As the global mental meltdown continues, the wisdom of decades has disappeared in weeks. We are left poorer for it. Take deficits... please. How long did it take us to learn, or say we'd learned, that they were bad? How many politicians swore while campaigning not to run them? And now look.

From the 1960s through the early 1980s, a lot of smart people really believed deficits stimulated the economy. But we ran them and things got worse, then we got rid of them and things got better. In some ways, I realize, governments of every stripe are now running deficits because they're helpless before the dynamics of a modern budget. But their insouciance leaves little doubt that the agonizing experiences of stagflation and runaway interest payments gave them only campaign slogans, not understanding.

What the rest of us learned over 30 years is that "government spending" does not stimulate the economy. When used for legitimate public purposes, like infrastructure or defence, it leaves us better off if done reasonably well. But whenever government spends, it spends real wealth that it must take from the private sector. That's you and me. In hard times, we're less able to bear any given burden. Hence increased government spending is especially bad in a slump.

Clearly politicians believe the opposite with instinctive rather than reasoned passion. Consider this brief story from Monday's Citizen: "U.S. stock index futures slipped, while the dollar and the yen rose yesterday, after world leaders pledged rapid action to combat the financial crisis, but fell short of announcing concrete measures or major regulatory breakthroughs."

In short, politicians announced yet again that they will definitely spend huge sums of money they don't have on things they don't want for reasons they can't specify in ways they haven't figured out. Oddly, confidence wasn't restored.

When they give details, things get worse. Last Tuesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. announced that the $700 billion "rescue" plan approved by Congress would not, as originally declared, focus on buying bad mortgage debt, but would instead involve purchasing bank shares. But he didn't know if the government would also throw more billions at failing car companies on top of the $25 billion loan program they bagged in September. Or give money to other financial institutions as well. Or also buy bad mortgage debt after all. "Mr Paulson's comments", the BBC observed tartly, "did little to ease continuing investor jitters..." The next day, Mr. Paulson mused about $50 billion maybe going to companies that issue credit cards and make car and student loans. Or not.

As Terence Corcoran wrote in last Thursday's National Post, when governments are in full panic mode, determined to hurl very many billions of dollars in some direction but can't figure out which and keep changing their story, any sane person will get or stay out of the markets until they figure out where the harm, or good, is going to be done. But there's more.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it became a familiar critique of government industrial strategy that the state couldn't tell who the winners were and the market didn't need to be told. And the policy elite all learned to mouth the words that "picking winners and losers" was a bad idea. But evidently they never believed or understood it. All these bailout plans seem to involve giving money to companies governments have identified as key to economic vitality on the basis that they're about to go bust. So politicians are cluelessly unteachable here too. And they have our wallets.

The Globe and Mail recently editorialized that "While there are ample reasons for Ottawa to tell car makers they don't deserve taxpayer bailouts, there are also compelling reasons to provide help for weathering the current storm. The trick will be to provide the right help to keep these critical companies afloat without getting stuck in a corporate welfare quagmire." Strangely, this argument drops any pretence that GM, Ford and Chrysler are winners but urges backing them anyway, which is hard to portray as an intellectual advance on older ill-advised industrial strategies. Especially as no one has a word to say about why policies that were universally deplored as unaffordable folly in booms have become reputable wisdom in hard times. Instead this week's Throne Speech blithely promised "further support" for the "manufacturing sector, particularly the automotive and aerospace industries."

Maybe I should simply be happy no one's yet suggesting we rekindle inflation and see if it helps. But I'm not, because it's going to be a long, dumb winter. And just months ago we were all so smart.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If Barack Obama were elected Prime Minister of Canada, how would he fix health care? It is not an idle question. American politics is necessarily interesting to Canadians for several reasons. It's inherently fascinating, even horrifying, because it's so exuberant. In American politics things actually happen, whereas here you get the feeling that if Christ were to return in glory, commentators would assess its impact on Tory prospects in Quebec.

