partisanship

Saturday November 2, 2019

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 2, 2019

Impeach Trump. Then Move On.

Is it possible that more than 20 Republican senators will vote to convict Donald Trump of articles of impeachment? When you hang around Washington you get the sense that it could happen.

September 27, 2019

The evidence against Trump is overwhelming. This Ukraine quid pro quo wasn’t just a single reckless phone call. It was a multiprong several-month campaign to use the levers of American power to destroy a political rival.

Republican legislators are being bludgeoned with this truth in testimony after testimony. They know in their hearts that Trump is guilty of impeachable offenses. It’s evident in the way they stare glumly at their desks during hearings; the way they flee reporters seeking comment; the way they slag the White House off the record. It’ll be hard for them to vote to acquit if they can’t even come up with a non-ludicrous rationale.

And yet when you get outside Washington it’s hard to imagine more than one or two G.O.P. senators voting to convict.

In the first place, Democrats have not won widespread public support. Nancy Pelosi always said impeachment works only if there’s a bipartisan groundswell, and so far there is not. Trump’s job approval numbers have been largely unaffected by the impeachment inquiry. Support for impeachment breaks down on conventional pro-Trump/anti-Trump lines. Roughly 90 percent of Republican voters oppose it. Republican senators will never vote to convict in the face of that.

August 23, 2018

Second, Democrats have not won over the most important voters — moderates in swing states. A New York Times/Siena College survey of voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found that just 43 percent want to impeach and remove Trump from office, while 53 percent do not. Pushing impeachment makes Democrats vulnerable in precisely the states they cannot afford to lose in 2020.

Third, there is little prospect these numbers will turn around, even after a series of high-profile hearings.

I’ve been traveling pretty constantly since this impeachment thing got going. I’ve been to a bunch of blue states and a bunch of red states (including Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah). In coastal blue states, impeachment comes up in conversation all the time. In red states, it never comes up; ask people in red states if they’ve been talking about it with their friends, they shrug and reply no, not really. 

Prof. Paul Sracic of Youngstown State University in Ohio told Ken Stern from Vanity Fair that when he asked his class of 80 students if they’d heard any conversation about impeachment, only two said they had. When he asked if impeachment interested them, all 80 said it did not.

Fourth, it’s a lot harder to do impeachment in an age of cynicism, exhaustion and distrust. During Watergate, voters trusted federal institutions and granted the impeachment process a measure of legitimacy. Today’s voters do not share that trust and will not regard an intra-Washington process as legitimate.

Many Americans don’t care about impeachment because they take it as a given that this is the kind of corruption that politicians of all stripes have been doing all along. Many don’t care because it looks like the same partisan warfare that’s been going on forever, just with a different name.

Fifth, it’s harder to do impeachment when politics is seen as an existential war for the future of the country. Many Republicans know Trump is guilty, but they can’t afford to hand power to Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

March 31, 2017

Progressives, let me ask you a question: If Trump-style Republicans were trying to impeach a President Biden, Warren or Sanders, and there was evidence of guilt, would you vote to convict? Answer honestly.

I get that Democrats feel they have to proceed with impeachment to protect the Constitution and the rule of law. But there is little chance they will come close to ousting the president. So I hope they set a Thanksgiving deadline. Play the impeachment card through November, have the House vote and then move on to other things. The Senate can quickly dispose of the matter and Democratic candidates can make their best pitches for denying Trump re-election.

Elizabeth Bruenig of The Washington Post put her finger on something important in a recent essay on Trump’s evangelical voters: the assumption of decline. Many Trump voters take it as a matter of course that for the rest of their lives things are going to get worse for them — economically, spiritually, politically and culturally. They are not the only voters who think this way. Many young voters in their OK Boomer T-shirts feel exactly the same, except about climate change, employment prospects and debt.

This sense of elite negligence in the face of national decline is the core issue right now. Impeachment is a distraction from that. As quickly as possible, it’s time to move on. (David Brooks, NYTimes)  

 

Wednesday September 11, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 11, 2019

Why is it so hard for Independent candidates to get elected to Canada’s House of Commons?

