Barack Obama's "stimulus" plan now includes, "advisers said", $300 billion in tax cuts because he seemed too focused on making government bigger to help the economy. Which means it's not really a "plan" because sudden kluges on this scale would undermine its structural integrity if it had any. But as long as politicians keep hurling hundreds of billions of dollars about in a weirdly self-satisfied panic, market participants are unlikely to recover their confidence. Would you?

Is that scandal stalking Barack Obama before he is even sworn in? Senate seats for sale in Illinois; a federal grand jury investigating political donations to his choice for commerce secretary... Is he already tarnished? Hardly. First, there is nothing scandalous about staff of a Democratic president-elect holding discussions with the Democratic governor who will fill the Senate seat he just vacated. It would be surprising if they had not. And while we do not know the content of those discussions, and an internal Obama check clearing everyone tells us little, we do know the governor of Illinois directed a string of unimaginative expletives at Mr. Obama and his advisors which suggests they were not receptive to his schemes.

Decency compels us all to admit here that many honest people have unwittingly spoken to a crook at some time in their lives. Especially if they are in politics in Illinois, where three of the last seven governors have done time and dozens of Chicago city councillors have been convicted of corruption since 1971. (As John Barber recently wrote in the Globe and Mail, the vigour with which Illinois prosecutes political corruption makes its perpetrators look stupid as well as crooked.)

History shows that a person can emerge from such a milieu not only smelling but actually being clean. For instance Paul Douglas, a distinguished economics professor who enlisted in the Marines at age 50 in 1942, got himself assigned to combat and won a bronze star and two purple hearts at Peleilu and Okinawa, and represented Illinois for three blameless Senate terms ending in 1967. And Harry Truman rose in Missouri politics with the backing of the Prendergast machine in Kansas City, yet was a man of unimpeachable personal honesty although, it turned out, in the White House he lacked judgement about the integrity of those to whom he felt loyalty.

Such blindness to the flaws of friends may not be directly scandalous. But it fulfils all its essential functions, as it did for Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding, neither of whom entered office with visible warning signs of scandal ahead. But if Barack Obama has issues respecting associates they concern not corruption but the disquieting radicalism of men like pastor Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers.

That is not to say that having friends, political associates or views that upset partisan opponents is inherently scandalous. While few elections have equalled in vitriol that of 1800, plenty of presidents have entered the White House to a chorus of abuse about their alleged extremism, including Ronald Reagan, who scandalized opinion but was not scandalous because he actually thought the West could win the Cold War.

Nor is it scandalous to face specific accusations, however serious or widely believed, that aren’t true. During the 1828 campaign at least one newspaper called Andrew Jackson the mulatto son of a British soldier’s whore, scandalous only to those who printed it. Charges that “Old Hickory” was occasionally criminally violent had better foundation, but where he was from such conduct was normal.

Even when charges have some factual basis it is important to distinguish between personal and political scandal. In 1884, Republicans taunted Grover Cleveland with “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” because he confessed to fathering an illegitimate child, possibly to protect a married friend who was sleeping with the same woman. In any event he won (prompting the counter-chant “Off to the White House ha ha ha”), then sustained as president the reputation for clean government he acquired as mayor of Buffalo. Philandering may be morally repulsive but it did not seem to diminish the political effectiveness of, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

There is a blurry line between the personal and political when it comes to another popular vice. In 1853 Whigs ridiculed Democratic candidate and former General Franklin Pierce, as “the victor of many a hard-fought bottle” and alcoholism did diminish his already feeble performance in the White House, while one shudders to think of Richard Nixon answering the hot line while pickled. But fondness for strong drink has marked many successful incumbents as well, while some notably abstemious presidents were duds, so opinion is legitimately divided on the relevance of such personal vices to politics.

You wouldn’t expect it to be when someone enters the White House dragging the chains of legitimate political scandal. For instance when Bill Clinton, dangling Whitewater, his wife’s futures trading foray, and enough sexual and other escapades to tag him as “Slick Willy”. But ahead of him stand two presidents whose entry into the White House was obviously and instructively tainted.

First, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes notoriously won the 1876 election on the basis of brazenly false returns from three former Confederate states, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, leading to an ugly bargain that Democrats would accept his election in return for the end of Reconstruction and federal pork for the south. His reward was one undistinguished term as “Rutherfraud” Hayes. More ominously, though rarely mentioned in polite company, every single Democrat elected to Congress from the south and every Democrat who became president with southern electoral votes from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s is contaminated by the flagrant violent racist exclusion of blacks and Republicans from the polls secured by the bargain of 1876. This includes Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

The second relevant example, prominently featuring Illinois, is John F. Kennedy. In his memoir With No Apologies, Barry Goldwater insists he gathered enough affidavits to prove JFK stole the West Virginia Democratic primary but the attorney general failed to follow up. In any event Kennedy definitely won the close election of 1960 through electoral fraud by Richard Daley Sr.’s machine in Cook County and Lyndon Johnson’s in Texas (where Johnson also clearly won his first, narrow Senate victory in 1948 by out-cheating his adversary). Yet no taint attached to Kennedy, then or later, possibly through widespread elite feeling Richard Nixon was the sort of man who needed to have elections stolen from him. If you want real scandal, look no further.

In any case don’t look at Barack Obama. Unless surprising new facts emerge, he enters the White House untainted, directly or indirectly, by the fact that a lot of other politicians including ones from his home state are dumb crooks.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

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]

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]

When is a gaffe not a gaffe in politics? When it's untrue, apparently. Enjoy the campaigns. A classic gaffe, a career-threatening humiliation delightful to the press, is when someone expresses a home truth in plain language. Like that if a foreign nation attacked a country with which you had a defensive alliance you would defend them. You can have real trouble living something like that down.

It's an especially juicy gaffe when someone blurts out what everyone knows.

Like the NDP candidate, formerly campaign director for the B.C. Marijuana Party in 2005, who got dumped because video surfaced of him smoking pot. Surely the real mistake was made by whoever in the NDP welcomed him as a candidate without realizing the marijuana in question was the stuff you smoke to get high. Didn't the party grasp that a guy whose political philosophy was openly based on weed had probably sampled it? So why is actual video of him smoking it confirmation of anything but the obvious? (The video of the other ex-NDP candidate apparently driving after taking hallucinogens is an entirely different matter -- surprising, stupid and dangerous).

Then there's the September 22 NDP e-mail inviting me to visit their digital "Orange Room" where a video called "Stephenstein" offers 39 seconds of alternating shots of the prime minister and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, then says "Don't Let This Fool Fool You."

I say that posting mean, childish junk on your website reveals something important about your party. But, evidently it's just good clean fun, unlike, say, a cyberpuffin pooping on someone. Blurting out your real partisan feelings only seems to qualify as a gaffe when conservatives do it.

The most interesting case thus far this fall is the amazing howler by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a September 22 CBS puffball "Exclusive" full of hard-hitting journalistic observations from Katie Couric like "Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden's strong suits" and "You say what's on your mind and I think people appreciate that." After claiming the Republicans will take things he says out of context (but "If I have to go parse through every single thing that I'm gonna say then I'm not me"), Mr. Biden illustrated his concept of true leadership with, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

Well, yes. Except Roosevelt wasn't president at the time and there was no commercial television. If Sarah Palin had said it, she'd have been pilloried for cluelessness, and rightly so. But isn't it at least as bad for Biden, put on the Democratic ticket expressly for his knowledge and experience, having been first elected to the Senate in 1972, roughly half-way between the actual inauguration of Roosevelt in 1933 and that interview? It's peculiar, in fact, that the high-priced talent at CBS didn't notice this oopsie while filming, editing and airing the segment. After all, the fact that Republicans were in power when the Depression hit had a huge impact on American politics for the next 50 years and you'd think they'd know that and so should Biden.

Wednesday's Citizen suggested Mr. Biden mostly got away with that blunder because attention was focused on "two bigger gaffes" in the same week, namely not knowing Barack Obama's position on clean-coal plants and calling one of the Obama-Biden campaign's own TV ads "terrible" because it mocked John McCain's not knowing how to send e-mail (in fact Mr. McCain has great difficulty typing because of permanent injuries from being tortured as a Vietnam POW). The latter isn't a gaffe. It's refreshing honesty with a dash of decency. So of course it's what's getting him in real trouble.

Here at home, a Tory candidate in Toronto just "resigned" after his party learned he'd stated abrasively on a blog that if Canadians weren't sissies someone would have come to the aid of that poor guy beheaded on a bus, and advocated "concealed carry" handgun laws in Canada partly to help women and gays defend themselves against violent hate crimes. And he's gay. We complain endlessly that political debate is trite, bland and vacuous, with politicians constantly trying to play it safe. But look how we treat anything frank and unconventional during an election.

