had three railroads: The Grand Trunk Railway -- which built the station in Belleville -- joined two countries, Canada and the United States. Most of the track was laid on Canadian soil; but the two terminuses were in Portland, Maine and Chicago, Illinois. The Canadian Northern Railway stretched from Quebec City to British Columbia, cutting a wide swath through Northern Ontario to Winnipeg, then heading northwest through Edmonton, and on to British Columbia. The most storied, and the longest of all -- The Canadian Pacific Railway -- stretched from coast to coast and symbolized the country's motto, "from sea to sea." Every small town in Canada had a station, or at least a grain elevator, and was connected to the main route by a branch line. In a large, sparsely populated country, railroads were the heart which pumped the nation's economic blood.

But when the world economy came apart -- in the aftermath of World War I -- railroads were in trouble. Canada never needed three railways. One century built too many railways. The next built too many automobiles. When the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern declared bankruptcy in the early 1920's, the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden nationalized them, blending the two into one. The government dubbed the new entity the CNR -- Canadian National Railways. And, throughout the Depression, Canada was served by two railroads -- from sea to sea.

But after World War II, transportation shifted away from the railroads to the passenger car and the transport truck. In the United States, the Eisenhower administration built the Interstate Highway System; and, by the mid sixties, the Canadian government completed the Trans Canada Highway. Passenger service on both American and Canadian railroads dried up. Tracks were abandoned or "rationalized," with two or more railroads sharing the same tracks. And, on the Canadian prairies, trucks pulled up to the grain elevators which stood beside abandoned railroad tracks. The governments of both countries took charge of what passenger service remained -- in short busy corridors between New York and Washington or Quebec City and Windsor.

If railroads were the symbol of 19h century prosperity, the passenger car was the symbol of 20th century prosperity. And, as the second attempt to globalize trade has come to a standstill, the automobile -- like the steam locomotive before it -- is about to be metamorphosed. But, just as railroads did not totally disappear, automobiles -- and the companies which make them -- will not go the way of the dinosaur. We got a peek at the future last week, when auditors for General Motors -- which fifty years ago was the world's largest industrial corporation -- concluded that the company would have difficulty remaining "a going concern." The company which Walter Chrysler built -- a company once noted for state of the art engineering and innovation -- is about to go under.

As it did for the railways, government will have to become a major stakeholder in a radically transformed automobile industry -- an industry which will no longer be the economic engine of both Canada and the United States. There will be howls from market fundamentalists, who will claim that government should not stand in the way of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction." But because cars and trucks -- like the railroads -- touch the lives of so many people, a smaller government supported transportation industry -- an industry which will include heavy investment in urban mass transit -- is just around the corner. It is a construct which has been adopted in the past -- and which is about to be adopted again.

Now For the Hard Part

British economic historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson was in Ottawa last week. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, he predicted that the global economic crisis is far from over. In fact, he said, things could get pretty nasty. "There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics."

And from Europe this morning comes a story, in The New York Times, that things could be falling apart in the European Union. "The leaders of the European Union gathered Sunday in Brussels," ran the lead, "in an emergency summit meeting that seemed to highlight the very worries it was designed to calm." The economic crisis has driven a wedge between the countries of what Donald Rumsfeld called "new and old Europe." The problem, according to the Times, is that "the 16 nations that use the euro -- introduced in 1999 and one of the proudest European accomplishments -- must submit to the monetary leadership of the European Central Bank. That keeps some members hardest hit by the economic downturn, like Ireland, Spain, Italy and Greece, from unilaterally taking radical steps to stimulate their economies." And newer members of the Union, "including Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, are in a state of near-meltdown."

The crisis is forcing countries to reach across cultures and political systems. And this is particularly true of the United States and China. Ferguson believes that what he has dubbed "Chimerica" -- the fusion of the United States and China -- "really is the key to how the global financial system works." The United States is the major market for Chinese exports; and social stability in China rests on the system of factories which export to America. The Chinese are the major holders of American debt, which is growing astronomically as the United States seeks to stimulate and stabilize its economy. Despite the deep seated distrust which has existed for sixty years between the two nations, it is essential that they work together.

