Thomas Hubert is a nobody. What he says and does will never, ever come anywhere close to affecting public policy. And until a few days ago, the vast majority of Liberals - let alone the general public - had never heard of him.
To read the coverage this week, though, Hubert is quite possibly the most important person in his party - a symbol of its drift and decay, and maybe the anti-Semitism lurking under its surface. As former federal ministers, ex-premiers and world-renowned intellectuals battle it out for the leadership of the Official Opposition, everyone from columnists to the Canada-Israel Committee to the candidates themselves have focused their attention on a 19-year-old who posted some half-baked rants about the Jewish state on a couple of blogs.
Hubert's claim to fame is that he holds a position with the Liberals' youth wing - not as its "youth leader in British Columbia," as a Canadian Press story identified him, but as the B.C. Young Liberals' communications director. This sounds impressive enough, I suppose, but as someone who once held a similar position in Ontario fresh out of high school and having belonged to the party for all of a few months, I can attest that Hubert is hardly walking the corridors of power.
As for his affiliation with leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy's campaign, for which the former Ontario minister has paid a steep public relations price this week, it appears to have boiled down to expressing his support and posing for a photo together during some sort of meet-and-greet.
For describing Hezbollah as "an organization that stood up to the most vile 'nation' in human history," it was only right that Hubert would have to resign his position with the party, however lowly. But the fact that anyone considers his scribblings a serious reflection of how Liberals view the Middle East is a reflection of just how bad we've gotten at parsing what's relevant and what is not. And for that, and all the grief he's causes them, the Liberals have nobody to blame but themselves.
It was inevitable, with the Internet serving as an archive of every stupid thing anyone has ever said, that these sorts of mini-scandals would arise more than in the past. Twenty years ago, people like Hubert shared their views verbally with a couple of friends; today, they put them on record in the public domain for other bloggers to chew on. But it's doubtful whether many people outside the blogosphere would care, if not for the precedent set by the Liberals last decade.
Election after election, Liberal war rooms caused utter havoc for each incarnation of their conservative opponents - painting them as right-wing extremists hell-bent on junking the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At times they weren't so far off - in the early days of the Reform Party, notably, and when the Canadian Alliance chose Stockwell Day as its leader. But when conservative leaders weren't being hard-line enough, the Liberals would dig up comments by some obscure candidate without a hope of winning, holding them up as evidence that the whole party was as regressive as ever.
It was an enormously well-executed and successful strategy, but it set a costly precedent. Today, we're conditioned to be scandalized by any intemperate comments - no matter how minor a player they come from. The Liberals' opponents, having learned from the best, are only too happy to help us along. But in some cases - as with Hubert, who was initially called out by other Liberals - they don't even need to bother.
When these little controversies unfold, there's usually a grain of truth to the claims that they represent some broader phenomenon. The various conservative parties did have a hard time reconciling their socially conservative roots with the moderation needed to win elections, and the Liberals are all over the map when it comes to the Middle East. But that means we should look carefully at what their leaders, senior decision-makers and to a lesser extent their MPs have to say - not waste our time elevating teenagers to national spokespeople.
Everyone who's ever worked on a political campaign knows that you don't get to choose your supporters, and you sure don't vet them with extensive interviews on their views on international affairs. So it's absolutely ludicrous to judge Gerard Kennedy - a candidate who certainly hasn't been actively pandering to the anti-Israel crowd - on the basis of what one of his marginal backers had to say.
But then, the Liberals are just reaping what they sowed. And if they're so incompetent as to be tripped up by guys like Thomas Hubert as they choose their next leader, they'll deserve the fate they get.
