What a politician can’t be these days is highly and visibly experienced, and it’s a damned shame. Whether we’re talking about Alberta or America, “change” is the magic word this season. Every politician wants the electorate to believe that they represent change, no matter how implausible the claim.
Ed Stelmach, a Klein veteran of 13 years’ standing, is masquerading as the embodiment of change. Steddie is pretending that this is Year Zero, an astonishing repudiation of the record of his former boss (and of himself), who won four consecutive majorities. It says a lot about the Klein legacy that Stelmach wants nothing to do with it, but it reveals a great deal about the rest of us too.
We’re about to re-elect the PC crew, which means that many of us buy the pig-with-lipstick makeover they’re selling. Stelmach’s increased popularity apparently depends on Albertans seeing him as an amiable amateur, a political outsider rather than an old establishment pro. Voters are being asked to believe that the premier’s résumé doesn’t count and that if he does have any experience, he is very sorry about it.
This is only fitting in this most Americanized of Canadian provinces, as it mimics what’s happening south of the border in the presidential primaries.
John McCain, who will be the Republican nominee, has been a U.S. senator for 21 years, and was a member of the House of Representatives for four years before that. But his campaign glosses over his Washington experience, in contrast with its promotion of his much older military record and his current promises to change American politics. It’s like the intervening two and a half decades didn’t happen. This may be considered wise, as there are many decisions in which he participated that haven’t produced the best results.
On the Democratic side, former co-president and twice-elected senator Hillary Clinton has fallen into a virtual tie with Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois. Anyone watching them debate sees that Clinton has Obama beat in terms of knowledge and policy depth, which is why Obama is much more comfortable performing solo, where his barf-inspiring platitudes about “doing politics differently” go unchallenged. But he is a fresh, smiling face compared with Clinton, who has been around long enough to gather a long list of enemies. It is her experience as much as her “cold personality” (hiya, misogynists) that makes her vulnerable to defeat by a relative newcomer.
Obama put the lie to his allegedly fresh and principled approach to politics months ago, when he and his spokespeople vociferously denied that he was or had ever been a Muslim. The wording was indignant where it should have been dismissive. Rather than take the opportunity to say that he valued the religious heritage of his father’s family, and that anyone trying to use this as a smear against him was a crank and a loser, his media response implicitly accepted the idea that he was being accused of something terrible.
What he represents is not change, but inexperience. At least Clinton has done and risked enough to have failures, which is absolutely necessary for real change to happen.
The devaluation of experience means that voters are less inclined to scrutinize candidates’ professional records, where such records exist. Walk into any other kind of job interview, and you’ll be probed deeply for details of your past professional behaviour. HR types consider this to be the best predictor of what you will do in the future, not your promises to reform or remake yourself. And a lack of experience diminishes your chances of getting hired.
It makes sense to apply this logic to politics. Anyone who runs for the leadership of something as complex as a provincial or a national government must serve an adequate apprenticeship in order to be taken seriously. And they must be prepared to stand on what they’ve done during that time, even if someone else was leading the government at the time. If they in fact disagreed with what happened during those years, they need to explain why they stayed silent and did nothing. Without that explanation, their promises for the future have no basis and should be dismissed out of hand.
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