Unfortunately, says Ferguson, even if Europe and Chimerica manage to finesse their differences, "This is a very unfair crisis. The epicentre is the United States, but the rest of the world, and particularly America's trading partners, will get hit harder than the U.S." That includes Canada. But because our economy -- unlike the economies of Asia -- is not wholly focused on exporting to the United States, things will not get as bad as they could get. That is small comfort.

We now know the downside of globalization. The brave new world of globalized trade hangs by a thread. As Ferguson has been warning for years, "it's a fragile system."

Mr. Obama Comes to Ottawa

Some of us -- who are old enough to remember -- might be forgiven for thinking that there was something retro going on in Ottawa last week. At times, it looked and felt like the Second Coming of Trudeaumania. Canadians greeted Barack Obama with open arms. It has been forty years since we greeted a politician with such joie de vivre.


Not that there weren't skeptics. National Post columnist Don Martin proclaimed "Obama Conquers 51st State," and in The Toronto Star, Tom Walkom asked, "Is Obama a closet conservative?" Walkom's skepticism ranged from Obama's commitment to clean energy, to the war in Afghanistan to his financial support for hedge funds. South of the border there was a much louder chorus of skeptics. Rush Limbaugh, not exactly a fountain of wisdom, accused Obama of being a "fascist;" and some Republican governors -- most in the states of the Old Confederacy -- announced that they would not accept all or some of the stimulus funds Obama signed into law last week.

But such was not the case in Ottawa. Canadians showed Obama boundless good will. From the moment he stepped off Air Force One and was greeted by Governor General Michaelle Jean, to his handshake with Stephen Harper, to his stroll through the Byward Market in search of souvenirs for his children, Obama never hit a sour note. In fact, he showed a remarkable familiarity with the issues at the top of Canada's agenda. It would appear that his Canadian brother-in-law, his Canadian staff members -- and maybe even the Canadians who worked for his election -- had manged to catch his ear.



His knowledge of this country is no guarantee of sweetness and light. As Martin warned his readers, "If that sounds like a perfect pairing, well, that too will change." After all, Trudeaumania eventually wore off and was replaced by a shrug and a middle finger. Yet, even today, despite the well deserved criticisms of his obvious failings, most Canadians still regard Trudeau as one of this country's great prime ministers. When push came to shove -- during the October Crisis of 1970 --Trudeau remained true to his vision -- and he did what had to be done. The War Measures Act was a cruel and blunt instrument. But -- always a proponent of individual liberties and Canadian Federalism -- Trudeau gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a document which ensures that the abuses in the War Measures Act can't be repeated.



There is room for skepticism. It may be that Obama has raised impossible hopes. But, once in a great while, history and one human being come together to change the world -- for better or worse. I have felt for some time that Obama can change the world for the better. The reaction in Ottawa last week merely proves that, in this country at least, there are many of us who share that belief.

A Realist's Optimism

There is something refreshing about Barack Obama's candor. First, because one did not hear it from his two immediate predecessors; and, second, because they give some insight into how the man might play the very difficult hand he has been dealt.

When Tom Daschle, Obama's choice for Secretary of Health, was forced to resign because he had neglected to pay his taxes -- and the various perks he had received since leaving public office became public knowledge -- Obama used the vernacular to admit his mistake. "I screwed up," he said. And last week, while generating support for his economic stimulus plan -- in the face of an almost solid wall of Republican opposition -- he told an audience in Fort Myers, Florida that, if he couldn't fix the economy, "you'll have a new president."

Some have taken that candor to be weakness. In fact, the chattering classes have already started to write his political obituary. As Frank Rich pointed out on Sunday, Newsweek declared in the first week of February that Obama "had all but lost control of the agenda in Washington"; and Politico claimed that he was "losing the stimulus message war." However, as Rich also pointed out, the pundits wrote the same kind of things when he was vying with Hilary Clinton for the Democratic nomination; and they predicted that John McCain -- the bus driver on the "Straight Talk Express" -- would run him over.