Also, American politics affects what the hyperpower might do next, interesting to everyone but especially its largest trading partner and closest neighbour. And finally, while in many ways unique, the U.S. also shares many traits and some public policy problems with Canada. Including the crippling stress of public health care on the government budget.

I know, I know, people say the U.S. doesn't have a public health care system. It's time to wonder what else such commentators don't know, since Medicare and Medicaid already consume 20 per cent of the American federal budget, with much worse to come.

Don't take my word for it. I'm cribbing here from a Nov. 4 talk by Dr. Cindy Williams, sponsored by the University of Ottawa's Centre for International Policy Studies. She's a senior research scientist in the MIT security studies program and former Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office with a PhD in mathematics, so my guess is she got the numbers right.

By comparison, under the heading "Federal transfers in support of health and other programs," the Canadian federal government only spends about $33 billion out of $240 billion, or around 13 per cent, which includes support for higher education as well. On the other hand, American states are better off than Canadian provinces: Comparing the two most populous, in California "Health and Human Services" takes around $40 billion of $144 billion in spending or 28 per cent whereas in Ontario it's around $40 billion out of $96 billion or 42 per cent. But put the two levels together in either country and the result is alarming in a strangely familiar way.

Especially as Ms. Williams, who I suppose I need to add was not there to shill for the Republican party, went on to show us a very scary projection by the Congressional Budget Office of what would happen to the U.S. federal budget if current trends continued and program eligibility conditions were maintained. (You can see for yourself, at www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8877/12-13-LTBO.pdf.) Compare that to recent Fraser Institute projections of our provincial budgets, and weep.

Ms. Williams went on to point out that the United States has managed its fiscal affairs in the last quarter-century, to the extent that it has managed them, primarily by steadily reducing defence spending from nearly 10 per cent of GDP in 1968 to under five now. Despite another Canadian myth, defence only gets 22 per cent of the American national government budget, one percentage point more than Social Security, while "Other Mandatory" (mostly food stamps, unemployment insurance and public pensions) gets another 13 per cent of federal spending and interest a further seven. But as health care grows, the U.S. will among other things have to surrender any ambition to be the guardian of world order to keep funding middle class entitlements. It seems a high price to pay.

I asked at the outset what Barack Obama would do about Canadian health care. In fact I don't even know what he'll do about the American stuff since during the election he promised a massive expansion of a system already threatening the federal government with insolvency and abdication of its core responsibilities. Yes, he also said he'd go through the budget line-by-line eliminating waste. But I downloaded the detailed "Appendix" to the "Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2009" and it's 1,314 pages long. If Mr. Obama can get through one page an hour deciphering the items and making intelligent judgments about what to cut, by how much and how, and devotes 10 hours a day to it seven days a week despite a few other duties attendant on the presidency, he'll be at it from Inauguration Day until late on the morning of June 1, so after lunch he can start trying to get Congress to go along with his cuts. Which will either come from the 54 per cent of the budget that's entitlements or won't make much difference. And either way won't alter the lethal long-term trends.

If he were in charge in Canada, he'd have a remarkably similar problem and dismal lack of solutions. Which surely tells you something about the sustainability of public health care. And politicians who promise to save it by expanding it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So that was a decent night for the Democrats. Sort of. I know, I know, Barack Obama "will electrify the world."

He's a "supernova." Of course now the press are also saying he faces difficult challenges and is something of an unknown and we'd all better lower our expectations. But hey, when change has come to America, who wants to quibble?

Me, actually. I agree that the election of a black president is a historic triumph of America's open society and Americans' fundamental decency. I'm too right-wing to support John McCain and I think it's amazingly great that such a thing could happen. Only in America, folks. At least, it hasn't happened in Canada, Germany, France or Britain where they like to sneer at American prejudice.

Some people claim a substantial hidden bigoted vote reduced Barack Obama's vote total. In fact he got more of the white vote (around 43 per cent) than the Democratic average in the previous 10 elections (39 per cent). But in any event, if some voters secretly voted against Mr. Obama because of his race, millions openly voted for him because of it, so it doesn't explain the narrowness of his victory.