On the other hand, I don't see much point in debating Joe Biden's claim that President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on TV in 1929. It raises serious questions about his fitness to be vice president. But at least it wasn't a gaffe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A recent BBC poll indicates enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama outside the United States. In 22 countries from Italy to Egypt he leads John McCain by about four to one on average, margins not seen since the last time a Democrat faced a Republican in an American election. It's one more warning to Mr. Obama's domestic supporters that he's not quite the phenomenon they think he is. This foreign enthusiasm is puzzling. Recent liberal Democratic presidents have performed fairly poorly on security and trade, and if Mr. Obama had consistent positions they might well be protectionist. Meanwhile to many of his American supporters his appeal is less programmatic than spiritual; he will heal America of divisions that allegedly run as deep as any the republic has ever known. Why this prospect would appeal in, say, Singapore or France is not obvious, especially to people who don't like America very much. But in any case it is untenable because based on a false premise. Barack Obama may be a healer, and the inauguration of a black president would certainly be good for America. The problem is simply that the premise that America is divided as never before does not withstand informed scrutiny. Not on race, not on foreign affairs, not on economics, not on anything. Compare today with 1800, when the election of Thomas Jefferson prompted a leading member of George Washington's Federalist party, Fisher Ames, to expect "the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice." The Jeffersonian Republicans in return accused the Federalists of being closet monarchists possibly plotting to hand the U.S. back to Britain, and in 1814 the remnants of the Federalist party did make a politically lethal though otherwise feeble effort to take New England out of the Union. But after a short-lived "Era of Good Feelings," by 1832 president Andrew Jackson was threatening to hang his own former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, over tariff policy linked to states' rights and slavery.

Speaking of slavery, in 1856 Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, to general Southern approval, in the lead-up to a civil war that would kill over 600,000 Americans, nearly as many as all America's other wars combined. And the man who saved the Union, President Lincoln, was himself subjected to extraordinary abuse in his day, including unflattering comparison to a baboon by a member of his own cabinet.

The Civil War was obviously the nadir. But how do today's divisions compare with Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman's campaign promise to stab president Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, over bank policy? From a resurgent Klan in the 1920s to Republicans washing their children's mouths out with soap in the 1930s for saying "Roosevelt" to McCarthy-era accusations of treason in high places to "Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" and "Burn Baby Burn", persistent urban rumours that Nixon would put blacks in concentration camps and ridicule of Ronald Reagan as a senile warmonger, American politics is consistently rambunctious, with a dash of venomous paranoia at least as evident on the left as the right. Even the relatively placid Clinton era saw the president impeached as a wretched cad then acquitted on a bitter partisan vote.

I happen to think the United States has had surprisingly good government under this system, in part because issues get very thoroughly aired. And (speaking for the record as a hard-core conservative) I consider 2008 a fairly unimportant election in which a cranky mediocrity and a charming novice seek to replace a disappointing incumbent.

I can't muster any views more apocalyptic than that. Except that, based on the historical record, enthusiasts for Barack Obama consumed with hatred of George W. Bush are in part imagining and in part creating the very abyss of partisan loathing they claim their man can fix with a few ritual phrases and a laying-on of hands. As for foreigners, they don't get to vote and Americans mostly don't care what they think. Rightly not, judging by that BBC poll.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

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The possible election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has engendered a puzzling level of enthusiasm among Canadian progressives. It is puzzling first because they are normally skeptical of American influence on Canada and second because it is not obvious, even if he possesses the wonderful qualities his more enthusiastic supporters attribute to him, how President Obama would bring about exciting changes in Canada. That we are in need of some rejuvenation of our political culture is beyond doubt. But Washington is not the place to look for it.

"Since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further."

It might be carping to suggest that the direct impact of President Obama’s policies on Canada is liable to be negative insofar as it is discernable. Despite some bobbing and weaving, he does seem hostile to NAFTA, on which so much of our recent impressive economic growth is based. And if he should miscalculate in foreign policy, as his rhetorical tendency to oscillate between extremes of accommodation and belligerence suggests, we might well find ourselves in a far less attractive world. Those to the left of George W. Bush on foreign policy may think Obama would bring a more enlightened attitude to diplomacy leading to a more peaceful world. If so, the benefits are obvious, starting with our possibly being able to bring our brave soldiers home from Afghanistan. But at the risk of sounding hard-boiled, since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so regardless of his excellence, Mr. Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further. And if he ends up flopping his flip on a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, then his Canadian supporters, even if they find it aesthetically superior to see a Democrat engage in foreign military nation-building ventures, will have little of substance to celebrate.