For while Obama has made mistakes, he is a quick study -- and he is not hide bound by ideology. In fact, he sounds a lot like Franklin Roosevelt. "We will do what works," he has said. That "will require re-evaluation" and "if that doesn't work, we'll try something else." You can bet that Obama has learned something from the Republican threat to filibuster his stimulus package and Senator Gregg's decision to walk away from his nomination for Secretary of Commerce.

At the end of the week the president had his stimulus package. As Paul Krugman points out in today's New York Times, that package, while absolutely necessary, may not be enough; and his bank rescue package leaves out a lot of details. But Obama does not suffer from the self delusion that most Americans have been living with for a long time. "The bottom line," writes Krugman, is that, according to the Survey of Consumer Finances, "there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower that it was in 2001."

The problem is that "until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing." The whole economy was built on the Bernie Madoff model. It was a Ponzi scheme.

Obama -- perhaps because of who he is and where he has been -- is no fool. As he told a group of reporters aboard Air Force One, enroute to Chicago at the end of last week, "You know, I'm an eternal optimist. That doesn't mean I'm a sap." Those who confidently boast that they have cut the young, green politician down to size should engage in their own re-evaluation.

Idiocy Dies Hard

Last week, Bob Rae wrote an open letter to the prime minister: "I am writing you in my former role as Deficit Poster Boy and Punching Bag," the letter read. "This title was bequeathed to me by Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney when I became premier of Ontario, and I have been carrying it around on my back since 1990."

It was time, said Rae, to pass the torch; for Harper -- even though he inherited eight years of surpluses -- was about to enter a time warp. "You will learn, as I did," wrote Rae, "that the estimates of Finance officials are never quite on, that as the layoffs and bankruptcies pile up, government revenues collapse and expenditures grow. . . . You will regret that your every prior thought is in print. Your old copies of Milton Friedman and Hayek's Road to Serfdom will somehow seem less relevant and helpful."

Yet, surprisingly, as Friedman and Hayek become less and less relevant, modern conservatives continue to quote chapter and verse from these sacred texts. When we learned on Friday that Canadians had lost over 129,000 jobs in January, Mr. Harper stoutly proclaimed that his government would not be "blown off track." This from the man who also stoutly proclaimed in October that there would be no recession in Canada -- and who foresaw slim surpluses in late November.

And south of the 49th parallel, Republicans -- under the banner "The New Deal Didn't Work" -- have railed at President Obama's stimulus package. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is furious -- particularly at the centrists who have managed to cut $100 billion from the Senate version of the legislation. The proposal was already too small, he wrote in today's New York Times. "Even if the original Obama plan -- around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial total of that given over to ineffective tax cuts -- had been enacted, it wouldn't have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years."

But, taking their cues from Friedman and Hayek, those who crafted the compromise bill made cuts precisely where they were not needed -- at the bottom. "The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction -- $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care -- cut. Food Stamps -- cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling precisely on the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump." And, railing against the cost of the bill, "36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that's right $3 trillion, in tax cuts over 10 years."

This was the approach John McCain advocated. He advanced a plan which would cost a little more than half the Obama plan; and most of that would be devoted to tax cuts. Clearly McCain still doesn't understand why he lost the election. It's worth remembering that his chief economic guru, former Senator Phil Gramm, confidently asserted six months ago that America was in a "mental recession." That conclusion surely must soothe the suffering of those two and a half million Americans who have lost their jobs since he made his pronouncement.

The problem, however, goes beyond Phil Gramm. As Jeffrey Simpson reminded his readers three weeks ago, Republicans have been in office for 20 of the last 28 years. They ran deficits for all 20 of those years. The exception was Bill Clinton's presidency. He spent his first five years digging out of the hole the Republicans left him; and then he piled up surpluses for the next three years. His successor started digging again -- and he left Mr.Obama an even deeper hole.

Mr. Harper disposed of the proportionately larger surpluses he inherited. He surely deserves the award which Mr. Rae assures him "is on its way." Modern conservatism has always been a faith based movement. Facts cannot dent its armour. In the late 19th century, British political philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that Great Britain's Conservative Party was "the stupid party." Modern conservatives appear to have returned to form. They offer proof of an age old maxim: Idiocy, like the cockroach, dies hard.

