Friday, July 02, 2004
How the Conservatives either exceeded or fell short of expectations, depending on who you ask
A few scattered "points" (the term, as always, is used loosely) about the Conservatives' performance in the election:
1. If you had told me a month ago that:
(i) the Conservatives would win 99 seats; and
(ii) Stephen Harper would be under pressure to give up the leafership,
I wouldn't have believed you. In fact, I'm not sure I believe it now. Canadian politics are a strange beast, even to those of us with an unhealthy interest in them.
2. On the other hand, the plan behind the "Unite the Right" movement was to combine the bases of support of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, which would result in an overall gain of seats for the so-called right-wing (what with the much ballyhooed "vote splitting"). This should have resulted in a base support level of 37.7% (25.5% for the Alliance combined with 12.2% for the P.C.s), a level which, presumably, would only have increased throughout Paul Martin's reign of error. Instead, the vote - after a very poor campaign by Martin and a fairly good one by Harper - *climbed* to 29%. Indeed, if the uniting of the right were simply a matter of summing the P.C. and Alliance numbers from 2000 - *before* it became apparent that Paul Martin was a waste of perfectly good genetic material - we would be looking at a Conservative minority government. What really happened is that Stephen Harper was able to take the Alliance support from 2000 and build on it, especially in Ontario and Saskatchewan (the seats the Conservatives won in the maritimes were a little different and were actually the result of the P.C. vote moving over to the Conservatives, but loyalty to a party name is a very different affair there than it is in the rest of the country). Bottom line, the "unite the right" drive was successful only insofar as it removed some of the competition from the fray - it did the Liberals and the New Democrats as much as or more good than it did the Tories.
Update: this point was perhaps best driven home by a Journal editorial not long before the election which referred, apparently without irony, to "the conservative movement since its merger with the Progressive Conservatives". Weren't the P.C.s supposed to be the *part* of the conservative movement already?
3. The Conservative gameplan at this point has to be to embarass the New Democrats into toppling the Liberals before the Liberals have a chance to engineer their own defeat for strategic reasons.
4. Incidentally, Mustafa's arguments over at POI, while characteristically logical, don't hold water simply because I cannot be convinced that the leader of a major federal party would knowingly give up the Prime Ministership for long-term gain. You don't get to lead the Conservative Party without being ambitious, and it's that same ambition that would preclude him adopting the strategy suggested by Mustafa. This is all conjecture, of course, but so's Mustafa's post.
5. While it's all moot for the time being, I'll let you in on an interesting little debate Spencer and I had before the election on what would happen if the Conservatives won a plurality of seats. We both agreed that Martin would allow the Conservatives first kick at the governance can. We both agreed that the government would probably fall on its first confidence vote. We both agreed that Harper would then go to the people in the same way as Trudeau did in '74, claiming he needed a majority to fulfill his mandate. We differed on whether he'd win.
I took the position that, as soon as Canadians saw what a Harper government would look like - not so much the "what" as the "who" - the Liberals would have a whole lot more ammo in their smear campaign. For example, Stockwell Day would have to be in cabinet, and I can't imagine there are many Canadians who both believe that dinosaurs predate humans and want that to happen.
Spencer, on the other hand, figures that Harper would leave the crazies out of a minority cabinet, promising them they'd get their due when he finally won a majority, and that he would therefore present to Canadians a deceptively moderate face. The problem with Spencer's line of reasoning, of course, is this: when have Stockwell and his ilk ever shown a propensity for strategic silence?
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A few scattered "points" (the term, as always, is used loosely) about the Conservatives' performance in the election:
1. If you had told me a month ago that:
(i) the Conservatives would win 99 seats; and
(ii) Stephen Harper would be under pressure to give up the leafership,
I wouldn't have believed you. In fact, I'm not sure I believe it now. Canadian politics are a strange beast, even to those of us with an unhealthy interest in them.
2. On the other hand, the plan behind the "Unite the Right" movement was to combine the bases of support of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, which would result in an overall gain of seats for the so-called right-wing (what with the much ballyhooed "vote splitting"). This should have resulted in a base support level of 37.7% (25.5% for the Alliance combined with 12.2% for the P.C.s), a level which, presumably, would only have increased throughout Paul Martin's reign of error. Instead, the vote - after a very poor campaign by Martin and a fairly good one by Harper - *climbed* to 29%. Indeed, if the uniting of the right were simply a matter of summing the P.C. and Alliance numbers from 2000 - *before* it became apparent that Paul Martin was a waste of perfectly good genetic material - we would be looking at a Conservative minority government. What really happened is that Stephen Harper was able to take the Alliance support from 2000 and build on it, especially in Ontario and Saskatchewan (the seats the Conservatives won in the maritimes were a little different and were actually the result of the P.C. vote moving over to the Conservatives, but loyalty to a party name is a very different affair there than it is in the rest of the country). Bottom line, the "unite the right" drive was successful only insofar as it removed some of the competition from the fray - it did the Liberals and the New Democrats as much as or more good than it did the Tories.
Update: this point was perhaps best driven home by a Journal editorial not long before the election which referred, apparently without irony, to "the conservative movement since its merger with the Progressive Conservatives". Weren't the P.C.s supposed to be the *part* of the conservative movement already?
3. The Conservative gameplan at this point has to be to embarass the New Democrats into toppling the Liberals before the Liberals have a chance to engineer their own defeat for strategic reasons.
4. Incidentally, Mustafa's arguments over at POI, while characteristically logical, don't hold water simply because I cannot be convinced that the leader of a major federal party would knowingly give up the Prime Ministership for long-term gain. You don't get to lead the Conservative Party without being ambitious, and it's that same ambition that would preclude him adopting the strategy suggested by Mustafa. This is all conjecture, of course, but so's Mustafa's post.
5. While it's all moot for the time being, I'll let you in on an interesting little debate Spencer and I had before the election on what would happen if the Conservatives won a plurality of seats. We both agreed that Martin would allow the Conservatives first kick at the governance can. We both agreed that the government would probably fall on its first confidence vote. We both agreed that Harper would then go to the people in the same way as Trudeau did in '74, claiming he needed a majority to fulfill his mandate. We differed on whether he'd win.
I took the position that, as soon as Canadians saw what a Harper government would look like - not so much the "what" as the "who" - the Liberals would have a whole lot more ammo in their smear campaign. For example, Stockwell Day would have to be in cabinet, and I can't imagine there are many Canadians who both believe that dinosaurs predate humans and want that to happen.
Spencer, on the other hand, figures that Harper would leave the crazies out of a minority cabinet, promising them they'd get their due when he finally won a majority, and that he would therefore present to Canadians a deceptively moderate face. The problem with Spencer's line of reasoning, of course, is this: when have Stockwell and his ilk ever shown a propensity for strategic silence?
