A lot of LIberals are speaking out against Bob Rae's apparent move to secure the permanent leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. Of course, it goes without saying that a lot of Liberals are very stupid, which is why they're Liberals in the first place.Those people are also the reason that the LPC is on its deathbed today. Unlike most political observers, I'm willing to state the obvious and say that it's incredibly unlikely that the Grits will ever hold government again. I think it far more likely that they'll be swallowed whole by the New Democratic Party in five years. And I believe it likely that the Liberals will destroy that party as well.
Granted, this didn't stop them from running the country. But that's only because conservatives were such an unmitigated goddamned mess most of the time. And when even a semi-competent Conservative leader appeared, the Liberals lost to him every time. They were beaten by three very different Conservatives; Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper. The numbers show that it was only a divided conservative movement that allowed Jean Chretien to become prime minister at all. When the movement unified under Harper, the Grits were first reduced to a minority, removed from power altogether, and finally robbed even of their Official Opposition status.
The LPC is the most overrated political force anywhere in my lifetime. For at least forty years, they've only won when their opponents are so disorganized and dumb that they can't be trusted to run a profitable rub and tug, let alone a major industrial nation. And even under ideal circumstances, their own infighting does them in, as we've seen over the last decade.
Here's the thing. If I was a Conservative Party supporter (which I'm not. I last voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives in 2000, after voting Reform in '93 and '97), I'd be afraid of facing Bob Rae in a federal election.
Rae is easily the smartest and most experienced viable candidate in the party today. In a party of lifetime politicos, academics and bureaucrats, Rae is also the only person in the LPC who has ever run anything before.
Which brings us to Rae's time as Ontario's NDP premier, which the anti-Rae forces feel is disqualifying. That's a record that can and should be examined, if only because times have changed so much that it might actually work in Rae's favour during a campaign.
Rae, as even he will tell you, was an accidental premier. He was elected because David Peterson's almost awesome arrogance - fighting no fewer than three elections in a single five-year mandate - finally blew him up, and the fact that Mike Harris had been leader for less than a year and no one knew who he was.
He was a socialist who was elected at the beginning of a worldwide recession, so he governed predictably, trying to spend his way out bad economic times. In the process, he created what was then record deficits.
But then Rae did something very unpredictable. He attacked those deficits and in the process destroyed his own political base. Instead of passing massive tax increases, which you would expect from an NDP government, he instituted austerity on the heavily unionized provincial civil service. That, you might have noticed, is conservative orthodoxy today. Indeed, the widely-hated Rae Days remain well to the right of what Republican governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich have attempted in the United States over the last two years. Walker and Kasich, like Paul Ryan in Washington, are trying things that won't produce savings for a minimum of fifteen years. Rae Days inflicted immediate pain on the bureaucracy and went a fair way in reducing the deficit. That's problematic because Canadian Conservatives tend to look at U.S Republicans for spiritual guidance, and Rae Days undercuts that.
Bob Rae's deficit reduction plan, while not wholly effective, might be the most courageous political effort in my lifetime. He had to know that assaulting his own political base would lead to his ruination, but he did it anyway. As a matter of practicality over politics, it ranks with the first President Bush's budget reconcilation deal of 1990. And for that, Rae has at least my respect for trying to do the right thing against political self-interest. Bob Rae made tough decisions that doomed him, which none of those who oppose him would ever dream of doing, mostly because they're cowards and hacks.
I've spent that last five years trying to figure out exactly how the Harper Conservatives (or Harper's probable successor, Jason Kenney) runs against Rae. And I've got to tell you, I'm fucking stumped.
Bob Rae isn't a political novice, like Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were. Indeed, he's been running bigger campaigns for longer than anyone currently in the Conservative Party. He also survived the Liberal Armageddon of last May, which few other national party figures managed to. That alone makes makes Rae a formidable opponent in ways that no other Liberal is. He understands what it is to run a major campaign, having done so four times in Canada's largest province.