Buying Time

Michael Ignatieff's decision to support the Conservative budget -- for now -- buys him and the Prime Minister time. Both men have political imperatives for entering their coalition of convenience. Harper's is obvious. His government -- humbled after its pre-Christmas ego trip -- remains in power. Ignatieff, whose party lacks both the policy and financial resources to go to the country, needs time to genrate both.

Most importantly, each party needs time to think through policy. For, as Robert Reich wrote this week, Conservatives and Progressives are advovating two distinct prescriptions for the current financial crisis. Conservatives, who Reich calls "cyclists," believe that we are caught in a familiar boom and bust cycle. They concede the need for some kind of government intervention; but, says Reich, they "blame the current crisis on a speculative bubble that threw the economy's self regulating mechanisms out of whack." Progressives, who Reich calls "structuralists . . . see the problem much differently." They believe "the bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970's, when median U.S. incomes began to stall."

When wages bottomed out, women entered the workforce to help make ends meet; and both husbands and wives began working longer hours. When these strategies failed to help them keep their heads above water, they went into debt and -- well, here we are. And, if the money the economy generated didn't go to the people in the middle, where did it go? "As late as 1976," writes Reich, "the richest 1 per cent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006 they were pocketing more than 20 percent." The last time this happened was in 1928.

Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty are clearly cyclists. They believe this downturn will end in two years; and they have Mr. Carney, of the Bank of Canada, on their side. The Liberals need to go back to the policy drawing board, so it's a little difficult to figure out where they stand. But Mr. Ignatieff's initial noises -- about protecting the vulnerable and insuring that the bailout money gets to those who need it -- suggest that he is more of a structuralist than a cyclist.

Where does this leave the public? Stuck in the middle -- which, recent history suggests, is not a comfortable place to be. For, while the political parties are fighting it out in Ottawa, things are getting worse for ordinary Canadians. NAFTA ensured relatively free movement of goods and services across the border; and, when times were good, that meant that some of the wealth generated in the United States flowed north. But the numbers from there last month were particularly bleak. In the last four months of 2008, Americans lost 1.9 million jobs. Because the United States is our biggest customer, a fair measure of American pain will cross our border.

Last week's budget bought time for both the government and the opposition. It's not clear what it bought ordinary Canadians. They do not have the luxury of time -- as they lose their jobs and try to pay their bills.

Potter or Scrooge?

In his review of last Tuesday's inauguration, Frank Rich noted that, in the midst of the general euphoria, Dick Cheney "in his black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life."

As Canada's Parliament returns to the House of Commons today, it will be interesting to see if Stephen Harper's near death experience has wrought any changes in the man. For literature and film provide two templates in this regard. There is, of course, Ebenezer Scrooge from Mr. Dickens, and Henry F. Potter from Mr. Capra.

When introducing his tough-on-crime agenda, Mr. Harper sounded a lot like Scrooge, complaining bitterly, "Are there no prisons, are there no work houses?" But after a visit from ghosts -- particularly the ghost of Christmas Future -- he apparently underwent an attitude adjustment.

Carefully targeted leaks have tried to convey the message that Mr. Harper has undergone some kind of conversion -- from modest surpluses to a deficit of $64 billion over the next two years. The devil, of course, is in the details -- particularly the details surrounding tax cuts. In the past, conservatives have turned to tax cuts the way the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding turned to Windex: they are unshakable in their belief that tax cuts cure everything.

That would now appear to be the case in Washington. Republicans say they will not support Mr. Obama's plan because there are not enough tax cuts. They have been in denial for a long time. And, even after the election, they continue to push an agenda which voters have soundly rejected. Perhaps that is not at all surprising for a party which currently is looking for someone to lead the Republican National Committee. One of the candidates recently sought support by sending out copies of a song entitled, Barack the Magic Negro.

The difference between Canada and the United States is that, after elections in both countries, new people are in charge in the South, while the same old crew is in charge here -- although the same old crew almost sent themselves packing just before Christmas. Canadians are well aware that the Prime Minister can change his clothes -- from suit to sweater. Whether or not he can truly change his mind is another matter.

