Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Just What Does it Take to Run the Office These Days?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Most people who have actual, real jobs would find it hard to abandon their work for a couple of months, unless given an official leave of absence and being replaced temporarily by someone else.

How many teachers, lawyers, garage mechanics, barbers, insurance salespeople, and, for that matter, professors, could just take time off from work, without their disappearance having an effect on others in their workplace?

But Sarah Palin has been on the road, running as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, since August. So who’s minding the store up in Alaska? She is, after all, the governor – the chief executive officer, the CEO, of the state.

Barack Obama, John McCain and Joe Biden, are senators, members of the legislative branch, the Congress, so this question doesn’t apply to them. Indeed, Congress isn’t even in session right now.

Sure, Palin may be signing off on bills, but how different is this from Queen Elizabeth giving the royal assent to legislation passed by the British Parliament?

The fact that Palin’s absence in the state makes little difference tells us something about the dirty little secret of modern politics, especially as practiced in America today. Many political figures today are really just “fronts,” people placed on their parties’ tickets as a result of their “electability” or “persona,” and thus the recipients of large amounts of cash from donors, who in return hope for policy decisions that will favour them.

The elected officials don’t actually do the work. They are not all that different from British aristocrats who, until the practice was abolished in 1868, bought army commissions for their sons, and expected others in the military to do the actual thinking when it came to warfare.

At least Biden and Obama attended law school, while McCain was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and an officer in the Navy. Palin barely managed to obtain a BA from the University of Idaho. She seems to use the word “maverick” as a synonym for being unlettered.

It was not always this way. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president in 1860, the voters expected him to really do the job. Honest Abe didn’t have a whole staff around him for the heavy lifting.

He wrote the “Gettysburg Address” himself, and didn’t use focus groups to see if it would be well received. Today, of course, presidents have speech writers, media consultants, analysts, strategists, and hundreds of other specialists at their side.

This is why the charges of “plagiarism” levelled against a politician when someone discovers they have lifted parts of another official’s speech fall flat. After all, it’s just one ghost writer stealing from another! None of this stuff is actually written by the candidates.

Just imagine, using my own job as an example, if this were the case in other walks of life:

Competing with others for a university position, I am selected by (and only by) the “electorate,” in other words the student body, for reasons best known only to themselves. And they have absolute control of the process; none of the faculty or administrators can veto their decision.

My specialty is comparative politics, and perhaps I’m not really up to speed in my field. But that doesn’t really matter. I’ll simply hire genuine political scientists to prepare my course syllabi, write my lectures, mark exams and term papers, and do all of my scholarly research and writing, up to and including the books that I will publish. And I get all the credit.

Not a bad gig, eh? Welcome to the world of 21st century democracy, where image is all and expertise comes a distant second.

That’s why the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin, rather than on books. Too bad -- she might have learned what the position of vice-president of the United States really entails.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Quebec Marches to Its Own Electoral Drummer

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In his column published recently in the Guardian, Richard Gwyn remarked, in commenting on the federal election, that "Quebec acted as if completely disengaged from the national political process."

The Bloc Québécois won 50 of Quebec's 75 seats last week, leaving the three major federal parties (and the Greens) in the dust. The Liberals got 13 seats, mostly around Montreal, the Conservatives 10, the NDP one, plus a single independent.

Though Stephen Harper "showered money and favours and attention on the province," Quebec's response was "to yawn." Gwyn added that, when it comes to federal politics, "Quebecers, it now seems, look exclusively at themselves."

Globe and Mail writer Jeffrey Simpson analyzed the results in the same vein. "Bloc voters obviously feel comfortable with the party," he wrote. "Some are separatists; others are not. They apparently welcome a party that wants no part of governing Canada while continuing to demand more and more from it."

The party, he observed, wants more money and jurisdictional power, plus a larger international presence, for the province. These are all "way stations to the Bloc's eventual goal of an independent Quebec."

Canada, concluded Simpson, "is no longer a country they wish to participate in governing, but one from which they wish to withdraw cash, like an automated teller machine."

Remember, the Liberal Party, which in the past had a hammerlock on Quebec, has been unable to win a majority of Quebec's 75 seats since 1980, even when led by francophone Québécois such as Jean Chrétien and Stéphane Dion. And of course the Tories have been toast since the days of Brian Mulroney.

The Bloc's strength also weakens Canada's national parties. With Gilles Duceppe winning upwards of 50 seats per election, as he did on October 14, it becomes very difficult for any other party to reach the 154 seats needed to form a majority government.

We achieved our objective, Duceppe told supporters. Without the Bloc Harper would have formed a majority government.

And this suits the Bloc just fine. It gives the party, which is in effect a Quebec nationalist lobby, more power to extract money and other goodies from those who govern in Ottawa, lest the government fall.

So guess what, mes amis. While you've all been monitoring the state of the Quebec sovereignty movement, wondering whether it remains a viable option for francophones, the game is practically over.

This is the sixth election since 1993 where the majority of francophone votes and seats in Quebec have gone to the Bloc Québécois. This can't be written off as a series of "accidents" or "sour grapes," with the Bloc simply taking advantage of miscues by the leaders of the other parties.

Quebec is already a "nation within a state." Even the provincial government of Jean Charest, nominally Liberal, acts like a national government, making demands on Ottawa little different from those of the separatist Parti Québécois.

Becoming independent one day will for Quebec be little more than a formality. Most people, either there or in the rest of Canada, will hardly notice the difference.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

McCain Carrying a Load of Ethical Baggage

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin can spout silly nonsense about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, it’s only fair that Obama in return should hammer away at another piece of history, the ‘Keating Five’ scandal of the late 1980s.

In recent campaign speeches, Palin has criticized Obama’s association with Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical offshoot of the New Left student movement that engaged in a number of bombings at the time.

Palin said that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

But Obama, who was all of eight years old when these crimes were committed, barely knows Ayers, who is today a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both have been involved with school reform in Chicago and were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund, between 1999 and 2002.

In fact, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has declared that he, too, has worked with Ayers. “I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over.”

Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democratic Congressman, warned that “If we are going to go down this road,” he would remind voters that, two decades ago, “John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.”

During the 1980s, Senator McCain received $112,000, and free vacations for his family, from Charles Keating, the head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. Such savings and loan banks had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors’ money. Keating took advantage of this change.

McCain, a personal friend of Keating’s, voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of savings and loans, and in 1987, when he learned that Keating’s bank was the target of a federal investigation, McCain met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

Keating ended up defrauding his customers and when his bank collapsed in 1989, some 23,000 people were victimized and many lost their life savings, largely because they now held securities issued by another Keating-owned company, American Continental Corporation, which had declared bankruptcy, rather than federally insured bank deposits.

Keating went to prison, and the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded McCain for “poor judgment.” (Four other U.S. senators were also involved; they became known collectively as the “Keating Five.”)

William Black, who was a deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation at the time, indicated that McCain’s chief error was in underestimating the importance of regulation and relying too heavily on slanted advice from bankers and lobbyists.

Black, now an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, added that McCain’s campaign still remains heavily influenced by lobbyists working in his campaign.

When it comes to the economy, the so-called maverick John McCain, who bragged until recently that he was fundamentally a deregulator, is part of the problem, not the solution.