William Watson: The unfortunate example of Hillary Clinton — Populist trumps unpopular
A prime minister celebrating 30 years since coming to office, 60 years since first being elected to Parliament and 90 years on the planet, and a former American first lady and secretary of state who lost one presidential campaign to Barack Obama and a second to Donald Trump may not be the most dynamic duo with which to prove your political party is still leading-edge. It’s especially a problem when the people you put up to interview them — François-Philippe Champagne in the case of former prime minister Jean Chrétien and Chrystia Freeland for former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton — look like they don’t really belong in the same league, even after several years in government.
But Chrétien and Clinton are the pair the Liberals opened their national convention with and they seem to have gone over well with the delegates. Chrétien, still the old pro, made good use of his trademark sense of humour, suggesting the Liberals offer Stephen Harper a membership card, since he was always much more reasonable and optimistic (the essential Liberal values, supposedly) than the current Conservative crew is. Humour is now largely absent from our politics, which is a shame, both aesthetically and because little else can so swiftly or effectively deflate a blustering opponent.
Though I disagree with Hillary Clinton on most things, I would have voted for her in 2016 if I’d had a vote or known someone at one of the voting machine companies and I’ve always respected that she can correctly use and pronounce, at speed, a word like “megalomaniacally”: she’s a great, if uninspiring, talker — though inspirational talking is overrated.
So far as I could tell from YouTube, two things she said earned standing ovations. First, her discussion of Roe v. Wade, or at least Freeland’s declaration, following Clinton’s discussion of Roe v. Wade, that Canada will always stand on the side of a woman’s right to choose. It’s the kind of statement where, if this were a genuine conversation instead of a show-talk, you’d ask: “Well, don’t women in Sweden, France, Germany and lots of other countries where there are time limits on abortion nevertheless still have the right to choose?”
And the other was when she talked about how important it was that we continue to support Ukraine since Ukraine is fighting for our freedom. This was one of several opportunities Freeland took to brag — though always prefacing it by saying Canadians hate to brag, an argument that grows less convincing with every use — in this instance about Canada’s contribution to the struggle. We were the very first, did you know, to ban Russian oil and gas imports — though if we imported them at European scale, our foreign minister would still be consulting with her officials on just what the consequences of a ban would be.
Speaking of China, Clinton’s no-nonsense approach to Chinese President-for-life Xi Jinping and his declaration that he didn’t want to leave the “problem” of Taiwan to a successor did not get a standing ovation and, unless I was imagining it, seemed to cause discomfort in a room full of people who until recently had been strongly pro-China. When Clinton talked about how, among many U.S. Republicans, especially men, there’s unhealthy respect for authoritarian leaders, it became clear she hadn’t been briefed on (though the whole room was involuntarily recalling) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unfortunate expression of admiration for China’s ability to pivot its environmental policies on a yuan.
One male Republican, the orange one who beat her in 2016, came in for special condemnation as someone willing to undermine his most cherished country’s institutions to pursue his own political and financial interests. We all need to be aware of the dangers such men present to our democracy, Clinton said. When people engage in election denialism, when they go so far as to storm and temporarily take over Congress, the threat is very real and needs to be denounced and fought.
When Freeland took up that argument, the rationale for Clinton’s appearance suddenly became clear. When people say they would fire the governor of the Bank of Canada, Freeland said, or defund the CBC, our very democracy is under threat. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, you see, equals Trump.
Excuse me? If the governor of the Bank of Canada fails at his main job and lets inflation get way out of control, it threatens democracy for the elected prime minister who appoints him to seek to replace him? And if a publicly funded broadcaster chooses sides in important public debates while producing programming that, a saving grace, goes largely unwatched, an elected government is not allowed to reduce its budget? Those are the Canadian equivalents of storming Congress?
Clinton seemed not to object to the use of her presence to attempt to Trumpify Poilievre. For perfectly understandable reasons, however, she may not have thought through the full implications of the parallel. But her Liberal friends should have. In 2016, a truly outrageous populist beat a genuinely unpopular Clinton. Populist trumps unpopular.
In his eighth year in office, Justin Trudeau has begun to grate on people the way Secretary Clinton did in 2016. And Pierre Poilievre, however Liberals will paint him, is not that outrageous a populist.
Yes, indeed, beware “the populist.”
Financial Post
