Conservative Tim Hudak’s Winston Churchill Moment

There’s a virus sleeping in the heads of most recognizable politicians on this continent. It makes them try to get away, if only once, with what I’ve dubbed: A Winston Churchill Moment. They want to show courage and conspicuous intellectual integrity.

Stephane Dion in Canada and Paul Ryan in the US Congress are ideal examples. They broke the strict rules of our bland politics to stand apart — from their peers and from their own unappealing images. They were convinced that "bold" fiscal and environment policies would enhance their stature — and fill gaps in their formal education.

Rather than stand with Churchill in history, they joined the swelling crowd around that literary invention: Don Quixote. And, certainly, the WCM virus is dangerously active in the Ontario election’s temporary front-runner, Conservative Tim Hudak.

Before elaborating, please accept that I’m out to protect us, not discourage policy-driven campaigns. The failure of “chivalrous” gestures does not reflect poorly on our maturity. Not being easily led near a cliff is nothing to be embarrassed about. History’s folly is fueled by the bad ideas we buy, not the ones we reject.  

Tim Hudak expressed his Winston Churchill Moment in the carefully chiseled and widely quoted cornerstone policy:

“If I have to trade off 100,000 jobs in the bureaucracy for one million new jobs in the private sector creating wealth, that’s a tradeoff I would do any second,” he told a town hall meeting in Barrie. “It’s not easy, I take no joy in this, but it has to be done if we want job creators to put more people on the payroll in our province.”

The best that has been said about this statement is that it’s “radical.” Nevertheless, it distorts both conservative economics and any common-sense conservative way to appeal for votes.

In placing his cuts right up against a million new jobs, it’s entirely reasonable to presume that he’s asking voters to endorse the layoff of 100,000 Ontario workers. Also, in placing his payroll savings against eliminating the provincial deficit in the next two fiscal years, he’s left little room for unfilled vacancies, retirements, and the private sector contracting out to significantly reduce the number of actual layoffs.

The hurried nature of his bloody prophesy certainly separates Hudak from his smarmy Keynesian pump-priming opponents. However, as stated starkly above, it also separates him from the economics of the only Conservative prime minister since the Great Depression that is better trusted in managing the economy than Liberals.

Harper’s federal deficit-reduction targets respect provincial spending cost pressures, aren’t leading to provincial job cuts, and are being absorbed by a Canada-wide economic recovery that is in far better shape than Ontario’s.

Harper isn’t terribly popular and it’s forgivable not to drop his name gratuitously. Still, on managing the economy back to sustainable growth, he still beats the competition — and did nothing in the last two restraint budgets to panic Liberals and New Democrats into uniting to defeat him at the polls.

Asking for a mandate to fire tens of thousands of people is as stupid for a conservative as asking for a mandate to raise middle class taxes by the left.

Voters rightfully suspect it’s not in their interest to help their leaders do the nasty things they must do sparingly.

These "courageous" gestures are common currency amongst retired public administrators and tenured academics. Only when struck by the WCM virus should a sane politician be excused for taking one up.

Persuasive rhetoric and great timing

Great oratory, it seems, relies on great timing as well as the right words. In his book “Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama,” Sam Leith observes, for instance:

On Winston Churchill: 

“Of course, there are times when powerful fixed artillery is just what you need. The thing about Churchill was that, like the stopped clock that’s right twice a day, he occupied one position and waited for the world to come to him. He spent much of his political career predicting the imminent end of Western civilization—and it was only by the damnedest good luck that it happened to be on his watch that it suddenly appeared to be coming about. If not, he might have been remembered as a self-aggrandizing windbag with an old-fashioned speaking style and a love of the sound of his own voice.”

On Adolf Hitler:

“He preferred to speak in the evening, believing that ‘in the morning and during the day it seems that the power of the human will rebels with its strongest energy against any attempt to impose upon it the will or opinion of another. On the other hand, in the evening it easily succumbs to the domination of a stronger will.’ Thus speaks a man who got his start launching his Putsches from beer halls.”

—In Sam Leith’s “Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric From Aristotle to Obama”, Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, Philadelphia, PA, 2012.

