A final word on Martin-ism.
I resist -- I really do, honestly -- turning this blog into a gooey paean to politicians I like. But since none of my friends or family members quite seems to understand my enduring enthusiasm for our now-ex-PM, I thought this piece by James Laxer in the Toronto Star really captures it well (link via a recent, happy addition to my blogroll, The Reaction, as part of an interesting posting on the first stirrings of the Liberal leadership race). I've mostly only reprinted the ideological handwaving and the gooey positive bits of Laxer's piece, but you have to read the whole thing to get a real flavour of the sort of the contradictions and ideological tradeoffs that reform liberals like Martin bring to the table:
What makes Canada unusual in the advanced world is that a centre party has been its dominant political force for many decades. The norm in other countries is for powerful parties on the left and right to overshadow the centre. Because it is a two-headed monster that faces both left and right, the Liberal party is loathed by its opponents for what they see as its lack of principles. A centre party is rarely an innovator. The Liberal party has often eaten the lunch of its foes — taking ideas for social programs from the NDP and serving up tax cuts to keep the political right at bay.
When he was sworn in as prime minister in December 2003, Martin seemed set for a long stay in power. His accession to the highest office, however, came only after a lengthy struggle waged by Martin and his followers within the Liberal party to unseat Jean Chrétien, a battle born of hubris and idealism. Determined to clean up the Liberal party in Quebec, Martin cancelled the sponsorship program on his first day in office. In response to the tabling of Auditor General Sheila Fraser's devastating report in February 2004, Martin established a commission of inquiry under John H. Gomery, a judge of the Quebec Superior Court, to investigate the mismanagement of the program.
Behind closed doors, members of the Chrétien wing of the Liberal party condemned the calling of the Gomery inquiry as a catastrophic blunder. Chrétien, they said, would have shrugged the whole thing off and gotten away with it. But having acknowledged the seriousness of the scandal, Martin was pummelled for it through two election campaigns by all three opposition leaders who refused to concede that he might have been acting out of a genuine determination to clean things up.
Rarely eloquent, Martin nonetheless showed real passion for Canada, and in that he was unique among the federal party leaders. He rejected the idea that Canada should participate in George W. Bush's missile defence scheme. Martin's frequent warnings about the dangers of American domination of Canada were airily dismissed by his opponents who saw in them the flailing of a desperate man. What they did not credit is that he had discovered on the job what previous prime ministers had learned — that it is very difficult for Canada to survive as an independent nation on the doorstep of a superpower.
Martin's tragedy was that he took office as a Liberal leader from Quebec who hoped to win the hearts of Quebecers in a way that Chrétien never could. Instead, ensnared in the sponsorship scandal, Martin presided over a precipitous decline in federalist fortunes in Quebec.
The election campaign that sealed Paul Martin's fate was conducted with all the dignity and decorum of a bare-fisted brawl in a hockey arena. But even though Martin was continually bloodied by his three major opponents and by a howling pack of journalists, he did not complain. Although he left the rink battered and bruised, he did so with considerable grace.
He did. I think possibly the negative popular reaction to Martin, and the bizarrely hostile media coverage he's provoked and that I've been complaining about over the past year, have to do with two things:
First, based on feedback I've gotten over the past 7 months of blogging on Canadian and US politics, my sense is that, as Canadians, we're generally more averse to overt political ambition and hubris, two things that Martin has never been good at hiding. As a half-American and an afficiondo of American politics, I have a pretty high tolerance for political ambition, for politicians who see themselves as tranformative leaders, so long as they're willing to attempt those transformations within the bounds determined by the national electoral institutions, and -- like Martin -- to listen and to indulge and appreciate other people's opinions. Looking south over the past five years, I understand the counter-argument, that would-be charismatic leaders inevitably take us along the road to authoritarianism. Or that, at the very least, by indulging them we run the risk of electing Mussolini-types as much as Gorbachev-types. I would argue in contrast that limiting the power of the executive institutionally is a better strategy than training generations of humble, or pretend-humble, national leaders. In particular, I was struck recently by this Bruce Reed commentary for Slate on the danger for Democrats over-indulging their Nixon-hatred and updating it to the current US Administration. The ideal liberal response is not to hate and fear the presidency, or to yearn for a Jimmy-Carter-style return to humility, but to demand better of the presidency and the man who fills it. I think the same thing goes for us up north.