Yes, narrowness. And here I must poke many journalists in the eye for covering what they wanted to happen, not what did. The Globe and Mail declared Barack Obama the victor "in a landslide triumph, winning more than 335 of the 538 Electoral College votes, in striking contrast to the wafer-thin victories that sent George W. Bush to Washington in 2000 and again four years later." Pfui. A landslide is Reagan in 1984, with 525 of 535 Electoral College votes and 58.8 per cent of the popular vote, or Nixon in 1972 (520 and 60.7), LBJ in 1964 (486 and 61), or FDR in 1936 (523 and 61).

I don't care how much you hate Republicans. Three-sixty-four and 52.5 is not a landslide. Statistically this election resembles 1968 or 1992 ... except both those campaigns featured strong third-party candidates.

It's also hard to argue that John McCain, or Sarah Palin, alienated moderates. If final turnout is around 125 million, Barack Obama gets seven million more votes than John Kerry in 2004 including 70 per cent of new voters, a galvanized Democratic base and working Joes and Janes concerned about the economy. If it's much higher, John McCain approaches George Bush's 2004 total despite losing the Joes and Janes and core Republicans who never trusted him. Either way there's no room for a wave of defecting moderates. You don't have to approve of it. It's still true.

One normally sensible Canadian pundit warned the GOP that "many of its remaining moderates ... were brought down, leaving the party weakened and prey to the radical evangelicals and talk show hosts who dominate its right wing. If the GOP clings to that base, perhaps with Ms. Palin as its champion, the party has no future." Yeah. They'll end up running right-wing losers like Reagan instead of moderate winners like Bush Sr. and John McCain.

Margaret Wente, also normally sensible, wrote on election day that Mr. Obama "has made me proud of America again" because Americans "are turning out in record numbers to repudiate the leaders who disgraced and failed them." A fine explanation of the record turnout Obama landslide ... if it had happened.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Gas prices are down, and so am I. No, I'm not some sort of environmental nut. It's just that I know exactly what Susan Sontag meant when she said "I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them." And only last month I, as a consumer, was the victim of a vast international conspiracy. Those were the days. Back then I even had major politicians feeding my delusion. In September, Jack Layton called for a commissioner to review high gas prices; Stephen Harper told reporters it sure looked like gouging; and Stéphane Dion wanted more Competition Bureau powers to investigate price-fixing. Now prices are down, my political friends have gone silent and I'm a nobody.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that gas prices both rise and fall in tandem because of the highly competitive nature of the industry, not the reverse, and are driven by actual or anticipated changes in the price of crude oil. But how lonely, how terribly lonely, to feel that it's all market forces, that I'm just a dust speck on the face of global trade. Of course politicians would rather be fearless crusaders against illicit plundering on an international scale than boring hacks mumbling populist clichés. And I'd rather be the target of such a conspiracy than just a guy struggling to make ends meet.

For the same reason -- to compensate for creeping feelings of insignificance, or insignificant feelings of creepiness -- I have frequently observed over many years that my investments invariably do what I wish my weight was doing and vice versa. Moreover, my mutual funds periodically jump up dramatically only to resume their steady painful day-by-day descent.

Just life in the market? Don't you believe it. Here's my theory: My holdings can't actually fall every day or they'd become worthless and the torment would stop. So once in a while the gnomes of Zurich engineer a sharp increase, over before I can enjoy it, then resume the long dreary decline. And while the "logical" explanation is that lots of people have the same problem, I don't open their financial statements. I'd rather sit alone brooding about a giant conspiracy pointed right at me. It makes me feel that I must really be somebody, when trillion-dollar international financial markets are rigged and jiggled daily just to make me feel bad. It sure beats sitting alone brooding that I'm sitting alone brooding.

So I'm not falling for any suggestion that I track the price fluctuations of my mutual funds to see if this fiendish pattern of occasional sharp rises and an overwhelming succession of small depressing declines even exists. No sir. They're not catching me with that one. I like feeling badly done to on a cosmic scale.

