NDP Leadership #145

 Damn, you're ascerbic, Unionist!  (But in an absolutely hilarious way!)

Unionist wrote:

dacckon wrote:

Brad Lavigne resigns as NDP's principal secretary
Tis' a shame, I always liked how he threw people out for being morons.

Maybe he did it one last time?

Awesome picture on facebook of Libby Davies holding up a Thomas Mulcair sign with a big smile on her face :)

Hunky_Monkey wrote:

Brad Lavinge has resigned as national director and principal secretary.

He hasn't been National Director for quite a while.

dacckon wrote:

Boom Boom wrote:

That allows us to campaign from the centre and govern from the left!  Mulcair's grand strategy?

 

Hopefully, this is what I have always wanted to happen.

 

Campaign from the centre.

 

Then "accidentally", with pride, govern from the logical left.

I hate to say it, but this is a terrible idea. The Liberals and Cons can get away with this sort of behaviour because the establishment, in all their forms, always support right-wing movement. It doesn't work the other way around. If a party turns out right-wing policies that they didn't campaign on, the narrative is "More responsible than we expected. Showing surprising level-headedness. Hurrah!". If they do the same with left-wing policies, it's "Trying to sneak socialism by the back door. They should have campaigned on these policies but were afraid to reveal them because they wouldn't have gotten elected. Deceivers!"

Basically, outside of responding to day-to-day politics, the party should always do what they say they'll do and only do what they say they'll do. No surprises! The NDP has never taken office before and has a loooong way to go to win the public's trust, even after we take government. Canada will only be "trying us out", just as Quebec is. In both cases it would take far less to dissolve that support than it would for more established parties, because better the devil you know, right? One of the key strategic mistakes that the NDP cannot allow is to let themselves be framed as "just like the other parties" (right behind getting framed as incompetent, which is what happened at the convention, which is a whole other matter). Like the old feminist saw goes, we have to be twice as good to get the same reward. Fortunately, that's not difficult. :)

But I do agree that the whole "struggle in the party, left vs. right" story that's emerged from the race, accurate or not, puts us in a good position. Now people who've been paying attention have come away feeling that the NDP just became more centrist, and hence, more electable. Granted, that's a small number, but it includes all the politicos and talking heads that form the opinions of the masses. This totally undercuts all the Cons' traditional methods of attack, since every red-baiting slur will be met with the vauge public notion that the NDP just recently became less extreme, so those things aren't a problem anymore. And it was already undercut by the very modest and centrist campaigns that the NDP ran under Jack, as well as his popularity. Of course, the notion that the NDP is an extreme party to begin with is a right-wing fiction, so Canadians looking at the party closer will find nothing to dissuade them from the notion that the NDP is comfortably in the middle of the road, and that will further reinforce this narrative of a recent shift. Looks like their own framing might come back to bite them.

Another thing that's going to fall flat is this "nasty Mulcair" thing. The first thing that I liked about Mulcair was how well he speaks and presents, especially in terms of radiating that competent authority that the NDP needs to win, but he was lacking a lot as well. What really impressed me was watching how cleanly and professionally he shut down his more aggressive nature to project a uniter's tone for the race. All the candidates had weaknesses, and you saw all of them working on them and improving throughout the race (which was fun) but you saw all of them struggle to overcome those weaknesses as well. All except Mulcair, who knew he was cast as divisive and too much of an attack dog, and from day one presented as a calm, unflappable, elder statesman, even slipping into boring now and again. I could see that this guy will remake himself into whatever is needed to win, and actually has the control to do that. I don't think we'll be seeing as much of nasty Mulcair. I think he knows that he's got to become warmer and more positive, and will do just that. The Cons will keep looking worse and worse as all their attacks miss the mark. I foresee a bad three years for Harper.

You don't understand. I'm talking about a perception. One that I don't consider to be accurate, but that helps us nonetheless.

To be clear about where I'm coming from, I already consider the NDP to be the center. That is, the ideological center of the Canadian public. Canadian values are NDP values and the party has done this deliberately. The move to the center is old news. We continue to labour under the public perception that we are a left wing party because we incessantly are described that way by the politicos and talking heads.

However, they are also correct in their limited way, because their whole perspective is within the narrow confines of the political class, and the NDP is on the left end of their spectrum. The thing is that the spectrum of the political class is quite a bit to the right of the spectrum of the general public. It's the failure to recognise this dissonance that mixes people up about left and right this way. The NDP continues to be described as a left-wing party, but it would be more accurately seen these days as populist, merely trying to preserve values that were once mainstream, and are still popular, but have been abandoned by the political class. Besides environmental measures, which are a new concern, the NDP don't promote anything more radical than turning the clock back a few years on the rightward crush of the last four decades. It has been a very long time since the NDP intended to change the system. They just promise to run it better.