Then there's his Ontario record, which is heavily mitigated by the way politics has changed over the seventeen years since Rae was ejected from Queen's Park. The Harris-Eves Conservatives left office with a fairly large deficit, and the current Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty, has racked up deficits that dwarf Rae's. And the Harper Conservatives have pissed away money at a rate that would impress even Pierre Trudeau.
Yes, the Tories will almost certainly dive-bomb Rae with millions of dollars of negative advertising demagouging his record at Queen's Park, which a broke and demoralized Liberal Party will be unable to counter. It worked magnificently against Dion and Ignatieff, so there's no reason that they won't go to that well again.
But at some point, the Tories are going to have to debate him on national television. And that's dangerous for them. Rae is smarter, a more experienced politician and a better speaker than Harper is. And if Harper leaves office before 2015 (which I think is a distinct possibility), Rae will almost certainly face Jason Kenney, who is a ward-heeling retard that only got where he is today by stealing the disgusting concept of identity politics from the fucking Liberals.
One can reasonably expect Harper or Kenney to start a debate by immediately attacking Rae's by then twenty year old deficits. If I was Bob Rae, my first answer would be "Yes, I was socialist who governed during a deep recession in the early 1990s, so I did what socialists are expected to do. Sir, what is your excuse for spending a $13 billion surplus on nothing and creating deficits that made mine look frugal by comparison?" That alone will be devastating because there is no plausible answer to it.
Then one can expect the attack on Rae Days. That's problematic in so far as if the Tories are even halfway serious about their deficit reduction plan - which they say will not include a tax increase - they'll have to do something that looks a lot like Rae Days, if not actually be more draconian. Remember, Harper pledged to reduce spending only down to 2009 levels, when the country was already in deficit and spending was at a high. If the Conservatives bar themselves from raising revenue and continue to use the tax code to buy themselves votes, the civil service is the only place left to save money. As a very smart guy, I expect that Bob will rattle off the facts and figures and look very credible doing it.
Also, by 2015 the Tories will have been in office for nine years, the standard exhaustion point for a government. Both Mulroney and Chretien were done at that point, and Trudeau was doing everything he could to postpone the election that would ultimately lead to his defeat. I think that Stephen Harper knows the history well enough to get the fuck out of Dodge and make some money before the next election, leaving a half-wit like Kenney as a sacrificial lamb that serves only to burnish his his own legacy, much like Mulroney did with Kim Campbell.
If the Liberals could mange to stop being Liberals for three whole years, I think that Bob Rae has an even chance of beating Harper, and could almost sexually humiliate Jason Kenney, even with a bankrupt and demoralized party. If Thomas Muclair wins the NDP leadership and takes Quebec off of the table for the Grits and Tories, I think that Rae could form at least a minority government. If the NDP falls apart, and Rae manages to keep Denis Coderre in line, the Grits could possibly win as many as forty Quebec seats and govern with a majority.
But the Liberals can't stop being Liberals for three whole minutes, let alone three whole years. As you're already seeing, there are factions of anti-Rae chuckleheaded strategists, bloggers and media types that are determined to pound the final nail in the Liberal Party's coffin if they can't have the Liberal Party all to themselves.
They don't care that Bob Rae is probably the only candidate that can work with the party machinery that the Liberals actually have, as opposed to what they wish they had. Instead of showing the kind of political discipline the Conservatives have always had in getting behind their leader, the Grits are flirting with an idiotic American-style primary system that will make getting behind the leader almost impossible, given that party's history.
Bob Rae has the best chance of any Liberal of beating a unified Conservative Party since Trudeau. But he can't do that if he has to spend his time as Opposition leader and a federal election candidate watching his own back.
Rae is alone as a Liberal who can beat the Tories, but the Liberal Party is incapable of unity, which is why the 2015 election will almost certainly be their last. If they give the leadership to another amateur that loses even more seats in the interest of keeping Rae's critics happy, they won't survive it.
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