On the same basis I firmly refuse to track the long-term trend in gas prices adjusted for inflation. It risks revealing not only a fairly random pattern in the short to medium term, but also that gasoline is not more expensive now than in Henry Ford's day. Especially when you consider how much better it is. (Does anyone out there remember Johnny Cash's song about the guy whose filling station was put out of business by "high-test gasoline" that let cars whiz by on the freeway without constantly refuelling? If the name "Cisco Clifton" popped into your mind you may not be paranoid but you're certainly weird.) I say the tendency of prices to fall as well as rise just proves how clever they are.

Still, on a damp chilly October morning I can't shake the nagging suspicion that I am, at best, the victim of a third-rate failed conspiracy. Not for me fiendishness on the level of Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Fu Manchu or, to avoid the charge of making things up, the Masonic plot to take over the world and force us all to wear aprons or whatever it is they want.

It might be objected that the Masons have been so busy conspiring and hiding every single imaginable scrap of evidence except, um, that disquieting pyramid with the eye on the U.S. dollar that they've never really gotten around to doing all the sinister things their long-standing domination of everything permits. But I say that's a conspiracy where you get your money's worth: deep, patient, convoluted. The same way UFOs wouldn't be fun if the aliens crashed a spaceship on the West Block lawn in bright sunlight and a map and a medical manual fell out.

That's why I'm so disappointed with the gas price conspiracy. It turns out I'm the target of plotters on five continents and all I get is a lousy 90 cent per litre fill-up. What am I, chopped liver?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

To get ready for Halloween our politicians are dressing as the ghosts of deficits past. I admit it's scary. But it's also in very bad taste. It's scary because spending money you ain't got is unwise in good times and catastrophic in bad and, as Adam Smith warned, accumulating public debt "has gradually enfeebled every state which has adopted it." And if Smith is too "right-wing" for you, how about that mad Jacobin Thomas Jefferson, who said "The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Such was the dusty wisdom of the ancients, blithely discarded in the 1960s and then painfully reacquired in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Strange that it should so promptly go out the window in the 2000s. Frightening, too.

These costumes bring back queasy memories of tragicomic finance ministers in the late 1970s and 1980s assuring us the deficit was finally tamed, and proving it with lovely charts showing it shooting up for a couple more years then suddenly coming down as though we had elected fiscal Uri Gellers who could bend curves with their minds. Of course the end result was that interest on the debt started crowding out program spending and after the electorate pummelled governments that relied on the paranormal to restore order, we actually got quasi-cutters who, in good times, managed to sort things out within reason.

I say within reason because the Chrétien Liberals balanced the budget largely by cutting transfers to the provinces, which meant cutting other people's spending, not their own. Which is more than the Mulroney Tories ever did. But they never learned how to curtail the tendency of governments year after year to do less with more -- nor did the provinces, who responded by delaying vital spending on health care and infrastructure, thus swindling futurity in a different way rather than treating it with honest respect.

Given that in many ways we are already that futurity, the trick looks less impressive now than it once did. Hence the new Fraser Institute report saying that, having blown the locks back off the treasury door in the good times just ended, six provinces will spend more than half their revenue on health care by 2036. Underinvestment followed by panicky overspending isn't prudence and it isn't frugality. It certainly isn't leadership.

Our political masters have the rhetoric down pat for their disguises. Stephen Harper, whose Tories inherited annual spending of $210 billion and have already sent it past $240 billion in a budget titled "Responsible Leadership," just declared it "premature" to say whether he'll run a deficit. (Though it wasn't premature to say he wouldn't during the campaign.)

However, Mr. Harper gravely assured us, his government would definitely maintain "responsible fiscal policies." Exactly the right tone: Solemn guff about responsible policies was the invariable accompaniment of irresponsible ones in the past, and will be again.

Then there's Ontario's Dalton McGuinty, uniting with his fellow premiers in demanding that Ottawa maintain transfers even if it means a federal deficit but unlike them admitting that, even if he contributes to financial catastrophe at the federal level, he'll inflict it provincially as well.