Second, dislike of Martin is tied to our enduring affection for Jean Chretien who, a fellow political-junkie friend reminded me recently, is the man most responsible for nursing us through our tulmultous '90s and the 1995 Quebec Referendum after Mulroney's PCs had just about ripped the country apart with the failed Meech Lake Accord. Had Martin won the 1992 leadership race, could he have done as well faced with the herculean but profoundly frustrating task of holding the petulant provinces and dualling linguistic heretages together? Frankly, I doubt it. Martin was a leader who embodied, wanted to embody, our ambitions for the post-Referendum world, who wanted us to to move beyond internal stuggles to take our place on the world stage as a player, as a liberal free-market economy with much of the moral authority tht the US, with its inequality, neo-colonial history, and tattered domestic safety net, lacks. By airing the Liberals' dirty Sponsorship laundry, and by simply acknowledging the many, many grievances woven through the cultural mosaic, Martin wanted to and acted as if he could move us beyond all that. It seemed a pervasive undercurrent in the Martin-ified Liberal Party: a few weeks before the election, I went to see Senator Romeo Dallaire speak and take questions with our MP Stephen Owen in Point Grey. What struck me was the thrust of Dallaire's speech: that we needed to move beyond our internal disputes, inter-provincial conflicts and look at the big picture: that the world needed a strong, moral, outward-looking Canada to turn our energies toward problems -- Rwanda, Darfur -- bigger than our own.
Martin, much more than Chretien, much more than most of the pols looking to take over the mantle of Liberal leader, could, I think, have provided that sort of big-picture leadership. It's not that Martin was incompetent at governing -- anyone who watched him maneouvre through the summer-of-not-quite-non-confidence and table as much good legislation as he did could think that. He was, I think, fundamentally a far more serious, less self-indulgent leader than Chretien. But he's not good at details, at projecting the ironic concern for our internal disputes, or at campaigning (campaigning is, after all, usually about targetted, small-bore pandering woven together to look like more than the sum of its parts). He's brash and can't really hide his dislikes, his desire to break with the past. And we, maybe, weren't ready for that break, resented the usurption of power from the Chretienites who had held us together with the flair for detail, for nuance, when we were most vulnerable.
The article concludes:
How will [Martin] be remembered? Unlike most politicians, Martin is a good listener, with a voracious appetite for new ideas and perspectives on the world. An energetic and youthful man for his years, he will find useful outlets for his passions. As time passes, Canadians may realize that he grew while in office and gained a wider and deeper understanding of this complex country and its people. He may even be regarded with some affection, especially as people rethink the unfairness of the shabby treatment he received at the hands of political opponents and the media.
I certainly hope so.
What makes Canada unusual in the advanced world is that a centre party has been its dominant political force for many decades. The norm in other countries is for powerful parties on the left and right to overshadow the centre. Because it is a two-headed monster that faces both left and right, the Liberal party is loathed by its opponents for what they see as its lack of principles. A centre party is rarely an innovator. The Liberal party has often eaten the lunch of its foes — taking ideas for social programs from the NDP and serving up tax cuts to keep the political right at bay.
When he was sworn in as prime minister in December 2003, Martin seemed set for a long stay in power. His accession to the highest office, however, came only after a lengthy struggle waged by Martin and his followers within the Liberal party to unseat Jean Chrétien, a battle born of hubris and idealism. Determined to clean up the Liberal party in Quebec, Martin cancelled the sponsorship program on his first day in office. In response to the tabling of Auditor General Sheila Fraser's devastating report in February 2004, Martin established a commission of inquiry under John H. Gomery, a judge of the Quebec Superior Court, to investigate the mismanagement of the program.
Behind closed doors, members of the Chrétien wing of the Liberal party condemned the calling of the Gomery inquiry as a catastrophic blunder. Chrétien, they said, would have shrugged the whole thing off and gotten away with it. But having acknowledged the seriousness of the scandal, Martin was pummelled for it through two election campaigns by all three opposition leaders who refused to concede that he might have been acting out of a genuine determination to clean things up.
Rarely eloquent, Martin nonetheless showed real passion for Canada, and in that he was unique among the federal party leaders. He rejected the idea that Canada should participate in George W. Bush's missile defence scheme. Martin's frequent warnings about the dangers of American domination of Canada were airily dismissed by his opponents who saw in them the flailing of a desperate man. What they did not credit is that he had discovered on the job what previous prime ministers had learned — that it is very difficult for Canada to survive as an independent nation on the doorstep of a superpower.