Perhaps the issue is not policy. At least some Canadian Obama enthusiasts expect his positive impact on us to be more a matter of changing our national mood than any concrete steps he might take. And here there is one way in which his example might do us good. It has been mentioned that the recent Democratic nomination contest between the senator from Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton presented a remarkable contrast with Canadian political parties and their all-white-male-all-the-time leadership ambiance. (The Republican race, with a maverick war hero, a Mormon, a libertine and a preacher man offered considerable variety even before John McCain chose the gun-totin’, whistle-blowin’, former beauty queen, pro-life Alaskan governor as his running mate.) And if Mr. Obama really is a fresh face, rhetorically inspiring rather than insipid, above the politics of image and manipulation, and living proof that anyone can aspire to the presidency, we might be prompted to ask ourselves why such things do not happen here. But that is about all the help we are going to get from him.

Even if American political institutions are working in such a way as to provide this inspiring ray of hope, we cannot attempt to imitate any changes Obama helps to cause in Washington directly because our own institutions are different. Indeed, one need not be naive about American governance to say that ours legitimately seem to be in a far more advanced state of disrepair.

The extent of visceral disdain for George W. Bush in Canada, especially among the literati, can easily deceive people into thinking that the American political system, and their very constitution, must have disintegrated for such a man to occupy the White House. The 2000 election was stolen, the war in Iraq is illegal, Guantanamo Bay violates the Geneva Conventions, the economy is collapsing because of the subprime mortgage lending fiasco, and so on.

"It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon, and Senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy."

The prevalence of such talk underlines that the last two presidents have had an unhealthy polarizing effect on American politics. Indeed, I confess that Bill Clinton had that effect on me. But I also remember the invective of the Reagan years. And as a U.S. historian by training, I am acutely aware that at various other times in America’s past the level of bitterness and division seemed perilously high, including periods now remembered as calm and harmonious or as times when giants walked the earth. It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon (as did a member of his own cabinet), South Carolina senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy and some parents washed their children’s mouths out with soap if they spoke the name of Franklin Roosevelt. Or that Orson Welles and Norman Mailer suggested on television that Richard Nixon might cancel the 1972 elections, while Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged Nixon to make some sort of reassuring statement to black Americans in his first inaugural address because “the rumor is widespread that the new government is planning to build concentration camps.”¹ And those last two examples came less than a decade after the supposedly transforming glory of Camelot.

There are plenty of grounds for criticizing George Bush on matters both of substance and of style. But neither his policy failures nor offputting personal style grotesquely exceed those of Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and race riots, Richard Nixon over Vietnam and Watergate, or Jimmy Carter over energy shortages and superpower relations. And, in any event, voters have already given both houses of Congress to the Democrats to rein in President Bush. The United States is simply not in a pit of such Stygian darkness that Barack Obama will transform it, even if he is everything his supporters imagine him to be. And even if he does, he certainly will not transform Canada as well.

Viewed dispassionately, our governance is not going well. But our problems cannot reasonably be attributed to George W. Bush or a Republican Congress, which the United States does not even have any more. Our policies bear little resemblance to those of Mr. Bush and our institutional difficulties are quite unlike those of the United States. To start with the obvious, Question Period routinely sinks to a level the Obama-Clinton debates never did. And it is no fluke, no passing result of our 2006 election or the 2000 one in the United States. It has been this way for well over a decade regardless of which party is asking or answering the questions.

Novice members of Parliament now routinely enter the Commons genuinely convinced that they can and will help raise the tone of Question Period. But before you know it they are turning artificially purple, jabbing fingers in a way that causes fights in bars and making barnyard noises while their colleagues across the aisle attempt to be heard further lowering the tone of debate.