May 28, 2019

Canada has not had a strong Independent movement since Confederation when there were several Independent politicians in government. They were called “loose fish” and operated separately of political structures, explains John English, director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International history at Trinity College.

When the party system began to take hold at the turn of the century under Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, these “loose fish” declined in numbers. The party structure became the main source of funding for candidates and also provided patronage appointments to important positions such as the railway or the post office.

November 9, 2018

Independents made a brief resurgence in the Second World War. When Prime Minister Mackenzie King broke his promise of conscription, Quebec Liberals declared themselves Independent (but still affiliated with the Liberal party for the most part).

By the 1960s, Independents became especially rare in Canadians politics, limited only to “those candidates who got kicked out of their party or decided their interest didn’t align with party values or the party leader,” English said.

The debate over the strength and influence of central party power in politics isn’t new, either. Collenette says this discussion has been occurring within parties for years, but “the question now is larger because its not contained in the party anymore.”

Promising the moon

The main reason Canada doesn’t have more Independent politicians is because “they don’t win,” Thomas said. Before campaign finance legislation changes were created in 1974, local electoral campaign officers would identify supporters and then get supporter to learn the name of the candidate. Now, voters are more likely to recognize party labels than individual names.

David Moscrop, political scientist and author of “Too Dumb for Democracy,” agrees that central party authority needs to be loosened but worries about the tradeoffs. First, it’ll require a lot of cooperation from parties, civil service, staffers, leadership and media. (“I don’t think that is going to happen,” Moscrop says.) Then you have to balance loosening party control while maintaining party cohesion. (“How do you do that?” he asks.) (National Observer) 

 

Wednesday September 11, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday September 11, 2019

Why is it so hard for Independent candidates to get elected to Canada’s House of Commons?

June 11, 2014

Canada has not had a strong Independent movement since Confederation when there were several Independent politicians in government. They were called “loose fish” and operated separately of political structures, explains John English, director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International history at Trinity College.

When the party system began to take hold at the turn of the century under Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, these “loose fish” declined in numbers. The party structure became the main source of funding for candidates and also provided patronage appointments to important positions such as the railway or the post office.

May 28, 2019

Independents made a brief resurgence in the Second World War. When Prime Minister Mackenzie King broke his promise of conscription, Quebec Liberals declared themselves Independent (but still affiliated with the Liberal party for the most part).

By the 1960s, Independents became especially rare in Canadians politics, limited only to “those candidates who got kicked out of their party or decided their interest didn’t align with party values or the party leader,” English said.

The debate over the strength and influence of central party power in politics isn’t new, either. Collenette says this discussion has been occurring within parties for years, but “the question now is larger because its not contained in the party anymore.”

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator Ð Wednesday September 11, 2019

The main reason Canada doesn’t have more Independent politicians is because “they don’t win,” Thomas said. Before campaign finance legislation changes were created in 1974, local electoral campaign officers would identify supporters and then get supporter to learn the name of the candidate. Now, voters are more likely to recognize party labels than individual names.

David Moscrop, political scientist and author of “Too Dumb for Democracy,” agrees that central party authority needs to be loosened but worries about the tradeoffs. First, it’ll require a lot of cooperation from parties, civil service, staffers, leadership and media. (“I don’t think that is going to happen,” Moscrop says.) Then you have to balance loosening party control while maintaining party cohesion. (“How do you do that?” he asks.) (National Observer) 

 

Thursday April 4, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday April 4, 2019

Let the Justin Trudeau scandal be a lesson: seemingly pristine leaders will always let us down

Must our politicians disappoint? That is the question that is keeping some of us on the liberal left up at night.

April 2, 2019

The latest let down is Justin Trudeau. He of the bilingual social media, refugee welcoming press stunts and (somewhat performative) feminism. While Trudeau was never as left wing as many of us economically, his leadership style on social issues did seem like a breath of fresh air. He appeared to be willing to take action that went against the narrative of the day, making genuinely tough decisions on issues like immigration where the easy option would have been to turn people away.

