Liberal Leadership Race: “The Also-Rans”

Background. So what of Dryden, Brison, Volpe, and Hall Findlay?

It should first be said that all the hype surrounding the membership recruitment skills of Volpe and “Jimmy the K” were just that: hype. And a ladle-full of manipulative pablum fed to a willing mainstream media that, I suspect, will not be acknowledging this fact any time in the near future.

I have already seen these four candidates referred to as “the also-rans.” This is unkind, and untrue. Together they possess roughly 14.2% of the delegates, about as many as Kennedy currently holds. This means nothing as long as they are unable to sway their delegates to another candidate. But I suspect that they can, since each candidate seems to command a certain loyalty from his (or her) followers. (I experienced this personally during one of the debates when I sat in the small Volpe cheering section, which erupted into vociferous clapping at the conclusion of every syrupy Volpe sound-bite ((I had mischeviously intended to cheer for him myself, but reconsidered upon noticing someone I know in attendance.)). The fact that they will be dropped first during the voting itself will lend momentum to whichever candidate(s) they send their delegates to, perhaps influencing the decisions of the delegates that are cast loose later on in the evening.

Which brings us to which candidates these ones will move to during the evening. Disclaimer: Some candidates in leadership races seem to purposely attempt to ramp up the entertainment value of the evening by moving to other candidates that no one suspected they would. By insofar as some guesses can be made: Brison and especially Volpe will almost certainly go to Ignatieff. Dryden, who seems to stand for nothing other than the defense of those tasks that were assigned to him as a minister by Paul Martin, and Hall Findlay, will likely go to one of the more centre-left candidates. Perhaps Rae if he emerges as the Stop Iggy Candidate (which does appear to be likely) or, if Dryden decides to support a cabinet colleague, Dion.

In sum, their influence should not be underestimated.

Kinsella Skewered, Gods Pleased as a Result

Kevin Michael Grace, one of Canada’s best writers and its pre-eminent paleo-conservative, delivers the smack-down.

And as I flip through the dreary columnist pages of the national daily I get, I observe that Grace still doesn’t have a column in a Canadian national newspaper. This sort of sloppiness instead is passed off in the NP as good writing. It’s time to correct that. As Adam puts it:

Allow me to add my vote for a column by Kevin Michael Grace — at The TO Star. He’s one of the country’s best writers just in terms of style and craft alone — and I speak as one who agrees with him about 3% of the time.

He’d surely flummox all partisans, and that can only be a good thing in this day and age of entirely predictable arguments coming from much of the chattering class. A conservative anti-war aesthete — that’s a perspective you don’t see often. He’s also painfully funny, which the Star’s column page (excellent as it is) could do with a bit more of.

h/t

A Corpse on the Tennis Court

Its Education Week at NRO (National Review Online), and this piece, by Jeffrey Hart, is my all-time favorite education piece. Here’s a sample. Remember the year 1988. I don’t think its better now:

Yet there does come that moment.

It came for me in the freshman composition course. The students were required to write essays based upon assigned reading — in this case, some Frost poems, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Hamlet . Then, almost on a whim, I assigned the first half of Allan Bloom’s new surprise best-seller The Closing of the American Mind. When the time came to discuss the Bloom book, I asked them what they thought of it.

Same-Sex Marriage Debate Delayed

The Globe and Mail reports the parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage has been delayed until the end of the fall sitting.  No word on why.

H/t:  iMAPP.org.

Meeting of the Minds: A Lost Opportunity

According to the man who worked as Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad’s translator for his recent New York trip, the prez wanted to meet with Michael Moore. Sadly, efforts to contact the filmmaker were unsuccessful. One can pretty much predict how their conversation would’ve gone. Probably something like this.

H/t: Hot Air

Belinda & Class

George Freeman reports:

“The funny thing about her is that she’s so uncultured and dense. Many powerful women have burned through marriages and taken numerous lovers, but broads like Katherine Hepburn or Princess Margaret had enough dignity to be discreet and became icons for their large personalities.

Large personality is not what comes to mind when I think of Belinda. She certainly has the money to mix with the fast set but she has no taste. Someone should tell her that hockey players are for screaming twenty year olds, not forty year old millionaires who want to have class.”

The Ghost of Lucien Bouchard

Lucien Bouchard has been gone from politics for a decade, and longer still from the federal scene. But his political ghost has been seen hovering over the head of Michael Ignatieff yesterday.

In 1997 Lawrence Martin wrote The Antagonist: Lucien Bouchard and the Politics of Delusion. In a biography of the first federal minister of the environment in the country, it was telling to find how Bouchard attempted to use his ministry virtually to control the rest of the entire bureaucratic machinery of the federal government. Bouchard demanded that all departments of government answer to his department, which is to say that they should answer to him, in the name of protecting the environment. Cabinet and the PM resisted what amounted to be Bouchard’s coup attempt.