"I've got 200,000 people who have lost their jobs, so now I'm going to shut down their hospitals? It just doesn't make any sense," was his excuse for possibly going into a deficit so he wouldn't have to make program cuts or raise taxes.

"I think Canadians are ahead of us," he blithered. "I think they understand these are very challenging economic times, they understand that our revenues are going to go down, that we have to make some difficult choices."

It's exactly the appropriate tone of brazen double-speak, because drifting into disaster to avoid changing his spending or revenue plans is neither difficult nor a choice. And it was delivered with such sanctimonious solemnity you'd think Don Mazankowski was back, wrapped in the tatters of his budgets, especially once you remember that Mr. McGuinty inherited spending of around $74 billion, and within four years had cranked it up to $96 billion with further large increases planned.

Hard choices? It is to laugh. (And in case you're thinking about Ralph Klein, his Tories doubled program spending between 1996/97 and 2005-06. Yes. Doubled.)

What's really scary is that politicians haven't forgotten the lessons of the past. They haven't forgotten how to cut spending; they never learned it. And they haven't forgotten that deficit spending is ruinous. They just don't care.

So yes, the costumes are scary. Now please take them off before we really say Boo. And then boo hoo.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If Barack Obama campaigns down to the wire it will be a courtesy to the Republicans, since he could now stop canvassing entirely and still win comfortably. Neither John McCain, Sarah Palin nor Joe the Plumber can hurt him on Nov. 4. It’s Nov. 5 he should be worried about. Judging by his recent comments at the Al Smith dinner, he doesn’t believe his own supporters’ more extravagant flattery. But he must also resist the temptation, widespread in his party and among the chattering classes, to assume that the size and ease of his victory mean those vulgar middle Americans are no longer politically significant.

In fact what historian Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence calls the “Jacksonians”, and David Hackett Fischer’s invaluable though regrettably interminable Albion’s Seed calls “borderers” (for their origins in the Anglo-Scots border region), remain the largest single component of the American political community. These folks left a huge stamp on America, with their rough and ready egalitarian manners and robust, unapologetic self-reliance.

It is they whom observers like Tocqueville took to be typical Americans and in large measure they still are. And though many will vote Democrat this time, it’s not because they share Barack Obama’s cultural or foreign policy instincts. If he doesn’t understand why he didn’t have to court them during the campaign he will become politically irrelevant with a speed that would astonish even Jimmy Carter. Especially given the growing contingent of “Blue Dog” Democrats in Congress, noted by Canadian commentator John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail, who are classic Jacksonians, culturally conservative foreign-policy hawks.

At the moment Middle America is disaffected from the Republican party for good reasons. But not those the Democrats take for granted. Jacksonians have no patience with cultural radicalism. And they do not care that the world seems to despise America; Jacksonians despise foreigners and rally ferociously round the flag when America is attacked.

As long ago as 1798, when the Jacksonian influence on politics was far smaller than it would be from the 1830s on, a war scare with France brought a surge of support to the Federalist administration that ebbed away when President John Adams settled the conflict peacefully and never returned. And in the 1960s this group turned against the Vietnam War not because it was immoral but because it wasn’t working. The Democrats, who mistook this sentiment for their own, have been critically weak on national security ever since.

It is a mark of just how bad things are for Republicans this year that the Democrats can run a senator from Illinois and one from Delaware and romp to victory. Their last totally non-Jacksonian ticket, the Minnesota/New York team of Mondale and Ferraro, carried one state plus the District of Columbia in 1984. In the 1990s they won twice with a border twofer from Arkansas and Tennessee. They only won once in the last century without a southern or border presence on the ballot, FDR’s third term in 1940. Whereas the last time they elected an elegant northern intellectual who made liberal women swoon it worked out rather badly.

