Good luck to Mr. Biden, and words of praise for AOC (but a criticism, too). Plus, the recap.
She's almost certainly right in her review of Democrat campaign weaknesses. But she's also protesting a bit too much that she's not one of them.
Photo Credit: Michael Stokes.
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Happy Sunday, Code 47 readers. I skipped the recap to you all last week, because, after all, I had something else to announce. If you missed that last week, I am stepping down as an editor at the National Post, so I can write more, including here. I want to thank everyone who took the time to write to me, and I also want to welcome my new readers. I hope you enjoy it here.
The week ahead is going to be very busy, as I wrap up loose ends at the Post. And this is happening at a busy time in the news cycle, what with an accelerating second wave of COVID-19 and the U.S. election this week. My newsletter for today will be brief, as I'm conserving my energy! Luckily, the point I wanted to make can be made reasonably tersely (at least by the standards of a writer with no editor telling him to get to the point). So here goes.
As I've written here before, I love the United States, and its people. I adore U.S. history. I made a decision a few years ago to stop writing about the U.S. I felt that there were enough writers writing about America and not enough Canadians writing about Canada. I've mostly stuck with that since, though I've bent my own self-imposed rule once or twice, I admit. I'm going to do so today to offer up a few brief thoughts on the U.S. election.
The first is this: I've been paying attention to U.S. politics at least semi-seriously since the end of the Clinton years. I would have voted for the Republican every time, until 2016. I had nothing against Gore or Kerry or Obama (twice). I just felt my politics were better aligned with the GOP candidate. In 2016, I'd have voted for Hillary Clinton to block Donald Trump. In 2020, I'd have voted for Biden. I have genuine concerns about Biden, including concerns about his age and that he may not fully have control over his own party's left flank (more on that in a minute). But I have no concerns about his decency, overall competency or commitment to America and its fundamental values. I certainly hope that in four or eight years, the GOP has gotten its house in order so that I could feel comfortable supporting a McCain or Romney-type Republican again. I don't know if that will happen, because I can see the GOP going any number of directions once Trump is purged, and I'm honestly not sure which one they'll pick. Your guess is as good as mine. We will see.
But I'd like to sincerely congratulate Mr. Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris on their victory, and to wish them good luck. Canada needs a strong, stable America. I hope it's not too much longer before I'm there again to check out a historical site, or even just to drink beer and watch a hockey game (Columbus, Buffalo, Detroit and Pittsburgh ... one day, soon, I hope!). I miss doing those things more than I thought I would. So godspeed, Mr. President-elect.
The other point I'd make is really more of an observation at this point, because it's too soon to draw any conclusions. But there has been a fascinating pair of parallel developments unfolding over the last few days. The first is the obvious rupture between Donald Trump and his inner circle and the rest of the Republican Party, which seems to be eager to be rid of Trump once and for all.
I'll leave my reaction to Mr. Spock. He captures it well.
But meanwhile, the Democrats are also already at each other's throats over whether the party swung too far left, leaving the GOP an opening in the centre. The knives were apparently out at Democratic HQ within days, if not hours, with moderate Dems decrying the party's embrace of some hard-left policies and "Defund the Police" rhetoric. This is already being blamed for hurting the party bigly in Florida, where Cuban-Americans unexpectedly supported Trump; something similar was observed in southern Texas, where Hispanic voters also broke from the Dems in surprising numbers. In a fascinating interview at The Line, an GOP-affiliated Republican pollster said that the GOP has been aware of this trend for a while, and says if the Dems don't figure this out, they'll keep losing winnable races. (Which he is obviously fine with.)
I honestly have no idea what actually happened. We'll find out. We'll get more detailed data and better analysis in the short term, and both parties will do full after-action reports on their campaigns. So everything is speculative now. But I was really interested to see handily re-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY-14) immediately reject the notion that the party's left flank hurt them in the middle. She made the case first on Twitter, and then in a long, thoughtful interview with The New York Times. In short, she's not having it.
From the Times interview, in her words:
These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?
If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.
Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.
There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities.
