“Elections should be about ideas” (NDP leader Jack Layton). Uh, I think that’s a bad idea. Undergraduate education should be about ideas. You get great reading lists, inspiring profs, you yak in the dorm late at night. But elections? They should be about what happens to ideas put into practice.

Twenty years ago, leaders like Ronald Reagan or Brian Mulroney could run on sheer ideas, like free trade or deregulation, that hadn’t yet been tried. (At least not since mid-19th century). Since then, we’ve had lots of experience with such policies, and voters can make a far more experienced choice. We’re not in the dorm any more, Toto. (And socialism sounded straightforward too, till there were some actual cases to examine.)

Elections are also about judging leaders’ capacity for judgment, since mostly what they deal with in power is unexpected crises, such as SARS or 9/11, that you can’t have ready-made ideas for.

I’m not saying Jack Layton is an ideologue. More an ideas-logue. The guy spits them out. You don’t like that, try this: windmills, proportional representation, rooftop vegetable gardens.

For a real ideologue, you have to turn to Stephen Harper. He doesn’t spew ideas, he takes a few and muses on how he got them, honed them, stuck to them. (“I have always used the term conservative to describe my political philosophy. . . I employ the term as modern conservatives describe themselves.”) These ideas are clearly a deep part of his sense of self. Or should I say, this idea. The sign of ideology is the conviction that one idea, or a tight, related set, can be successfully applied to any topic or situation. Everything follows reasonably, except the monomaniacal premise it starts from.

In a Globe and Mail article in 1997, Harper compared the paper’s version of conservatism to “a patrician socialist seeking common cause with the lumpen proletariat.” From now on, my definition of ideologue will be anyone who can read The Globe and Mail and find socialist propaganda.

Harper comes to his current post after leading the National Citizens Coalition, a group ideological enough to reduce baseball standings to a fight between the free individual and big government. It led the battles against bilingualism and the metric system. It once compared Ed Broadbent to Ayatollah Khomeini. Jack Layton, by contrast, recently headed the squishy Federation of Canadian Municipalities. To find a left equivalent of the NCC, you need to leapfrog the NDP to maybe the Marxist-Leninist Party.

Paul Martin is the clinker here. He likes the idea of ideas. He gets excited about them. But he gets excited about whatever hops across in front of the windshield. It’s hard to remember what comes after, “I’m very, very excited about — ” or “I’ve been very clear about — ” Enthusiasm rules.

I know people who say Paul Martin’s real agenda is to serve the rich and the corporate elite. But after watching a lot of TV for the past six weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that his real problem is that he has no agenda. (He may not realize this, but what difference does that make?) And maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe for the next 10 years, he could get as excited about building a vibrant health-care system as he was about erasing the deficit — come hell, high water or sick people — during the past decade.

He’s like Groucho Marx, who barked, “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Principles can be overrated when dealing with reality. Even V. I. Lenin, whom you’d normally consider a total (Karl) Marxist ideologue, after seizing power in a devastated Russia, decided: What this country needs is a little capitalism. That showed genius.

I take back what I once said about this election being uninteresting. It is interesting, though not because of the leaders but because of the voters, as they try to sort through complex motives. They’d like to spank Paul Martin but maybe not send him to his room. They don’t want to be lied to and fooled again, but only a fool gives up totally on believing. It’s still unclear what they will do in the end, with the blunt instrument of a single ballot, in the barren, bland privacy of a polling booth.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.