Is Stephen Harper Ebenezer Scrooge or Henry F. Potter? Dick Cheney truly fits George Bailey's description of Potter -- "a warped frustrated old man." What Canadians want to know is whether or not Stephen Harper fits Potter's description of George Bailey: "a warped frustrated young man."

A Future Unforseen

The picture has a special meaning for me. It was shot by a photographer who was aboard the train which brought Barack Obama and Joe Biden to Washington. It speaks to what will happen on Tuesday; but it also speaks to something I never thought would happen.

Forty years ago, about two months after graduating from university in Montreal, my father and I hopped in the family car and headed for North Carolina, where -- through a serendipitous congruence of events -- I found myself attending the University of North Carolina.

At the end of the first leg of our trip, we stopped in Washington, D.C. I had never been there; but I looked forward to visiting the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial and the Kennedy grave site. What struck me most, however, as we travelled around the city, were the extremes -- white Greek temples and row upon row of slum houses. The contrasts were so glaring, I wondered how people could tolerate them.

I thought of that trip when I read Frank Rich's column in this morning's New York Times. Rich (who is a few years younger than me) grew up in Washington, "a sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era." -- which meant that it was a segregated city. "I wish I could say that we were outraged by this apartheid," Rich wrote. "But we were kids --privileged kids at that -- and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals." That was why the gulf between rich and poor went unnoticed.

But, like me, Rich had read John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me; and he had watched Martin Luther King deliver his speech outside the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963. And he knew that, despite the invisibility of the majority of Washington's citizens, things were changing. This became particularly apparent when King was assassinated in 1968. Washington erupted in blind fury; and mobs torched those slum dwellings.

Still, "looking back on my high school years," Rich wrote, "I'm struck by how slowly history can move. The civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished by 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation [in 1967] the impact was minimal, even in the city where the laws were written and passed." That was true in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I taught high school in 1969, to pay for my education. I taught in a school where 1% of the student population was black. On the other side of town there was a high school where there was not a single white student.

It has been over 145 years since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation; and it has been just over 45 years since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. But it is precisely because history has moved so slowly that next Tuesday is so significant -- and why the tears you see mean so much. Those tears represent both the pain of the past and the hope of the future.

The Great Financial Chain of Being

William Shakespeare lived in an ordered universe. The moral philosophers of his day conceived of that universe as a Great Chain of Being. God was at the top of the chain; the angels occupied a position immediately below Him; and humanity occupied the link below them. They were followed by animals, plants and inanimate objects. In turn, each of these rungs was itself further subdivided. The King sat on top of the human organization chart, followed by the nobility, followed by various permutations of the common man. This precise organization of the universe guaranteed stability -- unless Lucifer decided to challenge God's authority, or a member of the nobility tried to usurp the power of the King. And, if that occurred, God eventually reached down and set things right. Thus, in Macbeth and Hamlet and Julius Ceasar, pretenders to the throne eventually met their just and richly deserved comeuppance. The Great Chain exemplified what the philosophers called "natural law."

Classical economics has constructed something similar. The very wealthy, or the captains of industry, occupy God's rung on the ladder, followed by the CEO's, shareholders, etc. Mere "consumers" are the equivalent of inanimate objects. That organizational chart has been accepted for most of human history -- with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal -- as theologically sound. Indeed, Roosevelt's harshest critics accused him of tampering with natural law -- and they eagerly awaited the day when God would set things right. Forty years ago, God appeared in the form of a bespectaled little man. His name was Milton Friedman; and it was he who re-established The Great Financial Chain of Being.

But, as became clear in Roosevelt's day, the Great Chain is actually the Great Vacuum Cleaner. Rather than allow the wealth of the mighty to trickle down to society's least powerful -- and, apparently, least important -- creatures, this kind of economic organization actually sucks the meager wealth of those at the bottom to the top, because it is maintained by a tax system which is tilted decidedly in favour of the wealthy. Over time, those at the bottom are deprived of purchasing power. They can only purchase goods and services by going deeply into debt; and, eventually, they can no longer support the debt they have accumulated. When the broad foundation which supports the Great Chain begins to crumble, the whole edifice -- like the Twin Towers -- comes tumbling down. What Roosevelt did was to inject money into the foundation of the edifice. His various employment initiatives put money into the hands of those at the bottom and kept the system afloat.