Like I said, she's not having it. And I suspect she's actually entirely right. Democrats should listen very carefully to what she's saying. In AOC, the Democrats have someone who understands the practice of modern politics. I don't often agree with her positions, far from it, but I think she's a formidable political mind and her criticisms should be taken seriously.
But ... she's not actually denying the assertion, is she?
AOC's argument, in effect, is to insist that A didn't kill a bunch of Democratic campaigns, because B did. But this is indulging in make-believe. Something I find so, so frustrating is our insistence on acting stupid all the time while trying to prove a point. In a non-stupid analysis, it is entirely possible that both of these things are true: that many Democratic campaigns were badly run and particularly weak in digital domains, but also that the party is struggling to connect with moderate voters because it is seen by many to have moved too far to the political left. There is absolutely nothing incompatible about those statements, and for all my respect for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's skill, she just might protest too much. Her arguments are probably true, but are so narrow that they don't actually address the key point.
Again, we'll find out eventually if there's much truth to the claim that the Dems have moved too far left to win among many segments of the American voter. The information exists, or soon will; it just needs to be gathered, organized and released. So we'll see. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep watching this one. I have a feeling that an awful lot of what's going to happen in America over the next few years is going to come down to who ends up winning this internal Democratic knife fight.
It was a busy week for me. On election day, before any results were known, I wrote this in the Post, on what Canada must do to adapt to an obviously changing world. "Canada likes to talk about the rules-based international order, but someone needs to enforce those rules. The geopolitical environment we live in is not simply the natural order of things. We are not guaranteed the many advantages we have, and we certainly aren’t owed them," I argued. "The U.S. has done the job of keeping the world safe and friendly for countries like ours for generations, but seems less and less interested, for reasons that aren’t likely to change any time soon, no matter the outcome of the U.S. election. Canada needs to get serious, or find ourselves on the outs with our less complacent allies.
"If the last four years haven’t been enough of a wake-up call, what will be?"
Also in the Post, before Biden was declared the winner but after it was clear that he had the electoral college votes he needed, I wrote this: "The Democrats may seem set to capture the White House, but the Republicans performed much better than many were anticipating. There has been no collapse in the Republican vote; Trump overperformed his 2016 vote tally. The GOP seems to have held the Senate ... and have actually picked up seats in the House. There is a six-to-three conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Can Biden get stuff done, even against all this opposition? ... Let’s ask Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham what they think about that. ... A largely intact voter base, an energized group of activists, a hemmed-in Democratic president and no more Donald Trump must sound awfully good to many senior Republican officials."
I also had this fast reaction to the election result, or what we knew of it, on Wednesday morning:
In non-U.S.-related news, I was writing, as always, at TVO.org this week. I started the week by noting that my family all had our flu shots cancelled. I wanted to know why. What I found was more interesting and nuanced than I'd expected. Check it out.
I also wrote this week about the Ontario government's announcement that it would boost the hours of care each patient will get, on average, in our long-term-care homes. This is good news, and overdue — and it's actually unrelated to the pandemic. "After Elizabeth Wettlaufer had confessed to the killing of eight residents and the attempted murder of six others, the Ontario government ordered a public inquiry into the state of long-term care in the province. ... Justice Eileen Gillese released a four-volume report on July 31, 2019; while many of the 91 recommendations were very narrowly targeted at the specific failures that had enabled Wettlaufer’s crimes, the broader overview of the system revealed many problems. The Ontario government was ordered to report back by July 31, 2020. ... COVID-19 struck during the interim and forced Ontarians to confront the grim realities inside our LTC system. The thousands of deaths, the continued outbreaks, the need to call in the armed forces to save what lives could be saved — all of these things rightly horrified the public. But the announcement the Doug Ford government made this week really wasn’t a result of the pandemic. It just happened to land during it."
And, of course, you can tune in to hear me each weekday morning at 7:00 a.m. Eastern time on SiriusXM's Canada Talks, channel 167.
That's it for me this week, folks. As I said, it'll be a busy one for me wrapping stuff up at the Post. I hope all of you have a great week and I'll look forward to being here with you again a week from today, if not sooner.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
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