Mea Culpa
I'll be honest where Paul Wells has been silent:
Whoops!
I really figured Dion was going to be the perfect match-up to Harper - quiet, serious, intellectual policy addict vs. quiet, serious, intellectual policy addict. I said at the time, "Get ready for the most attention-demanding national debate ever". But instead, Dion is resorting too often to empty rhetoric, typical of a politician, and Harper has shown himself a tad too cynical in his actions too often: he is indeed a strategist, not a policy wonk.
Between them, I guess I'll take Harper. Dion is optimistic, and I appreciate and value that quite a lot. But I'm not sure he's very pragmatic. In the end, I believe I'll vote Green - we'll see.
Whoops!
I really figured Dion was going to be the perfect match-up to Harper - quiet, serious, intellectual policy addict vs. quiet, serious, intellectual policy addict. I said at the time, "Get ready for the most attention-demanding national debate ever". But instead, Dion is resorting too often to empty rhetoric, typical of a politician, and Harper has shown himself a tad too cynical in his actions too often: he is indeed a strategist, not a policy wonk.
Between them, I guess I'll take Harper. Dion is optimistic, and I appreciate and value that quite a lot. But I'm not sure he's very pragmatic. In the end, I believe I'll vote Green - we'll see.
posted by Jacques Beau Vert at 1:06 PM
5 Comments:
I've been surprised at the low level of debate as well. I wouldn't try to draw a moral equivalency between someone who is using the phrase "neo-conservative" a bit too often and someone who is paying for gutter-style attack ads in both official languages while smearing their opponents with lines such as "they hate the police", but I certainly expected a higher level of debate.
Rob, you've hit on the exact quotes that really bug me the most, too.
TAK, I don't much care for May, but I do feel that a strong surge of support for the Greens that draws votes from the other parties will make those others take more notice than a dispersed vote among CAP and the Marijuana Party.
And really, I think the NDP is no better than the Tories or Liberals. They all need to smarten up.
And yeah, a "revenue cap" is absolutely insane. I hadn't heard that. But she stands absolutely zero chance anyway.
Given your name I think you should just go ahead and vote Green:)
Personally I don't think I would ever vote for a (primarily) one issue party such as the Greens.
I think Wells either wrote an article or a blog entry noting that Dion suffers from intellectual-in-politics disease, which involves becoming hyper-partisan. Harper has suffered from the same for years.
The man who may well be laughing to the bank on this one, however, is Colby Cosh -- in his analysis of the possibility of an Ignatieff-Harper match-up, he foresaw what this sort of job does to a person:
Like others I would feel a intellectual's satisfaction at living in a country where Ignatieff and Stephen Harper were the leaders of the two main parties. But the truth is that political leadership has done much to de-intellectualize Stephen Harper; and when it comes to the state of Canada, I'm frankly not certain that Ignatieff wouldn't already come pre-de-intellectualized. ...
Still, one almost wishes the movement to bring him "home" would pick up steam; it might be a fitting penalty for his fatuity for him to return to Canada and be confronted with the crooked, mean, evasive, plumb-stupid reality of Liberalism. Imagine the courtly, learned professor trying to absorb the reality of--never mind actually dealing with--creatures like Alfonso Gagliano. Dante himself could not devise a better hell for an intellectual than the one called Ottawa.
Perhaps we ought to admit that politics makes politicians?
Both Dion and Harper are good men who would make (or already do make) excellent prime ministers.
Still say that Dion has at least a decent shot at giving Harper a good scare & maybe even unseating him.
And either is such a step up on Paul Martin...
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