Thus, in a financial crisis, the government must put money into the hands of those who have lost their jobs by giving them jobs which need to be done -- whether it's the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying the country by building hydro-electric dams, or a Green Economy Initiative to create renewable energy sources.

Those who have been at the helm of the economy for the last thirty years, however, keep insisting that the way to put money into people's hands is to give everyone across-the-board tax cuts. The Americans gave away $150 billion in tax cuts last year and nothing happened. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, wants another $350 billion in tax cuts. And the word is that Jim Flaherty -- who two months ago foresaw a $100 million surplus, then last month predicted a $30 billion deficit and last week warned Canadians to steel themselves for rising unemployment -- is considering similar tax cuts in the upcoming budget. These folks maintain that the way to stabilize the building is to strengthen the roof. And they scratch their heads when, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it continues to sink.

Paul Krugman, this year's Nobel laureate in Economics, has advised President-elect Obama to ditch the tax cuts. "My advice to the Obama team," he writes in today's New York Times, "is to scrap the business tax cuts, and, more important, to deal with the threat of doing too little by doing more." That is advice which Canada's opposition leaders should also take to heart. It is too much to expect those who got us here to heed that advice. "By and large the free market medicine men," Thomas Frank wrote in last week's Wall Street Journal, "seem determined to learn nothing from this awful year. Instead, they repeat their incantations and retreat deeper into their dogma, generating endless schemes in which government is to blame, all sin originates with the Community Reinvestment Act, and the bailouts for which their own flock is desperately bleating can do nothing but harm."

The American Revolution, the French Revolution and World War I doomed the Great Chain of Being. But the Great Financial Chain of Being is alive and well.

Straight Out of Orwell

In an article in this month's Vanity Fair, Richard Clarke -- the former American Czar for terrorism -- describes a meeting which occured in the White House on the evening of September 11th. Recalling the meeting, Clarke reports Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's advice to George W. Bush: "And Rumsfeld said, You know, we've got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him -- at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him -- like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said -- I'll never forget this -- There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks."

From the very beginning the plan was to shift the war from Eurasia to Eastasia. And, as Frank Rich wrote in Sunday's New York Times, the Bush administration had its propaganda machine ginned up and ready to go. "The one indisputable talent of [Bush's] White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and to the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well."

The propaganda may have lost its punch; but the machine is still spinning recent history. As Rich reports, a booklet can now be downloaded from the White House website, which trumpets Mr. Bush's accomplishments. But the booklet's reading of history is highly selective: "Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began on September 12th, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended in December, 2007). He vanquished all the leading Queda terrorists (if you don't count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving 'market economy' (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a 'democratically elected president' (presiding over one of the world's most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He 'led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief' (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina)."

All politicians leave mixed records behind them. But what is striking, as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney leave office, is the refusal of either man to admit the possibility of error. When asked by Charles Gibson if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, Bush answered, "it was a repudiation of Republicans."

All propaganda seeks to take credit (personally) and to assign blame (to someone else). Hence, as Orwell noted, one finds the ubiquitous use of the passive voice in sentences like, "Mistakes were made." Conveniently, of course, the sentence leaves no room for someone to take responsibility for those mistakes.

Clearly, as Mr. Rumsfeld suggested, the Iraq War was conceived as a demonstration project. However, when things go so catastrophically and so demonstrably wrong, one has two choices: Either one confronts the truth; or one seeks refuge in delusion. As Mr. Bush leaves office, he still clings to his delusions. Orwell would not have been surprised.

