The candidates have been calling and stopping by, leaving their smiling portraits and self-promotional screeds in my mailbox, talking nonsense to each other on TV, and clogging up the Internet with their incessant bickering. There really should be some kind of regulation around how much electoral politics the average person has to be exposed to on a daily basis. With Canada heading to the polls for the third time in four years and the American media afflicting the world with its fourth year of coverage of the 2008 presidential elections, it makes you wonder who is actually running things while the leaders are all out vying to stay in power.
It must be particularly tough on America, where the best and brightest minds of democracy’s global beacon are now in the 1,200th day of campaigning. Obviously, when their entire financial infrastructure has mostly fallen out its own ass, the two presidential candidates actually had to go back to work for a couple of days, a move that was of course not in any way exploited by either to enhance their public profile. In this last month running up to the American election, I think we can look forward to a lot more campaign trail schadenfreude. McCain’s already debased himself seven ways to Sunday in his quest for the Oval Office, and there’s no reason to think he’s bottomed out yet. My question is, with two unpopular wars on the go, an economy circling the drain and every pundit and their dog declaring the end of the American empire, who in their right mind would want to be president?
Of course, we’ve got problems of our own up in Canada, where people have pretty much given up on the efficacy of our election system and are now planning a giant board game on the map of Canada, with carefully placed strategic votes being swapped online by people who dread a Conservative majority. Given Stephen Harper’s public denouncement of the cultural pleasures that make non-robotic lives worth living and the fact that his continued resistance to science fact as regards climate change puts him in the highly intellectual company of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, it’s easy to see their point. We have good reason there’s a nasty social-conservative brain lurking under that Lego haircut too.
So strategically vote away, I say. But the real downside of his whole strategic voting thing, aside from admitting that our gestures toward parliamentary democracy are nothing more than shadow puppetry, is that it’s invited the kind of negative campaigning that makes American politics so horribly entertaining to watch into our electoral process. There’s some lip service being paid to making the country better, but what it’s really about is voting against the people who are bound and determined to wreck the country with their blinkered agenda. I’m not just talking about the routine pebble-flicking of televised debates — and really, good on the lesser candidates for pelting the incumbent while he holds off announcing his party’s platform until less than a week before the election — but even on a more localized level.
I got a call from the campaign of Claudette Roy, Liberal candidate for Edmonton-Strathcona, wanting to know if they could count on my support. I told them I had no idea what I would be supporting, and they promised to drop off some literature on which I could base my decision. A couple of days later I got a glossy, two-sided postcard from the Roy campaign explaining to me that there was no way the NDP were going to defeat the Conservative incumbent in my riding and that if I was truly opposed to handing the Harper administration a fresh mandate, I wouldn’t go flushing my ballot down the toilet by pledging my support to the New Democrats. I carefully examined both sides of the document in search of some hints about what MP Roy would do to represent her constituents, but could find no trace. Meanwhile, Rahim Jaffer has been slipping me notes for months warning about the opposition weaklings who won’t lift a finger to get the drug dealers out of my local schoolyard.
It seems it’s no longer enough to assert that you have creative solutions to the nation’s problems — what you really have to do to get elected is persuade people that your opponents are categorically the worst possible choice, that their policies border on treasonous, and that even a moment in power would give them all the time they needed to drive the country straight off a cliff.
Where is the candidate who has the balls to say that they’ll work with whomever is in power to keep Canada from falling apart in the face of growing economic disparity, international unrest, perpetual war, and looming global market disaster? Who is really going help families and Aboriginal peoples and artists and businesses and immigrants do their part to make this country great? Who genuinely wants to help the world — especially the fragile North — avert environmental catastrophe? Who is willing to build consensus in this country to meet important challenges? You can speak up any time.
