Betraying the electorate triggers powerful negative emotions
Sorting through the post-mortems on the recent U.K. election, I came across an interesting Sunday Times piece from the English novelist/journalist Robert Harris. In it, he made reference to the pariah status of two former British prime ministers – Ramsay MacDonald and Tony Blair. Unless you’re something of a history buff, MacDonald’s name probably rings…
What columnist Pat Murphy learned from the PC defeat in Alberta and the Conservative victory in Britain
Political aficionados certainly had a double helping of drama last week. In Alberta, the NDP’s upending of the long-running Progressive Conservative dynasty wasn’t on anyone’s radar. And in the U.K., everybody anticipated a hung parliament rather than the Tory majority that emerged. Here are my takeaways: Alienating large chunks of your base is a risky…
Conventional wisdom, especially when its purveyors have a moralistic bent, is a precarious guide to reality
Although it’s been 40 years, the images still pack a dramatic punch. As Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army on April 30, 1975, thousands of people – primarily at-risk Vietnamese – were evacuated by helicopter. Two years after the last American troops had departed, the long war was finally over and the reckoning was…
The number of related military deaths easily surpassed the combined total of American fatalities from both World Wars
When Ulysses S. Grant accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, it effectively ended the bloodiest conflict in American history. Hard as it may be to grasp, the number of related military deaths (Union plus Confederate) easily surpassed the combined total of American fatalities from both World Wars. And as anyone who’s…
A little humility would have served Roosevelt, Kennedy and Obama well when dealing with Russia
A recent column about Franklin Roosevelt and the advent of the Cold War prompted a question. How might the Roosevelt/Stalin relationship compare to the current one between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin? In turn, that got me thinking about how American presidents, particularly Democrats, dealt with Russia. Why focus on Democrats? Well, they’re supposed to…
2 recent op-eds in the National Post bear little resemblance to the real world
The National Post’s op-ed pages had an interesting day recently, sporting several pieces that stuck in my mind. This column is about two of them. The first one felt like the Post’s umpteenth brief against the Harper government’s prohibition of niqabs at citizenship oath-taking ceremonies. The paper certainly hasn’t been shy about expressing its disapproval…
Stalin's habit of doing precisely what he could get away with made the Cold War inevitable
It was 70 years ago this April that Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Although he’d been in failing health for some time, the details of his condition had been carefully kept from the general public and his passing from a massive stroke on April 12, 1945, thus came as a shock. In an era before the…
While bad news for Democrats, predicting US political realignment is a tricky business
Political junkies have a weakness for big ideas, particularly those purporting to explain how the future is going to unfold. Invariably, it’s a matter of identifying underlying realignments, preferably those linked to factors which are deemed immutable, at least in the near-term. My first encounter with this phenomenon came in 1969, courtesy of Kevin Phillips…
History may have played out differently if Kennedy had shown Thatcher’s political courage
In politics, as in life, sometimes it’s necessary to throw caution to the wind, damn the torpedoes and just go for it. Indeed, as Margaret Thatcher demonstrated 40 years ago, fortune can be induced to smile on the brave. Thatcher’s catalyst came from Conservative disappointment with the results of the October 1974 UK general election.…
The GOP has some of the strongest candidates since 1980
Believe it or not, it’s almost 40 years since Americans last had a suspenseful presidential convention. It happened in 1976, when Ronald Reagan’s insurgency came within a whisker of denying the Republican nomination to the incumbent president, Gerald Ford. Since then the nominations, whether Republican or Democrat, have been securely locked-up well before convention time.…