So, for the ambitious orator, remember: historic circumstance, not a crisis in your own career, will decide when you can make that historic speech.

For those of us just sitting in the audience, it appears to be a good thing that the men or women up there on the big stage are also able to mix it up on the morning shows.

Looking for mad leaders for hard times?

Winston Churchill said he never found anyone interesting who’d lived through a happy childhood. Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University Medical Center gets in closer, assembling an entire book on the proposition that depression and mania make leaders more realistic and empathic, and mania makes them more creative and resilient.

“A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” has touched a nerve. It’s been reviewed widely and he’s appeared on the Stephen Colbert Show. His series of short sketches of everyone from Churchill and Martin Luther King to Lincoln and Tony Blair, however, hasn’t caused much stir. The way his thesis is glibly applied to the present is the sensation.

“‘For abnormal challenges,’ Ghaemi insists, ‘abnormal leaders are needed.’ The text makes only one reference to the current president, warning us that while “‘no drama’ Obama might be considered the epitome of mental health,’ we must remember that ‘psychological moderation’ is not the prescription for greatness.”

Click on: www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/a-first-rate-madness-by-nassir-ghaemi-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

As one reviewer put it: Is Barack Obama too sane to lead the United States in times of crisis? Are stable leaders inappropriate for shaky time?

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/management/morning-manager/the-right-leader-in-a-crisis-may-not-be-the-stable-one/article2147615/

As a child of the Cold-War and Mutually Assured Destruction, there’s something ridiculously naive about the question. The government of the US today, like the Government of Great Britain in the summer of 1940, is not a start-up company that can be run by an egomaniac or a poem born after days of anguish alone in a room.  The White House’s ability to make decisions, to make a positive difference—and to not do terrible harm—rests on the reliable application of disciplined intelligence.  You can’t skip sanity to be a great President.

Churchill and Lincoln’s “black dogs” encumbered their lives but didn’t cloud either their values or their clear heads as decision makers. Churchill’s values and experience, and a great writer’s ability to see what he saw drove his early radical assessment of Hitler. His depressions and drinking in the Thirties only helped keep him out of power, unable to avoid a catastrophe.

When finally in office, Churchill didn’t decide to make a dear friend and pen pal out of President Roosevelt because he thought they would be ideal soul mates. To do his job—to survive Hitler—he had to. In the spring of 2008, Barack Obama didn’t huddle with bankers and big businesses and double the US deficit because he was a confused Uncle Tom, meekly following instructions George Bush had left on his desk. Obama saw it as his responsibility to avert another Great Depression.

Certainly, it would have been more interesting for everyone if Obama had waited for the economy to collapse and used that time writing fire side chats to radicalize America later. But, do we want leaders to lead us into “abnormal” times so they can be a little more “abnormal” as well?

Obama’s passion gap

George Packer delivered a bitter assault on the competence of Barack Obama’s presidency in the influential “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker. He elevated the standard liberal frustration—the President’s “fire in the belly” problem—by saying worse things about others, invoking the pain of unemployed individuals that Obama can’t help, and quoting the famously scientific 19th Century European political thinker Max Weber. 

“On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their own dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.”

Read more www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/07/25/110725taco_talk_packer#ixzz1SeU3bUUH

The serious target of this extravagant indictment is clearly the President. The Republican Party is not of one mind. Try to imagine Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell finishing each other’s sentences. Republicans recklessly over play their hand. Obama apparently doesn’t even have his heart in the game.

Packer’s case against him is personal: Obama seems determined to do his best within the bounds of Washington’s divided-government and doesn’t try to escape that reality with sufficient rhetorical verve:

“More important, he no longer uses his office’s most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focused on the continued need for government activism.”

This fundamentally understates what Packer actually wants him to do and overstates the use of rhetoric to do the job. Packer wants the center of opinion in the country to shift far enough to the left that Obama can get his way on policy with a hostile Congress.

The center of public opinion is deeply ambivalent about the virtue of debt- financed government intervention. It can shift in favour a little more government leadership and, for the sake of a faster recovery, it probably should.  However, trying to hasten that process now with florid presidential rhetoric would be self-defeating.