And it is not just Question Period. Take legislative committees. American congressional committees have their failings, but they continue to play a vital and effective role in the discharge of Congress’s legitimate and constitutionally mandated functions. If you have sat in on any significant number of parliamentary committees lately, which I have, you will know that many of them are on the verge of total meltdown due not to otherwise real problems, such as overwork, but to a complete lapse in civility that inhibits even routine substantive and procedural activities. Even the notorious disruption of, for instance, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics over the “in-and-out” affair has its roots in a ferocity of partisan attachment among almost all members of Parliament that leaves no room for a higher allegiance to Parliament or concern for its proper functioning that might transcend the vicious battle for short-term party advantage.

Our discontents go further. Whatever one thinks of the Liberal Party’s traditional image of itself as the only national brokerage party, it is surely alarming to see the geographical and sociological fracturing of our politics into voting tribes among whom there is little communication, never mind conversation. There is widespread fear of another election among parties and voters for reasons ranging from financial to aesthetic. But the biggest problem is that we are liable to get back the same parliament again and again. (If the Conservatives do obtain a dissolution of Parliament this fall, uncertain at the time of writing, it will be from fear of something worse, not the hope of something better.) It is hard to see how George Bush can have created this electoral paralysis and, therefore, hard to see how Barack Obama might end it. And you certainly cannot blame the outgoing Republican incumbent for the fact that Canada’s three opposition parties share a sufficiently similar social democratic philosophy to cooperate almost reflexively in committees, and even sometimes in passing money bills through the House, yet cannot bring themselves even to bring down the Tories and cause an election, let alone assemble a coalition to pass a coherent governing program based on things they all loudly declare themselves to believe in.

Such a state of affairs would not be a problem in principle in the United States. Their constitution, with its separate election of the executive, does not depend upon the president having a working majority in the legislature. For much of its history he has not, and the founding fathers would be happy to hear it. Moreover, even a president with significant partisan majorities in Congress may be unable to control the legislative agenda. But in Canada, with a constitution in many ways similar in principle to that of Great Britain, the executive depends upon a working majority in the House. The Conservatives, lacking one, should not be able to govern, and in certain important respects, including the work of committees, they cannot. The unwillingness of the opposition parties to take on the unpleasant as well as pleasant tasks incumbent on a majority in Parliament, leading them to abstain on or duck crucial budgetary votes, is a peculiarly Canadian pathology that denies citizens a government they can hold responsible for what actually happens politically, and an opposition they can turn to for alternatives. Barack Obama cannot help us with that even if he turns out to make John F. Kennedy look like Ike.

Right now people are thrashing about, proposing remedies that are incompatible with our fundamental institutions and unrelated to our current difficulties. We are digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole with proposals such as Reform’s direct democracy in the 1990s and a proliferation of arm’s-length agencies impossible to situate within the executive, legislative or judicial branches and unconstrained by traditional rules appropriate to any of them. We need a plan here, not a mood swing.

"One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize."

One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize. Regrettably it has precisely the same effect on implementation. One waits in vain for progressive Canadian enthusiasts for the coming Obama revolution to tell us what exactly it is that, fired with newfound enthusiasm, we ought to do to make Canada—rather than the U.S.—a better, happier place.

Some prominent Canadian commentators have invoked the atmosphere of Camelot with respect to Mr. Obama. Cynics might retort that the senator from Illinois in 2008, like the one from Massachusetts in 1960, is young, handsome, inexperienced and gifted at raising expectations with empty rhetoric. But the analogy is noteworthy because the American “Great Society” of the 1960s really did furnish the model, or at least a significant inspiration, for our own “Just Society” five years later—the last great burst of transborder progressive enthusiasm.

Retrospective discussions of government in Canada in the 1960s contain an air of breathless excitement. Politicians of vision worked closely with brilliant public servants such as Gordon Robertson and Robert Bryce to sweep aside old structures within government and outside it and to revolutionize Canadian society by harnessing the potential of a marriage of social science and political power. Bliss it was to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, especially given free love.

What is too often overlooked in such fond reminiscing is the awkward fact that it did not work. I say this not as a sour and sidelined relic of the past age, even if I am one. I simply take at face value the verdict of activists and advocates for progressive causes. Read their rhetoric about, say, income distribution in Canada today and it is obvious that the welfare programs brought in with such fanfare, often profoundly influenced in their design by American ideas, have not done what their supporters said they would, however much they may have confirmed, or confounded, the expectations of their critics. And progressive politicians share that verdict.

"In 1943, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal."