Gentle Radical

It's been more than forty years since I walked into a lecture hall in Montreal to listen to a man I knew only as the son of the man whose name appeared above the entrance to the university library. I thought about that moment when Saturday's Globe and Mail declared Jean Vanier its Nation Builder for 2008. The subject of Vanier's talk that day was familiar to anyone who has followed his life: His focus was on those people who, in French, Vanier calls les faibles -- in English, literally, "the weak" -- but which more faithfully translates as "the vulnerable." Vanier believes we are all faibles. For him, however, the most vulnerable are the mentally challenged or, as current terminology would have it, the "developmentally disabled."

Vanier is the son of Canada's first French Canadian Governor General. He spent his youth in Britain and the British navy, a scion of privilege. Yet he left all of that behind and founded a community he called "l'Arche" -- the Ark -- to serve the very people he spoke of forty years ago.

What struck me most that day -- and what has stayed with me for the rest of my life -- was his notion that we, the privileged, owed a debt to les faibles. In my youthful narcissism, I had thought it was the other way around. But, for Vanier, these were the people who gave our lives meaning: they gave us the opportunity to work for what was good, decent and transcendent. It was a notion which I greeted with considerable skepticism. And, at the end of the lecture, I proceeded to the podium to ask him what I thought was a worldly-wise question.

I have forgotten the question; and I have forgotten the content of his response. But I will always remember how he answered my question. He did not dismiss me as another foolish youth. In fact, he gave me his complete attention. His eyes did not wander to other people or events in the room. He dealt with my skepticism directly and was in no hurry to move on. I was aware from that day forward, as I read his books and followed his work, that he is a truly remarkable man.

Vanier's conviction has never wavered. Today, as the world strains under the enormous burdens the best and the brightest have left in their wake, his message is the same. To those who have worshipped at the altar of free markets and global competition he says, "There's obviously a good aspect to competition -- the development of the body, the mind, creativity. But there's something where we can very quickly walk on people -- I want to prove I'm better than you. [What really matters is] how to find a world where the essential thing is to work for peace, to work to build something together." It is our recognition that we are all faibles that keeps us from walking on each other. "Vulnerability," says Vanier, "brings us together."

When I think about that lecture hall forty ago, I also think about a more modest lecture hall in which I sat a dozen years ago. It was the end of the day, at the high school where I taught for most of my career. The Director of Education for our school board had gathered us together to explain how The Common Sense Revolution was going to change education in Ontario. To underscore his point, he told us the parable of the animals at the water hole. It seems that a lion wandered into a gathering at a particular African source of refreshment. He surveyed the impalas, wildebeests, zebras and other long time members of the congregation. One of the impalas looked up and noted the lion's presence. "Well," she said, "this is certainly a change." The lion -- his eyes gleaming -- responded, "Yes. And from now on you're all going to have to run a lot faster."

That particular director has retired. I do not know what became of him. I assume that he has found a comfortable chair from which to view the passing parade. Jean Vanier has also retired. But he has not looked for a comfortable place to land. He gives L'Arche -- as he gave me -- his complete attention. He still visits its many homes throughout the world. And now, he says, "I am free to do what I like, and what I like is to announce the message: That people who are weak have something to bring us, that they are important people and it's important to listen to them. In some mysterious way they change us."

As we face the new year, we need to remember our debt to the vulnerable -- and we need to remember that we are all vulnerable.

Lament for a Generation

History will remember Bernard Madoff as the incarnation of the financial folly of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. But it will not place the blame for that folly at his feet. Instead, it will tell the story of a generation who fervently believed they could get something for nothing -- or next to nothing.

That story will begin in the late 1950's, when -- as Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail -- there occurred "the intellectual revolution of Barry Goldwater's rage against the state, social conservatism, Arthur Laffer's curve, and the idea that ever lower taxes would bring ever higher revenues, so that budgets could and would be balanced by some miracle that had previously escaped economists and, indeed, previous generations of sound money, balanced budget Republicans."

Given a patina of respectability by academics like Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman, the revolution was carried forward by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Always about a decade behind their democratic forebears, Canadians heard the same gospel from the mouths of Preston Manning and Mike Harris. The revolution reached its apex --and was asphxiated -- under George W. Bush in the United States and Stephen Harper in this country.