Professor Ignatieff now wants to implement a Bouchard-like environmental control on the federal government that would propel the minister of the environment to primacy in the cabinet. If Ignatieff ever came to the PMO, one would surely hope to have the same kind of resistance in cabinet that met Bouchard, but these are Liberals we are talking about. Yes-men in cabinet are typically what survives in Liberal politics, as Jean Chretien ably demonstrated.

Here’s Michael Ignatieff, 2006:

“Results have been weak” from a decade-old policy requiring sustainable development strategies every three years from government departments, the candidate says. But if he becomes PM, that will change.

“This act would require all federal policy to comply with environmental objectives and targets,” he said in a speech Wednesday. “This means something real simple and clear. It means that every product the federal government buys, every service we purchase, every building we build, every policy we put in place, has to contribute to sustainable development objectives.”

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

Bob Rae’s Political Baggage

Billy Joe Bob questioned my optimism/pessimism that Bob Rae’s tenure as Ontario premier, and his Chretienista supporters, would make him unelectable in Ontario and Quebec.

The NP interviews numerous people in Ontario who think, at the very least, Rae has a very large hill to climb to overcome memories of his tenure. The biggest challenge seems to be in rural Ontario and among Liberal Party folks themselves, who think Rae’s commitment to the party is shallow (though they also acknowledge Rae was a Liberal in spirit when he was in fact NDP Premier – perhaps Rae himself is a bit confused whom to love?).

Anyway, those don’t seem insurmountabe obstacles for his candidacy. Urban voters, especially younger ones brought up to regard Mike Harris as evil, won’t remember his NDP days. And Rae’s shallow commitment to the Liberals is outdone only by his main rival, Michael Ignatieff, who hasn’t confirmed he’d stick around if he lost the race.

How the Modern Prince Should Dress

The Claremont Review of Books reviews The Suit by the pseudonymous Nicholas Antongiavanni. The book is patterned after Machiavelli’s Prince, down to the number of chapters.

Here’s a snippet of the review:

Just as Machiavelli boldly set forth the qualities a prince needed to obtain and maintain power, Antongiavanni recommends “dandification” as the virtù required at the highest reaches of business and politics, where it is survival of the best fitted. To those who would rule in these competitive worlds, Antongiavanni’s first and foremost counsel is to don a suit and tie, the timeless combination that reached its apogee in the 1930s. A triumph of design that harmoniously balances modesty and sexuality, conformity and individuality, simplicity in the whole with ornament in the details, the business suit is the perfect uniform for those who see their work as civilized combat. Indeed, long before anyone spoke of the “power suit,” bankers and lawyers on the streets of London could be seen going about like knights ready for battle, outfitted with armor (three-piece suit), helmet (bowler hat), sword (umbrella, never unfurled), and shield (copy of the Times). With this in mind, one should notice that the chief effect of business casual has been to strip men of the most aggressively masculine item in the Western wardrobe: the necktie.

Canada’s Religious Freedoms

The US State Department has released its annual International Religious Freedom Report. You can find information on every country in the world. Readers of ThePolitic.com will be familiar with much of the information on Canada. This, however, was news to me:

A number of mosques were vandalized, including several mosques in the Montreal area, in February and March 2006. At the end of the period covered by this report, police had not identified suspects in these incidents. This followed media coverage of the international reaction to publication in Denmark of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. In April 2006 a mosque in the Quebec city of Trois Rivieres, home to approximately 300 Muslims, was targeted with racist posters.
During the same period, approximately forty-five acts of vandalism against Christian cemeteries and churches were identified in the media. On June 27, 2006, a Manitoba court sentenced three individuals to prison terms of two years minus one day to three years for the arson destruction of a 105-year-old church. An amount of $1 million (C$1.2 million) was levied against the three as restitution. The individuals, followers of a Norwegian musician jailed for a 1993 murder and for the destruction of several churches in Europe, set the church ablaze on February 12, 2006, the Norwegian convict’s birthday. The individual receiving the stiffest sentence had previously been charged with arson in an April 2004 fire that destroyed another church and with the vandalism of tombstones in Manitoba and Alberta. He was scheduled to appear in court on August 3, 2006.
In May 2006 St. Alban’s Anglican Church, located in a Victoria, British Columbia, suburb was vandalized. Church lights and stained glass windows were smashed, Bibles and other religious objects were desecrated, and cigarette butts and empty wine bottles were left in and around the church. Police made arrests in the case, but by the end of the period covered by this report, authorities had not charged anyone. Church officials indicated they did not plan to press charges.

H/t: All American Patriots.

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