Just Society reforms sought to curb native Canadian traditions like free enterprise and the politics of liberty, sometimes reflexively dismissed in this country as “too American” or in an even more partisan way as “too Republican.” But in 1943, William Watson observes in Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal. As Watson goes on to point out, as late as 1958 Canadian governments took a smaller share of gross domestic product than American ones. Parts of Canada’s welfare state date back to 1940 (rudimentary unemployment insurance) or even 1927 (the first, grudging old age pension), but the bulk of it dates to the two decades from 1956 (the Unemployment Assistance Act) to 1968 (federal medicare), including the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and the Canada Assistance Program and federal aid to education in 1967.

Yet by 1973 the throne speech was promising a dramatic revamping of a system that was not working, which the subsequent orange paper prepared for health and welfare minister Marc Lalonde failed to deliver. In 1994 Lloyd Axworthy, then Minister of Human Resources Development, undertook a grandiose consultation exercise that saw the Human Resources Committee of the House of Commons travel across Canada in a propeller plane listening to activists complain from sea to sea to sea. (I know. I was there, as a Reform staffer.) In the end they cut spending and renamed unemployment insurance to employment insurance Not a lot to show, really.

By the same token, satisfaction with the existing public healthcare system is hardly greater among its most fervent supporters than among its most acerbic critics. They disagree sharply on prescriptions but not on the crisis, for which politicians routinely produce expensive fixes that are meant to last a generation and are lucky to quiet the complaining and demands for more money for a few months.

In the midst of all this, there is reasonably wide agreement that the volume of activity now undertaken by the executive branch precludes effective scrutiny by Parliament or even, nowadays, Cabinet. Quarter-trillion-dollar budgets, thousands of pages of regulations, massive bills drafted by hordes of bureaucrats, all simply roll through unchecked and poorly understood because no one has the time or capacity to check or understand them.

"It is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case."

Now turn to the field of judicial innovations, from the broad reading of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court to the proliferation of human rights tribunals not bound by traditional rules of judicial procedure. Some people including myself are appalled that, for instance, Ezra Levant had to spend almost three years and $100,000 defending his right to reprint cartoons as part of a news story while one of the complainants could casually walk away two years into the case without spending a dime on lawyers. And it is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case. But defenders of the process do not appear much happier; they still seem to regard Canada as a nation riddled with injustice, hatred, bigotry and exclusion, with only a thin red line of human rights commissions between us and the resurgent net-savvy KKK.

If one listens to the voices of progressives in politics or that frequently amazingly uncivil bunch wrongly dubbed “civil society,” it is clear that no Just Society has emerged in Canada, nor is one about to. Conservatives may lament the demise of parliamentary sovereignty and the rise of an imperial judiciary in vain; their opponents derive no satisfaction from these processes.

It is, of course, possible to assert that it is just a matter of persisting, that the medicine will have the desired effect provided the patient adheres to the course of treatment long enough. But those who await a second Camelot under Obama, casting reflected glory upon ourselves, must believe that in such an event we will find new approaches that will at last bring the New Jerusalem or Albion into being upon the banks of the Rideau. And whatever else one thinks of that position, it is logically incompatible with the claim that the dramatic changes we have made in the last half century were the right ones and that we now need a calm hand on the wheel and a steady-as-she-goes mentality of the sort most prominently associated recently with Jean Chrétien.

If prompted I can certainly offer a quite different program of action, based on undoing much of the unsound innovation of recent decades. And I can tell you where to find the necessary spirit: in a splendid tradition going back more than twelve centuries. Let us not forget that our political institutions were explicitly modelled primarily on those of Great Britain, which, in a characteristic passage, the famed 18th-century commentator William Blackstone called “a land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution.”

My proposal is to take a very deep breath and remind ourselves what our institutions are for and how they are meant to work. In the process we must grasp that we have had not too little but too much change in government in the past 40 years, and have replaced our under-appreciated traditional parliamentary system with a bizarre new one that does not work at all.

If my proposal does not appeal, I am willing to entertain alternatives. Maybe you do not want to restore the spirit with which Canadians tamed a wilderness, beat Hitler and made parliamentary democracy work in a federation. But whatever you do want, we are not getting it from Washington, even if Barack Obama is everything his more excitable supporters in both countries expect him to be.

Note ¹ Raymond Price, With Nixon (New York: Viking Press, 1977), page 44.

[First appeared in the Literary Review of Canada]