Trudeau had transformed his party from within rebuilding it in his younger, cooler image. Now, he stands accused by two female former cabinet colleagues of corruption. His response? To throw these whistle-blowers out of the Liberal Party. The disappointment is profound.

So Trudeau is human after all. His once fleet feet are made of clay. Yes another hero falls from their perch.

March 4, 2016

We expect a lot from our political leaders. So much so that they are bound to disappoint. But should we expect a kind of perfection from them we could never deliver ourselves? Is there a refugee whose life has been changed by Trudeau’s policies that would exchange that for this scandal not happening? Should Labour disown the minimum wage because it was introduced by a leader that let them down so badly elsewhere?

We do need to be clear about what our red lines are. We shouldn’t forgive Blair for the bloodshed of the Iraq War nor of the chaos and loss of trust in politics that followed it just because we think he’s right over Europe. Trudeau’s imperious treatment of his whistle-blowing colleagues should not be glossed over as if it meant nothing just because we like the way he stands up to Trump.

For public service to be the unalloyed good the liberal left believe it should be, we have to learn to be more grown up about those that deliver it. Both the hero worship and the demonisation come from a desire to believe that politicians are different from the rest of us. But we don’t just get the politicians we deserve, we get the politicians we are: weak, strong, courageous, stupid, clever and human. (Continued: The Independent) 

 

Thursday February 28, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay – Thursday February 28, 2019

The moral catastrophe of Justin Trudeau

The dangerous files are never the obscure ones. Scandals don’t happen in the weird little corners of government, in amateur sport or in crop science. They happen on the issues a prime minister cares most about, because everyone gets the message that the rules matter less than the result.

February 9, 2005

It’s a constant in politics. In 2016 I took one look at Bill Morneau’s first budget and wrote this, “The sponsorship scandal of the late Chrétien years was possible because it was obvious to every scoundrel with Liberal friends that spending on national unity would not receive close scrutiny from a government that was desperate to be seen doing something on the file. A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.”

It wasn’t a perfect prediction. I kind of expected the hucksters and worse to be outsidegovernment. Unless the Trudeau Liberals can produce persuasive evidence that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an utter fabulist (and frankly, I now expect several to try), her testimony before the Commons Justice Committee establishes pretty clearly that the hucksters and worse were running the show. Led by the grinning legatee who taints the Prime Ministers’ office.

There will now be a period of stark partisanship. We’re in an election year. Loyal Liberals will tell themselves, and then everyone else, that the price of looking clearly at Justin Trudeau’s bully club (so many men; wonder how Katie Telford felt about that while she was signing off on every element of it) is ceding the field to Andrew Scheer. Who, they will tell themselves and then the country, is an actual Nazi.

September 22, 2017

I mean, after all, that’s pretty close to what they told one another, and then Jody Wilson-Raybould, last fall, isn’t it? There was an election in Quebec in the first week of October. And Ben Chin, a former journalist who did whatever Christy Clark needed done in B.C. before moving east to do whatever Bill Morneau and the PMO needed doing, used that thin reed of an excuse to try to sway Wilson-Raybould’s chief of staff, Jessica Prince. “If they don’t get a [deferred prosecution agreement], they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election right now, so we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould told the committee, paraphrasing Chin’s conversation with Prince.

I’ve never met a Liberal yet who doesn’t reliably confuse his electoral skin with the national interest. So much of what Trudeau and his minions have done in the last year stems from that instinct. Take the ludicrous half-billion-dollar bailout for people in my line of work, never explained, sprung out of nowhere in Morneau’s fall economic update—or as I now like to think of it, between Trudeau advisor Mathieu Bouchard’s meeting (yet another one) with Prince and Michael Wernick’s chat with Wilson-Raybould. You can get a lot of op-eds written with that kind of dough. Take the cool billion the Canada Infrastructure Bank coughed up  to pay for a politically popular and impeccably well-connected transit project around Montreal… (Continued: Paul Wells, MacLean’s)