Milquetoast Madness

Just as you thought it couldn't get any dumber! News that Conservative Party campaign director Doug Finley has sent his supporters an inflamed letter accusing the Liberals of leaking incorrect information about Stephen Harper and the wafer incident in New Brunswick is just another sign of the sickness that has plagued federal politics in the last number of years.Let's be clear: the newspaper that launched the story was wrong and has paid the price for it's lack of proper investigation. To be clear again: I blogged at the time defending the Prime Minister, as did Domnic Leblanc, a well-known and connected Liberal MP whose father's death was being commemorated while this silly incident about the wafer was going on. I'm not anyone important, but surely Leblanc's defense of the Prime Minister was a noteworthy attempt to keep things on the high ground.This entire issue has gone from the ridiculous to the insane, and for Finley to call the supposed leak an "unprincipled attack" is a little rich, given his own penchant for slash-and-burn political war. I know that all parties have been guilty of such crazy things, but at what point will it end? We have referred previously in this blog to the devastating effects this kind of politics has on the country, and to benign voters in particular: it causes them to forsake the ballot box.Pollster Peter Donolo has spoken before about the link between the particular hyper-partisan negative ads published by the Conservatives and the resulting lower voter turnout. Over Finley's letter though, he takes it a bit further. "It was always about that they knew how to play to people's anger, their pet peeves, their grievances." Though the Liberals can be as hyper-partisan as anyone else, they have so far refused such grunge. Donolo points out the Liberals are centrists and, therefore, not as grievance-based. So it is "difficult to light a fire under anybody." He labels the comparison, "milquetoast verses red meat."How does getting anyone angry over nothing assist the political process? It doesn't. In fact, it demeans it. Proof of this just came out over the weekend. New statistics were released showing how people view our federal political system, specifically for the years between 1999-2009.  Approval of the federal system during that decade dropped to 50% from 65% in Atlantic provinces; to 55% from 68% in Ontario; to 54% from 61% in Manitoba and Saskatchewan; and to 40% from 64% in Alberta.The awful thing about this is that all parties know it, especially the present government, and yet it continues. Why talk about democratic renewal within parliament when we're all bleeding voters in the country through a collective act of self-flagellation? If we admit that the more negative we get as parties the more the voter turnout declines, then why do we do it?  The answer? Because the first party that blinks could get crunched by the one that doesn't. And so we continue, one maddening negative ad after another.We - politicians and citizens - have bonded ourselves to our fantasies. For average Canadians, it is that we can get by fine without government. And for politicians? It's that we can bludgeon one another and still think we are serving the public. Party against party. Region against region, Citizen against citizen.  It reminds me of the observation by William Butler Yeats:

We had fed the heart on fantasy.  The heart's grown brutal from the fare."

Some day, hopefully soon, some observer is going to write about this particular period in politics and document our great undoing. And this particular story of the wafer and the milquetoast might well be used to prove the point, likely in a chapter titled "Fools Rush In."