Kill the Messengers by Mark Bourrie

Author:Mark Bourrie [Bourrie, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443431064
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2015-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Frat Boys and Cheerleaders

A government is like a sausage. You want some shit in it, but not too much.

—NAZI COLLABORATOR AND FUTURE FIRING SQUAD TARGET PIERRE LAVAL, PREMIER OF VICHY FRANCE

Arthur J. Finkelstein is proud of being called America’s Merchant of Venom. He is one of a growing army of professional strategists who have changed politics from a profession to a game. Politics has never been a calling for the thin-skinned and the empathic, but it used to have some moral standards. And, in the end, people seeking political office did tend to take public service seriously and act as though they were responsible for a sacred trust. Not all of them were as conscientious as Harry Truman, who saw all of the trappings of presidential power as baubles lent to the citizen who holds the job that must be returned upon leaving, but ministers did use to resign in shame for transgressions as minor as being caught in a strip club. People like Finkelstein changed that.

Nowadays, honour is seen as a sign of weakness and honesty is construed as possible disloyalty to the team. Finkelstein, one of the people who is supposed to have inspired Stephen Harper’s combativeness, made his reputation helping Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidents get elected; he was also one of the strategists who put Benjamin Netanyahu into power in Israel. He first showed up in Canada as an adviser to the National Citizens Coalition, helping with its advocacy ads in the early 1990s, before Stephen Harper was hired to run the mysterious pressure group. Finkelstein, like many other modern political strategists, advocates tough attack advertising against opposing candidates as they appear on the scene, so that their reputation can be poisoned in the public mind before voters get a chance to get to know them.

At least one writer credits Finkelstein with changing the public meaning of the word “liberal” from one of generosity and open-mindedness to recklessness and weakness. It didn’t matter that nineteenth-century liberals favoured free markets and decent wages and working conditions, or that in the twentieth century liberals had led the United States through the two world wars and the Korean War and had got the country mired in Vietnam. They were appeasers, and, when a highly decorated Democrat ran for president, the neo-cons brought out other veterans to ruin his reputation. Nor would the public remember that liberals had led them out of the Great Depression, passed the Civil Rights Act and presided over the transition of the American wartime economy into a consumer-driven behemoth that raised millions of people out of poverty, not only in America, but also all over the world.

Starting in the Reagan years, Democrats would flinch at the word “liberal,” and middle-class voters who had become the wealthiest working people in world history would spit the word out as a political profanity. Liberals would now, in the public mind, be considered wastrels, cowardly in the face of foreign enemies, soft on illegal immigrants, and adopters of pretty much every loony idea that comes along.

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