Martin's tragedy was that he took office as a Liberal leader from Quebec who hoped to win the hearts of Quebecers in a way that Chrétien never could. Instead, ensnared in the sponsorship scandal, Martin presided over a precipitous decline in federalist fortunes in Quebec.
The election campaign that sealed Paul Martin's fate was conducted with all the dignity and decorum of a bare-fisted brawl in a hockey arena. But even though Martin was continually bloodied by his three major opponents and by a howling pack of journalists, he did not complain. Although he left the rink battered and bruised, he did so with considerable grace.
He did. I think possibly the negative popular reaction to Martin, and the bizarrely hostile media coverage he's provoked and that I've been complaining about over the past year, have to do with two things:
First, based on feedback I've gotten over the past 7 months of blogging on Canadian and US politics, my sense is that, as Canadians, we're generally more averse to overt political ambition and hubris, two things that Martin has never been good at hiding. As a half-American and an afficiondo of American politics, I have a pretty high tolerance for political ambition, for politicians who see themselves as tranformative leaders, so long as they're willing to attempt those transformations within the bounds determined by the national electoral institutions, and -- like Martin -- to listen and to indulge and appreciate other people's opinions. Looking south over the past five years, I understand the counter-argument, that would-be charismatic leaders inevitably take us along the road to authoritarianism. Or that, at the very least, by indulging them we run the risk of electing Mussolini-types as much as Gorbachev-types. I would argue in contrast that limiting the power of the executive institutionally is a better strategy than training generations of humble, or pretend-humble, national leaders. In particular, I was struck recently by this Bruce Reed commentary for Slate on the danger for Democrats over-indulging their Nixon-hatred and updating it to the current US Administration. The ideal liberal response is not to hate and fear the presidency, or to yearn for a Jimmy-Carter-style return to humility, but to demand better of the presidency and the man who fills it. I think the same thing goes for us up north.
Second, dislike of Martin is tied to our enduring affection for Jean Chretien who, a fellow political-junkie friend reminded me recently, is the man most responsible for nursing us through our tulmultous '90s and the 1995 Quebec Referendum after Mulroney's PCs had just about ripped the country apart with the failed Meech Lake Accord. Had Martin won the 1992 leadership race, could he have done as well faced with the herculean but profoundly frustrating task of holding the petulant provinces and dualling linguistic heretages together? Frankly, I doubt it. Martin was a leader who embodied, wanted to embody, our ambitions for the post-Referendum world, who wanted us to to move beyond internal stuggles to take our place on the world stage as a player, as a liberal free-market economy with much of the moral authority tht the US, with its inequality, neo-colonial history, and tattered domestic safety net, lacks. By airing the Liberals' dirty Sponsorship laundry, and by simply acknowledging the many, many grievances woven through the cultural mosaic, Martin wanted to and acted as if he could move us beyond all that. It seemed a pervasive undercurrent in the Martin-ified Liberal Party: a few weeks before the election, I went to see Senator Romeo Dallaire speak and take questions with our MP Stephen Owen in Point Grey. What struck me was the thrust of Dallaire's speech: that we needed to move beyond our internal disputes, inter-provincial conflicts and look at the big picture: that the world needed a strong, moral, outward-looking Canada to turn our energies toward problems -- Rwanda, Darfur -- bigger than our own.
Martin, much more than Chretien, much more than most of the pols looking to take over the mantle of Liberal leader, could, I think, have provided that sort of big-picture leadership. It's not that Martin was incompetent at governing -- anyone who watched him maneouvre through the summer-of-not-quite-non-confidence and table as much good legislation as he did could think that. He was, I think, fundamentally a far more serious, less self-indulgent leader than Chretien. But he's not good at details, at projecting the ironic concern for our internal disputes, or at campaigning (campaigning is, after all, usually about targetted, small-bore pandering woven together to look like more than the sum of its parts). He's brash and can't really hide his dislikes, his desire to break with the past. And we, maybe, weren't ready for that break, resented the usurption of power from the Chretienites who had held us together with the flair for detail, for nuance, when we were most vulnerable.
The article concludes:
How will [Martin] be remembered? Unlike most politicians, Martin is a good listener, with a voracious appetite for new ideas and perspectives on the world. An energetic and youthful man for his years, he will find useful outlets for his passions. As time passes, Canadians may realize that he grew while in office and gained a wider and deeper understanding of this complex country and its people. He may even be regarded with some affection, especially as people rethink the unfairness of the shabby treatment he received at the hands of political opponents and the media.
I certainly hope so.
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