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Thursday May 6, 2004
Paul Martin: master of the understatement
According to Jane Taber, Paul Martin told his caucus that the coming election will be the "most important" one ever, and that "at no time have...the choices been so clear."
Really? I mean, I can see how it might be the most important election ever for Paul Martin. But for the country? That would require the second statement - the one about clear choices - to be true. And that, unless I'm missing something, would require the two leading parties to release their platforms at some point, and maybe even start talking policy instead of making stuff up about each other.
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Tuesday May 4, 2004
The Howard Dean fan club (membership: 2)
My friend (and former Pundit writer) Milan Markovic is arguing from his perch in DC that what John Kerry needs is more Howard Dean. I'm not sure, at this point, that selecting Dean as a running mate wouldn't do more harm than good - he seems like the kind of guy who'd be a massive headache in that role. But I'm one of the few people (other than Milan, of course) who still thinks the Dems might have made a mistake passing him over for the nomination in the first place.
I'm serious. Yes, his campaign's implosion was largely of his own making. But I suspect Americans had seen the worst of Dean, and would have been pleasantly surprised to discover during the coming campaign that he wasn't completely out of his skull. Sometimes, exceeding low expectations is all you need to do to get a spike, and Dean's - much like Bush's in 2000, when everyone thought he was a moron - were ridiculously low. Simply proving that he was sane and competent might have been enough to convince voters to give him a second look. By contrast, Kerry will be judged against inexplicably high expectations, and I'm guessing the judgement won't be an overly kind one.
Admittedly, I've gone out on a bit of a limb - so feel free to chop it down. Just remember, the next time you say you want different, less scripted candidates, how quickly Dean scared you off. Too bad (if for no other reason than
as a sociological experiment) that we'll never know if mainstream U.S. voters would have responded the same way.
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Monday May 3, 2004
Back in blog (II)
Okay, this time I promise not to disappear for another week. I was moving (homes, not jobs), and moving is hell (though not as much hell as trying to sit through yesterday's Leafs game). We're now more or less settled, though, so no more excuses. You want blogging, you'll get blogging.
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Adam Radwanski
Y'all are gettin' played
Could we please have a moratorium on stories like
this one about Olivia Chow is "considering" running in Trinity-Spadina, or better still about hubby Jack Layton is "encouraging" her to do so?
What are the odds that
the NDP leader's wife will shaft him by announcing a few days before a probable election call that she's going to stick to municipal politics, leaving the party without a candidate in one of the most winnable ridings in Ontario? Olivia's running, period. If she wasn't, I daresay Jack might've chosen that turf over Toronto-Danforth himself.
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Score one for the chronically underrated
The Charlatans' entire new album, Up at the Lake, is available for free on their
official website.
For my money, these guys are the British band of the past two decades. Sure, the Stone Roses were bigger (and better) in the early '90s, the same could be said for Oasis (and maybe Blur) in the mid/late '90s, and there have been plenty of other pretenders since. But none of them could match the Charlatans' consistency. It's hard to think of too many bands that hit their stride almost a decade in, but they fit the bill. The jury's still out on whether Up at the Lake is as much of standout as their last three albums, but it's well worth the download. And much as I liked Wonderland
s funk, that countryish twang is sounding awfully good to me.
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Monday April 26, 2004
Defending Joe (sort of)
I seem to have somehow become Joe Clark's biggest defender (Winnipeg's CJOB this morning, Global's Last Word this evening), which is odd since I'm not even much of a fan.
Here's the thing - you can't be a "traitor" to something you never belonged to. Clark have never belonged to the Conservative Party of Canada. He belonged to the now-defunct Progressive Conservative Party. They are not the same thing.
Unlike some of his former colleagues, Clark has never pretended to be a fan of the new party. He's never staged a dramatic exit on the basis of some trumped-up dispute. He's always opposed folding the Tories into the CPC, he's sat as an independent, and he's announced he's not running for re-election. That sort of consistency gives him the right to speak his mind. And when he says he doesn't like any of his choices in the coming election, I suspect he speaks for more voters ? Red Tories and disgruntled Liberals alike ? than he ever did as his party's leader.
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Adam Radwanski
Back in blog
Got a little derailed by technical problems over the weekend, but all is
well again. And since nobody else (as far as I can tell) has noticed a minor
case of foreign policy intrigue that played out in the pages of the
Star, maybe I can still weigh in without seeming completely
stale.
On Thursday, the Star's Jim Travers told
us to look for an exciting new development in the Prime Minister's
upcoming visit to DC. "Paul Martin will carry to Washington next week an
innovative and politically shrewd plan for Canada to take a leading role in
building the institutions Iraq needs to trade chaos for democracy," he
wrote. "Designed to help restore a failed state while keeping Canadians out
of harm's way, the proposal calls for Ott
awa to dramatically strengthen its
current $300 million commitment to Iraq's post-war rec
onstruction by
developing training centres in neighbouring Jordan to support everything
from justice and elections to federalism."
Fascinating stuff, right? Travers certainly thought so. "Politically, it
shows that a government under fire for talking too much and doing too little
is moving forward on a key priority Martin first identified during the
leadership campaign," he concluded."For a summit that is being coyly
downplayed as just business as usual, that's not a bad start. For Canada's
new place in the world, it's a good beginning."
Fast forward two days to Saturday's Travers column, headlined No great
expectations at Martin-Bush summit.
Sure, there's the usual glowing praise for St. Paul ("This Prime Minister
is never better than when he is tackling head-on the sprawling issues that
confront a new, chaotic and often frightening world order.") But there's no
mention whatsoever of the aforementioned "innovative and politically shrewd
plan" to help establish "Canada's new place in the world." Instead, we're
told that it "isn't reasonable to expect this visit to measurably advance
Martin's - or Bush's - political interests."
Umm, what happened? Does Travers have an extremely short attention span,
did he jump the gun the first time, or (and this is my guess, given the way
things have gone lately) did the Martinites change their spin? After all,
this Prime Minister is also never better than when he's frantically
backtracking.
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Adam Radwanski
Radwanski's Ramblings from April 16-22,
2004
Radwanski's Ramblings from April 9-15,
2004
Radwanski's Ramblings from April 2-8,
2004
Radwanski's Ramblings from March 26-April 1,
2004
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