But it would be disingenuous to conveniently pin the tails on these donkeys. For, truth be told, the revolution and the destruction it has spawned was powered by a generation of donkeys -- my generation. As Jim Hoagland wrote in last Sunday's Washington Post, we are the generation who have "taken the greatest financial, technological and political opportunities the world has ever offered and abused them for our own pleasures, greed and egos."

Public schools and universities were built to educate us; the post World War II economy coddled and pampered us; and the health care and pension systems were constructed to lead us gently into the night. But, not content with our lot, we insisted on our right to have much, much more. Mr. Madoff's ponzi scheme was the prefect realization of that wish. He gave those of us, who are or soon will be retired, splendid returns. However, he achieved those returns by taking money from new investors -- the young -- and playing Robin Hood to those of us who took the proceeds and never asked how they were generated. As Mr. Hoagland rightly points out, we have left those new investors -- our children -- "fetid stables of debt, scandal and corruption."

The result is a rising tide of youthful anger. At the moment, it finds expression more in Europe than in North America. Students riots in Greece have left 70 dead and a trail of vandalism and destruction. That fire is spreading: "The same dry kindling of the Greek uprising is scattered around Europe," Hoagland writes," where youth unemployment rates are double or triple those of the population over 24, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and retirement benefits are politically untouchable. Similar tensions are rising in China, as the global recession deepens, in oil producing countries such as Russia and Iran that are caught in the whiplash of rising and falling prices, and most of all in developing countries with broken governments and economies that punish the educated young disproportionately."

It is not enough to lament the mess we have left our children. The clock is ticking and we must make things right. We must run monumental deficits to invest in their futures; and, when we have primed the pump and created jobs for them, we will have to follow Keynes' advice and pay for those investments in the good times. We have done just the opposite for nearly forty years -- and we are surrounded by the carnage we have created.

Grace Under Pressure

The problem with Hemingway's definition of courage -- grace under pressure -- is that, while it's a neat turn of phrase, it's nonetheless shallow. There is so much more to courage than just grace under pressure. Be that as it may, Bob Rae displayed both courage and realism last week when he bowed out of the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.

He faced a central political problem. As Jeffrey Simpson noted in The Globe and Mail, "Like Macbeth's 'horrible shadow,' Mr. Rae could not escape the reality and mythologies of his years as the NDP premier of Ontario. They have stuck to him and tormented his political career as a Liberal. Even outside Ontario, where Liberals and others had not experienced those years, the telling of the province's travails, and those of his government, spread across the land, seeping into the common (if potted) wisdom of what actually happened and why."

Some claimed that his insistence on the principle of one person one vote was an obvious attempt by a losing candidate to tip the race in his favour. However, the last time I checked, that principle was at the root of western democracies. Others claimed that his support for the opposition coalition was a loser's game. But again, according to the rules of parliamentary democracy, that principle has been in practice for hundreds of years.

Mr. Rae does not need anyone to lecture him on principles. But, as perhaps the best Canadian politician of his generation, he can read his times; and he understands exactly what Stephen Harper has been trying to do to his political opposition -- and exactly what kind of response it requires. More than that, he has a refreshing sense of perspective. "It's only politics," he says, "it's not the end of the world."

Somehow, one cannot imagine Stephen Harper making that kind of statement. Even if the coalition fails, it has given Canadians confirmation of what they have long suspected -- but which the Prime Minister has sought to soft peddle in a soft blue sweater. Put simply, Mr. Harper believes -- with Vince Lombardi -- that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." The coalition has also given us a glimpse of how Stephen Harper reacts when he is genuinely scared. It is not a flattering portrait.

Harper is reputedly a very bright man. The late David Halberstam, in his book The Best and the Brightest -- the story of how John F. Kennedy and his brain trust blundered into Vietnam -- intended the book's title to be ironic. The title, he wrote, underlined "the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard won, often bitter experience." The prime minister is a bitter man but he is not a wise one.

Mr, Rae, on the other hand, has known -- and, as last week illustrates, continues to know -- bitter experience. But he has emerged from that experience a wiser and a much better man than Stephen Harper. Winning isn't all it's cracked up to be.