Stephen's Harper's risky ploy

Up until fairly recently, I thought that, if nothing else, Stephen Harper was at least a competent politician. Sure, he's a jabbering dupe of a prime minister, and his party has come to embody all of the worst excesses of his Liberal blood enemies, but at least he was a better than average campaign strategist.

That's changed over the last year. He won his long-awaited majority after running what was easily the worst of his four national campaigns. He won because the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff self-destructed. Towards the end of the campaign, he wound up running against the idea of an NDP majority, which no one would have thought possible even a month earlier. As the Dippers rose, they split the Grit vote in enough ridings to allow the Conservatives to come up the middle. Winning because the other side falls apart is hardly an accomplishment to be very proud of.

As it happens, the Tories may have still had to cheat to win, even as Canada's Natural Governing Party was busy committing collective suicide. In recent weeks, there have been credible reports of robocalls being made in dozens of ridings. Those calls, which were fraudulently identified as coming from Elections Canada, told Liberal-leaning voters that there polling place had changed. And that, as you might imagine, is a fucking crime.

Those calls almost certainly originated with the Conservative Party, and Stephen Harper almost certainly knew about them. To suggest otherwise is to entirely ignore the last six years.

Harper has famously micromanaged both his party and the government to such an extent that Tories everywhere are afraid to say or do anything at all without first clearing it with the Prime Minister's Office. Entire books have been written about his top-down management style, for Christ's sake.

If the robocall scandal is even half as widespread as is currently alleged - and I'd be awfully surprised if it doesn't get a lot bigger - there is no credible way that Harper didn't know about it. Nothing happens that the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO doesn't know about, and if the upper echelons of the Tory campaign or the PMO knew about the robocalls, you can bet your ass that Harper knew about it. The suggestion that the spending required to launch calls as widespread as what we're hearing would escape Harper's notice, or that of his top campaign people, is ludicrous. And if his top campaign people knew, he knew.

If I were the Prime Minister, I'd be looking for a very good criminal lawyer right about now. I just can't see a scenario where the Tories can avoid a public inquiry on this one. If they refuse to initiate one, they look guilty. But if they do, the chances are pretty good that they'll be found guilty. And once the small-fries start looking at the prospect of going to jail, they'll start trading up with prosecutors. Once that starts, it isn't likely to stop. One of the drawbacks of Stephen Harper's management style - as opposed to, say, Brian Mulroney's - is that it doesn't inspire much loyalty.

The In and Out scandal dragged on for years, but no one really cared about that because to even understand it was to get so far into the weeds of Canadian campaign finance law that no one could be bothered. By the time the Tories admitted their guilt, no one noticed.

This is different. If true, this is voter fraud carried out across the second largest country on Earth. As things currently stand, it stretched across multiple time zones and could have affected tens of thousands of voters. That's really easy to understand. This is far more like the Sponsorship Scandal - or even Watergate - than it is In and Out.

I will credit Harper for one thing. He's smart enough not to play defense. He knows that once you go on the defensive, as Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff learned to their sorrow, you're dead.

So he's going on the offense, as he usually does. What's newsworthy is his target: Interim-Liberal leader, Bob Rae.

 

Rae is a strikingly odd choice of a target. After all, he's the temporary leader of the third party in Parliament. The Grits are so wholly discredited that it's hard to see them winning a national election ever again. Rae is also the only halfway credible or smart figure in the party, but he agreed when he accepted the interim leadership that he wouldn't run for the permanent leadership. Should he renege on that, he'll re-ignite the decades old civil war in the party that destroyed them in the first fucking place.

The hyper-smart, "small c" conservative, Gerry Nicholls, has a theory about why Harper's doing this, but I disagree with him.

While the Prime Minister is the living embodiment of everything that's truly wrong with the Human Spirit, he's not actually retarded. And while he's more than willing to piss away a grand fortune in public money in hucksterish, electioneering nonsense, he doesn't have a history of doing so with party money.

Historically, Harper has only gone jihadi on those that he perceives as a threat. You'll notice, for example, that he hasn't dumped a ton of money shit-talking the NDP, even though they happen to be Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

And you know what? Harper isn't wrong. If Bob Rae can overcome the mortal handicap of leading the fratricidal and cannibalistic Liberal Party of Canada, he is the clearest threat that Stephen Harper has ever faced. Assuming that the NDP doesn't swallow the Liberals whole before the next election - which almost certainly won't happen - Rae is the only saviour the Grits have.

Firstly, Rae's alone among prominent federal politicians in being not only smarter than Harper is, he is also the only guy who has more experience, both in politics and governing. No other Dipper or Grit has Bob Rae's resume, or anything close to it.

Secondly, he's managed to get through life pretty much free of scandal. Say what you will as his time as Premier of Ontario (and I've said the most horrible things imaginable, and voted against him on two seperate occasions. I'll always regret that I was only born in 1970 and haven't lived in the ridings of Toronto Centre, York South or Broadview, so I could I have voted against him more often.), but his government was shockingly clean.

I'm not going to pretend that he's not a credible threat to Harper, and perhaps the only one out there. If anyone can take out Harper, it's Bob Rae. The Tories aren't just right to try to take out Rae, they're smart to do it when he doesn't the money or the media spotlight to respond.

Having said that, the line of attack is confounding, unless you really appreciate lying.

If I had Harper's record, spending and deficits would be the absolute last thing I'd hit Rae on. This is because Harper himself has surpassed even Pierre Trudeau as being the spendingest prime minister in the peacetime history of Canada. His per-capita deficits certainly reflect that.

Stephen Harper is maybe the last person on earth that isn't George W. Bush that should be hitting Bob Rae on being a shopoholic communist. After all, what in the fuck do you suppose that Harper himself has been doing for the last three years, if not trying to spend his way out of a recession? If Harper can magically get himself around that argument, Rae can then ask him what he was doing in pissing away a $13 billion surplus by turning the tax code into a middle-class giveaway before the world started ending.

Like him or not, Rae displayed an almost heroic level of political courage in attacking his deficits by confronting his own strongest constituency, the civil service unions. And that cost him his job, which he must have known it would. And few things are as dazzling hypocritical than nu-conservatives shithammering Bob for Rae Days while celebrating weapons-grade fuckheads like Scott Walker and John Kasich for essentially doing the same thing.

If I was Bob Rae, I'd be using this Harper ad in my leadership campaign because it highlights his strengths. Rae can run those 30 seconds and respond with "Yes, for the first half of my term, I was a socialist. What's Stephen Harper's excuse? When I saw the error of my ways, I tried to rectify the situation on the backs of those who had supported me. Will Stephen Harper do that?"

This ad is a big bad mistake because it allows Bob Rae to hit Harper from his own right. Rae spent a shitload of money because he was ideologically inclined to do so. And when he saw that he was wrong, he blew himself up trying to right the situation. Harper, on the other hand, spent a shitload of money to try to buy elections, and then cling to power. And absolutely no one thinks that he's going to try to balance his budgets on the backs of the people who brought him to power.

It should be fairly easy to merge the second half of Rae's Ontario term with the Chretien-Martin austerity budgets that eventually balanced the books. And then compare them to Harper's record of being proudly allergic to money, sucking off everyone who might potentially vote for him like a three dollar crack whore, and voter fraud.

If the Liberals can stop being Liberals for fifteen fucking seconds, Stephen Harper just handed them a platform that they almost can't help but winning with.

But I know the Liberals far better than I'd like to. And I know that they'll see this ad, get scared stupid and suffocate Rae in his sleep tonight. That's why they're useless and better off fucking dead.