Barack Obama and Stephen Harper — how weird is that?
This is bizarre. Americans are moving left. Canadians are moving right. It’s almost always been the other way around. In fact, it’s been 80 years since we’ve seen this. The only comparable time was when Franklin Roosevelt came to power after we elected arch-Tory R.B. Bennett.
That, too, was in a time of economic peril. Bennett didn’t last long. FDR’s liberalism soon spread across the border. A rising tide, they say, lifts all boats. It lifted our Liberal ones, sunk Bennett’s.
This memory has probably intruded upon Stephen Harper’s roomy cranium by now. There are those polls saying Canadians favour Democrat Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency by a margin of four to one! He’s an American politician with a Canadian mindset. Or at least what has generally been considered a Canadian mindset. He’s certainly no guns and God guy. He favours public health care, has a social conscience, prefers diplomacy to unilateralism. “I know that the hardening of the lines,” he once wrote, “dooms us all.”
A lot of Canadians are going to love this man, like they did FDR, in the way they were charmed by JFK. He is an independent thinker, not transfixed by any ideological trappings, but internally strong. It seems he has followed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum: “Life is something that can be dominated — if you’re any good.”
I’m trying to imagine Stephen Harper paired with him. Our PM can handle himself intellectually with anyone, but the danger for him is that he will look soooo last century up against Barack Obama.
It’s true that Harper has moderated some of his original hard-core conservative gospels. But he’s still an old-alliance type on foreign policy, he’s still a foot-dragger on the environment and he’s still more of a Milton Friedman disciple than a Keynesian. There are cycles of history. It’s tough if you get caught up in the wrong one.
It’s not just Harper who tilts against the new tide. There is other evidence of our rightward shift. Our population is moving West, the resource wealth is in the West, the Alberta influence gains strength, our media is more right-wing than ever. On the other hand, the fact that Harper didn’t win a majority against a weak opponent tells you something. So does our overwhelming lean toward Obama.
Franklin Roosevelt became more popular here than R.B. Bennett. John F. Kennedy became more popular than John George Diefenbaker. In these careening times, they are precedents worth noting.
