How the Liberals seduce voters with the classic bait and switch routine

[CHIMO]

There's a durable joke in Canadian politics about how Liberals are defined by their strong convictions -- and if you don't happen to share them, they've got others. The polite word for that is adaptability. Conservatives tend to use other terms, starting with unprincipled, followed by reptilian analogies, and ending with angry spluttering noises. Beneath a Tory's denunciations, though, there's unmistakable professional admiration. Those Grits sure know what it takes to win.

Yet the exact ingredients in that winning formula remain something of a mystery. Stephen Clarkson, a University of Toronto politics professor and co-author, with Christina McCall, of an award-winning two-volume biography of Pierre Trudeau, sets out to show what's in the mix in his new book, The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics. Clarkson dissects the nine most recent federal campaigns -- six of which the Liberals won -- and pokes through them for clues about how today's version of the party stacks up against its storied predecessors.

Seen Clarkson's way, Paul Martin's recent sabre-rattling on softwood looks less like the tactic of a moment, and more a classic Liberal bid to strike a chord with voters who like a touch of anti-Americanism with their Canadian nationalism. Policies being crafted with a likely spring 2006 election in mind -- from a plan to try to attract 100,000 more immigrants per year, to a new education thrust -- look like the latest variations in the long line of left-Liberal platforms.

The old maxim that the party runs from the left and governs from the right is at the core of Clarkson's argument. Less familiar is his contention that Canadians are not really being duped by the Liberal bait and switch routine -- they're playing along with it. Clarkson argues that voters willingly suspend disbelief, electing a party they know, deep down, won't behave in power quite as it vowed to on the hustings. "When a political party promises a modified welfare state but actually delivers a neo-conservative set of policies, the most obvious observation to make is that it deceived the public," he writes of the Liberals under Jean Chrétien and Martin. "A more nuanced explanation would include the public in this hypothesis, making the voters willing accomplices in their self-deception."

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20051024_114002_114002

There was a time, that I remember, where the Liberals kept stealing the lefts' ideas. Now it seems they are stealing them from the other side.

Wonder how long it will take, until Quebec realizes that if they are going to leave it better be done before the constitution is that of North America.

[imouttahere]

1. Strikingly similiar description....

it appears dems and the liberal party of Canada have one thing in common - campaigning left and governing center/right. Which is why the U.S. is on the highway to hell - the dems take a similiar route as the repukes. Only an FDR-style rescue will save this diety-forsaken mess of a country.