Mr. Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, recently committed a classic political “gaffe” (that is, spoke an important truth honestly) about the parallel: “Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” But, curiously, he went on “it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.... I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’”

No such difficulties will arise if Mr. Obama meets the test with resolution. It’s if he exudes sanctimonious weakness like, say, Jimmy Carter, that he faces domestic as well as foreign policy disaster. As Mead notes, the Jacksonian tradition in foreign policy frequently baffles observers although it is quite straightforward. At its core is this belief: “You can deal with a bully only by standing up to him. Anything else is appeasement, which is both dishonourable and futile.” If Barack Obama cannot understand and respect that sentiment, he will find himself in big trouble.

The Middle American charm of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber has galvanized the Republican base but won’t help them much on Nov. 4. As of Nov. 5, though, the Jacksonians will be back. President Obama had better be ready.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

The Social Democratic Party of Canada is to blame for the dismal election result we just had. If such a party existed and had run, we'd have a majority government. First, let's back up.

The outcome last Tuesday is definitely not Stephen Harper's fault. True, 143 seats out of 308 isn't a majority. But 133 of 233 outside Quebec sure is. And it isn't fair to ask, if Mr. Harper couldn't win a majority against Stéphane Dion or Paul Martin, whom can he beat? His problem was Gilles Duceppe. Besides, the right went through a prolonged period of soul-searching in the 1990s, and even if you don't like what they found, it's reasonable to assume there isn't anything else there they could go back and get.

The situation on the left is very different. So the first requirement for political progress in Canada is that Liberals avoid blaming Stéphane Dion and his admittedly wretched campaign. They must accept that they are not the natural governing party any more. They haven't won a majority in Canada under an Anglophone leader since Mackenzie King in 1945, nor a majority of Quebec seats since 1984. People have voted in three elections who weren't born then. This is not their grandfather's Liberal party and to see the policies they value implemented the Grits can't follow his strategy.

The second requirement is for the NDP to abandon the belief that they're still on the verge of that big breakthrough they've been expecting since 1961. Sure, they gained seven seats, but their share of the national vote rose by less than one per cent. And while they're understandably boasting about winning an Alberta seat, their most remarkable achievement is winning a Quebec seat in a general election for the first time ever.

That brings me to the Bloc and its weirdly anodyne campaigns. Their slogan this time was "Présent!", which is normally what you say when you show up but don't vote. The day after the election a BQ press release attributed to Mr. Duceppe the idea (my translation) that "the election result shows clearly that two visions confront one another, that of Quebec and that of Stephen Harper; the proof is that it is Quebec that kept the Conservatives in a minority by giving the Bloc two thirds of the seats." But the Tories got less than half the seats in Ontario and were wiped out in Newfoundland. Plenty of other voters and politicians desperately wanted Mr. Harper held to a minority, and helped do it. Why not work with them?

Mr. Duceppe's explanation makes no sense. From 1921 through 1988 every majority government in Canada included more than half of Quebec's MPs. Since 1993 it seems Quebecers have taken leave of their strategic senses, giving a majority of their seats six straight times to the one party that will never form even part of a government. Yet it can't be a deliberate attempt to paralyze our politics so that we will let them leave, because in referendums they keep voting to stay. So what is their game? It's a fair question, and the third requirement for sorting out our politics is that we get a sensible answer.

One prominent separatist tried to ask it during the election, reproaching Mr. Duceppe for having made the BQ just another social democratic party. The Bloc leader brushed him off. But social democrats should raise the same question from the other side, demanding to know what policies the Bloc, and their supporters, want implemented in a separate Quebec that could not be implemented across Canada by a social democratic government.

Of course neither the party of Laurier and Trudeau nor that of Tommy Douglas would form a coalition with separatists. But why does sovereignty matter when the position of the Bloc on questions from abortion to Kyoto to Afghanistan is substantially identical with that of Liberals and the NDP? Why not form a Social Democratic Party of Canada and implement them, in Quebec and elsewhere?

In Wednesday's National Post Jonathan Kay suggested that the divisions among left-wing parties are essentially cultural. But as Thomas Sowell says, culture is a set of working tools, and there should be no taboo on discussing whether some of the gear in the shed is plumb worn out. Especially given the equally powerful cultural phenomenon, unmistakable in parliamentary committees, that Liberal, NDP and Bloc members share a political sensibility as well as a political philosophy and are very comfortable working together. It's time they took responsibility for governing.