Any success would be entirely speculative. Republican activists will continue to drive the primary process—the process that disciplines the president’s recalcitrant Washington opponents. The undecided voters that Obama needs won’t have a ballot to confirm what they think for another fifteen months. That’s a long time to wait for crowd reaction and policy progress.  

Of course, it would be more exciting if Obama dropped his reputation for being “more reasonable” than his adversaries and deployed a winner-take-all inspirational style. However, that would only deepen paralysis in Washington and feed the suspicion that he’s more articulate than effective.

The crucial problem with Packer’s thesis, however, is the contention that inspirational White House rhetoric can change the way the people think and, in doing so, can change circumstances on the ground.

Teddy Roosevelt coined the phrase “bully-pulpit” but never enjoyed the right circumstances to make it work. His theatrical competitor Winston Churchill appeared to use words to vastly great effect while TR ended his public career as a rather windy crank.  Yet, it was only during an extraordinary period in history that Churchill truly inspired. In the late spring and summer of 1940, he and his listeners agreed, finally, on the nature of the problem and necessity to act.   

Reading the facts responsibly did not encumber Churchill’s rhetoric. Luftwaffe planes over the night skies of London established Churchill as Britain’s greatest realist and that allowed him to be heard by everyone. Theories about military deterrence didn’t work for Churchill and economic arguments will not create a national consensus for Obama.

For a generation, Churchill had been recognized as a great wordsmith, while his political influence faded. He inspired a nation in 1940 because no one questioned his definition of the task before them. It would have only been embarrassing if he’d given “his blood, sweat and tears speech” a year earlier.

Conviction, without good timing, makes people look away rather than leap to their feet.

You can lose when you're doing something important

One conspicuous symptom of our miserable times is the number of politicians leaving careers in defeat or being written off well before their next election. Most noted has been the defeat of some 54 incumbents in the November US congressional elections.

But political exile is common elsewhere. In Canada, Gordon Campbell, the Premier of British Columbia, was effectively chased out of office for expanding the tax base. Nationally, Stephane Dion, the Liberal Party’s former leader, summarily lost his job after unsuccessfully advocating a carbon tax to fight climate change.  Today, in London, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party has, in one season, gone from being Britain’s most liked politician to “Nick Clegg, Dick Head!”

A great deal of human capital has been forcefully withdrawn from public service and many good people are finding themselves with fewer friends.

Today, with so many really smart people, with high incomes, dependent on the favourable opinions of voters, defeat causes many to shudder like seeing a bat at dusk. Increasingly, consultants treat defeat as a medical illness; insisting that with the proper application of market intelligence and personal discipline other politicians can avoid the same fate.

However, political defeat is not a medical condition or a freakish occurrence. It is a good politician’s unshakable companion. Competent representative democracy could not carry on without it.

We know stories about Presidents and Prime Ministers who stood by their convictions. However, an equally relevant and inspiring book on the subject of political courage was written by an American historian about Winston Churchill’s followers in the House of Commons in the 1930s. Lynne Olsen, in “Troublesome Young Men,” tells the story of the handful of back-benchers who defied Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, risking their careers and social standing against a massive majority in Parliament and in the country. What is striking about these mavericks was their youth, savvy and ambition. Individually, most all of them rightfully aimed for high political office. (Two, in fact, eventually became Prime Ministers.) Despite their personal ambitions, they stood against the professionals and with Winston Churchill, a loner, a has-been, a bore to many, who appeared to lack the humility and discipline to tack or make new friends.

The contemporary political victims noted earlier are not amateurish or arrogantly disdainful of the preferences of their constituents either. By and large, they are hard working representatives, not especially disputatious or headstrong. Their unpopularity was born in conscious efforts to tackle important challenges, to serve an urgent public interest.

Furthermore, they see themselves as moderates and pragmatic; their positions were unpopular even though they were often compromises as well.  Nevertheless, on climate change, fiscal stability and universal healthcare, these modern politicians recognized that a viable response to the problem at hand required their support, whether that response was popular yet or not.

If there is anything inspiring about 2010 to take into a bracing New Year it is not the public’s ability to rage, but the continuing ability of a goodly number of politicians to pay for their principles.