It’s not that voters are dumb, it’s just that they’re busy. And in the midst of a brutal global pandemic, it’s become even worse
Forget it. Two years ago, in a limitless and sunny August when a global pandemic seemed like an impossibility, my daughter and I knocked on doors for the Democrats in Portland, Maine. We were using a list of registered Democrats living in a tidy West Portland neighbourhood. The houses weren’t terribly big nor terribly small.…
Polls shows older Americans abandoning Trump because they’re appalled by his mismanagement of the pandemic
None of us. There’s a simple reason why no one really wants to say Donald Trump is going to lose the U.S. presidential election in 2020. Because no one really got it right in 2016. I’m one of the many who got it wrong. Never saw it coming. And I was close enough to the…
The entire Democratic Party strategy – to make the election a referendum on Trump – now lays on the floor, discarded
In another October, in another democratic contest, a man’s disability – a man’s health – almost changed everything. In October 1995, Quebec was voting in a second referendum on independence. The federalist side had been winning – until Quebec’s separatist premier passed control of the campaign to the younger and more popular leader of the…
For a political candidate, the most important thing to have in an election is a message. Donald Trump doesn’t have one. In 2016, he did. As dishonest as it was, “Make America Great Again” was a brilliant political slogan. It suggested, without explicitly saying it, that America was no longer what it had been. It…
Back then, I worked for John Turner’s Liberal government and my then-girlfriend worked for Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. On the afternoon of Sept. 4, 1984, I was heading home to Calgary and law school. So I went to the Ottawa polling station where she was volunteering. She was sad to see me go (I guess) but…
Imagine you’re in an Ottawa hotel suite with a former prime minister of Canada and a former president of the United States. Secret Service members watch the door and a photographer is getting ready to take some shots. Imagine that. But then imagine the door opens and in walks Aline Chretien, looking as beautiful and elegant…
When I was a kid at David G. Burnet Elementary School in Dallas, Texas, we would stand at our desks every morning and do the Declaration of Independence. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands,” we’d say, our hands over our hearts.…
After becoming Conservative leader, he’s flip-flopped on policy. But when you try to be all things to all people, you end up satisfying nobody
The best way to win the Republican presidential nomination in the United States, someone once said, is to run as far as possible to the right. Then, when one wins the nomination? Start running back to the centre. Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O’Toole heeded that advice. His leadership campaign was brimming with the…
In a pandemic, the fundamentals of electioneering and voting can get some of us sick – and make some of us die
There isn’t going to be a federal election in Canada. Not anytime soon, anyway. Blame COVID-19. For a while, it looked like there could be. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberals had surged ahead of the leaderless Conservatives in the polls. His lead was big – big enough to suggest a parliamentary majority was likely.…
It gives them an opportunity to totally dismantle the Liberal Party’s leadership and the party’s policies
The metastasizing WE scandal has many tendrils, like a noxious weed. It is spreading, inexorably, into the centre of the Trudeau government. It may kill it. The fundamentals are well-known. Justin Trudeau’s immediate family received hundreds of thousands in secret payments – after he became Prime Minister. Trudeau thereafter handed a billion-dollar contract to WE,…