So what I'm speaking of is specifically those voters who don't follow politics a lot and could be swing voters for us but have been held back by the vauge and sketchy notion that the NDP isn't a serious party that is able to govern. I believe that this is a rather big group, and the polling of second choices in the last election supports this, I think. I'm saying that those voters, under the murky notion that the NDP are "too left" for them, will pick up this meme of a recent centrist shift and it will give them a feeling of peace about the idea of voting for us. Then when they check out the NDP (even if that isn't until election time) they'll like what they see, and their brain will build the story that it's because of that centrist shift they had, that's why they reflect my values so well. It allows them to build a rational argument in their minds that justifies voting NDP. In reality, the party will be promoting all the same stuff as last time, no doubt, and we were always the party that reflected their values best. They just didn't trust that enough to act on it.

Again, this is just that pool of potential swing voters out there who are not very political and don't follow this stuff but absorb little bits of it in the news and such. I think there are tons of people who are like this, and who ultimately vote on their feelings rather than any knowledge of the political circumstances of the election. That's why impressions can be so powerful, regardless of what realities are.

I don't think the NDP is at or should be at the ideological centre of Canadians.

We are a left of centre alternative.

I do think that the NDP is at the global political centre but that Canada in general is a bit to the right of the global centre.

I think Mulcair is saying we need to convince people of the policies we want to bring not berate them for not agreeing with us.

I don't think it is fair to say he wants to move the party to the right and I don't think that is the objective we are looking for.

Others challenged me by saying that rhetoric was the party. I am not convinced. The party is policies that can change people's lives. Otherwise we would have to then call the Liberals progressive because their rhetoric is progressive. I think we can tone down the unnecessary rhetoric that has no application in policy. Instead we should be looking at the themes and messages of our membership and look to reflect them in our policy and present them to Canadians in the best way we can to convince people to support those ideas and our party. That is not a move to the right. It is a move away from focusing on what we talk about to what we actually do.

So when it comes to labour for example-- we don't need to tell labour how union-friendly we are or fill the air with slogans about us against them and all those words. Instead we should put in place policies to protect collective bargaining, encourage union organizing because everyone has a right to be in a union, and to promote good, well-paying union jobs. I don't want to hear what the NDP has to say about things it has no policies to support. This is where I have at times become frustrated and felt there was some hypocrisy in those statements. I don't need Mulcair to tell me he is a friend of working people in disconnected words. He can tell me in the context of specific policies we want to see adopted. This is what I mean by dropping the rhetoric.

Now, I gave the example of labour but this is extended to everything. Don't talk to me about being the party of peace just in words. I don't need that. Show me specific policies that say this and then I can take a few words of rhetoric. Otherwise can the words that are not associated with actions. Canada has had the Liberal party for many decades and is tired of that.

If this is what people mean by modernization, I'm all for it. This is different than tossing principles and policies overboard for votes.

jerrym wrote:

Freedom 55 isn't it time to change your name to Freedom 95 as Harper unveils his budget and plans for pensions. 

Haha! I'm not particularly fond of my screen name, so maybe I should change it. Although, the inane reference to retirement planning was only secondary when I came up with it.

Quote:

- they tend to yell and scream a lot about "process issues" like prorogation, Afghan detainees, contempt of parliament, robo-calls etc...- while the NDP focused more on bread and butter issues...

Yes, there is a long history of regimes that resolved "issues" by ignoring the mere "processes" of democracy.

With the NDP right-wing, anyone pointing out the failures of The Party is equally, and bizarrely, likely to be called a "Liberal" or "the hard left".

contrarianna wrote:

Quote:

- they tend to yell and scream a lot about "process issues" like prorogation, Afghan detainees, contempt of parliament, robo-calls etc...- while the NDP focused more on bread and butter issues...

Yes, there is a long history of regimes that resolved "issues" by ignoring the mere "processes" of democracy.

With the NDP right-wing, anyone pointing out the failures of The Party is equally, and bizarrely, likely to be called a "Liberal" or "the hard left".

I'm getting the feeling that many of these people who claim to be progressive really aren't - not at their core.  How can you claim to be progressive without waiting to see how someone behaves and performs in a role before they even start.  Sounds pretty reactionary to me.

Well said.

It's bad enough that the Cons attacked him within 24 hours of winning but some of our own people can't wait to hang Mulcair out to dry as well. Jeesh!