April 2nd, 2011 at 10:31 am
In any multiparty election contest, the #2 candidate always wants to be alone with #1. Stephen Harper would have known that before he made his offer to debate Michael Ignatieff one-on-one this week. Why did he make the offer — which he presumably knew that Ignatieff would accept — if he was just going to retract it?
Here’s why. During this election campaign, the natural tendency is for all three election parties to concentrate their fire on the government. Even when the opposition parties are relatively weak, as during this campaign, the attacks take their toll. So the government party must look for ways to stir the pot, remind the opposition parties that they also hate each other. The prime minister’s comment does just that. He has goaded Michael Ignatieff into publicly pooh-poohing the NDP and BQ with his comment that neither Jack Layton nor Gilles Duceppe can hope to become prime minister. The obvious truth of the comment makes it all the more annoying.
The prime minister’s challenge was aimed at stirring up Michael Ignatieff’s greatest weakness: his disrespect for his opponent, Stephen Harper. It’s not just a matter of intellectual vanity, although there is certainly plenty of that on display. It’s also emotional. Ignatieff seems to have convinced himself that Harper is history’s greatest monster, to borrow a phrase from The Simpsons. If only he can pull Harper alone in front of the cameras (Ignatieff seems to imagine), then all Canadians will perceive Harper as Ignatieff perceives Harper: a lawless dictator trampling the prerogatives of Parliament.
The debate offer invited Ignatieff to ignore the most important challenge he faces: proving to Canadians that he is the man for the job of prime minister. The gesture incited Ignatieff to instead take up exactly the wrong challenge: proving to Canadians that they made a mistake when they twice elected Harper to the prime minister’s job.
The coterie around a party leader so often offer the same bad advice: Attack! Take the gloves off! People love a fighter! The party faithful enjoy the attack. They like hearing their party leader repeat in front of the TV cameras all the angry things the faithful have been shouting at the TV screen.
Elections however are not decided by the party faithful. Elections are decided by people who do not pay attention to politics, who do not know whether an F-35 is a fighter jet or a camera lens. But they do know this: When the Liberal, BQ and NDP parties vote to condemn a Conservative prime minister for “contempt of Parliament,” that is not exactly the same as the verdict of a criminal trial. It’s just Parliament Hill yay-boo gamesmanship. And 90 minutes of Michael Ignatieff barking at Stephen Harper will not convince them otherwise. Because in fact, elections do not go to fighters. If they did, then John McCain would have beaten Barack Obama in the United States in 2008. The reaction to these so-called fighters is more often: “Why is that obnoxious man on TV shouting at me to get upset about things that do not upset me? Why won’t he talk about the things I care about?”
One of my all-time favorite political stories: Karen Hughes, George W. Bush’s top communications aide, was walking along a beach. She looked up, saw a small plane towing an advertising banner. It said: “Jill come back, I am miserable without you. Love, Jack.” She thought: “Bad message, Jack. Too much about you, not enough about her.” That’s the mistake Stephen Harper was trying to trigger in Michael Ignatieff with his mano-a-mano challenge.
It seems to have worked, too.
Originally published in The National Post
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