Even the Tories would benefit; the only way they can get a majority now is for the nation to try coherent social democratic governance and decide they don't like it very much.

I'm not saying I want a Social Democratic Party majority after the next election. I just want an explanation of why the social democratic majority doesn't either.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With the election just days away, it's not enough to declare that contemporary Canadian politics is disgusting. You need to show it. So allow me to empty upon you a bucket of slop from my e-mail inbox. It contains a lumpy mess of campaign-driven press releases the parties send out to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in a concerted and largely successful effort to prove that they are as shallow as they are mean. They manage to hit one another with a fair quantity of well-aimed mud but rarely succeed in ducking what's coming back at them, and not infrequently wipe their filthy hands on their own clothes without seeming to notice it.

For instance, the Liberals had every right to point out that Stephen Harper's March 20, 2003 speech on Iraq contained an embarrassing amount of cutting and pasting from remarks by then-Australian prime minister John Howard two days earlier. But after a Conservative staffer confessed to having been "overzealous in copying segments" of Mr. Howard's speech and resigned, the Liberals put out another, thoroughly revolting, press release saying "The story does not add up, and took seven hours to concoct" as though it were self-evidently the deliberate policy of the PM to plagiarize.

Of course it is also appalling that Mr. Harper had harried staff slap stuff together for him on a topic of such importance. And how about the Liberals catching Jack Layton assuring CTV that when NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair advocated water exports years ago he only meant bottled water despite clear evidence to the contrary from the Quebec National Assembly's Journal of Debates? I do not know whether Mr. Layton made up a fib on the spot, was misled by Mr. Mulcair or just accepted a flip assurance from a junior staffer. But I do know he didn't bother finding out the truth before saying whatever sounded good.

It seems they're all willing to say just anything, provided it isn't sincere, clever or in tune with the public mood. Read the titles of four press releases I got within hours of the English-language leaders' debate, plainly written before the debate even started: "Harper reassures Canadians with plan for economy," "Jack Layton dominates English debate," "Dion stands out as only leader with a plan for the economy," "Elizabeth May wins English debate." For bad measure the Greens had earlier told me "Elizabeth May wins French debate" and later described her as "Fresh from victories in the national televised leaders' debates last week." Who do any of the parties think this stuff impresses? Who do they even think reads it? And haven't our politicians got anything less redolent of the frat house to say?

I get dozens of such missives a week and on the whole I find the accusations that other parties are making unsound policy on the fly convincing. It's the tone of angry self-satisfaction that I find not merely unjustified but actively disgraceful, given public disenchantment with the whole business. OK, guys. You got them, and they got you. But we got nothing.

I am put in mind of an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville that when politics seems stagnant, it "is the time for intrigues and small parties ... great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities ... small parties are generally without political faith. ... They glow with a factious zeal. ... The means they employ are as disreputable as the aim sought."

Thus this election confronts me with a new version of a familiar dilemma. It's not that I'm puzzled how to vote when my ballot seems unlikely to be decisive nationally or even in my riding; that's normal. Nor is it how to vote "strategically"; all voting is strategic. The novel problem is finding a sensible strategy for voting for decency, since no party has attractive policies and all have a repellent political style. I would sooner watch crows squabble over road kill for two hours than our leaders at a table interrupting, talking over one another and jabbing fingers incessantly.

The question is, how do you vote for decency under such circumstances? In a few ridings you have the happy choice of supporting an incumbent who seems to be part of the solution rather than the problem. In others, I say, the less happy but equally clear obligation is to try to vote out the appallingly rude incumbent regardless of doubt about the civility of any possible replacement.

Yes, our politics is disgusting. To help clean it up, on Oct. 14 vote for the person in your riding you expect is most dismayed not at their opponents' vitriol, but at the sludge pouring out of their own camp.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]