THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 5, Season 3
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Host: Tom Clark
Guest Interviews: Amy Kremer, John Harwood, Susan Delacourt, Ron Kronstein
Location: Ottawa
**Check against delivery**
Tom Clark:
On this Sunday morning, some breaking news, the two Canadians imprisoned in Egypt have just been released. John Greyson and Tarek Loubani are safe and with Canadian consular officials in Cairo. More on that later in the show.
But first, day six of the American government shut down. Neither Democrats nor Republicans made any move overnight to end the shutdown but is the Republican Party about to feel the pain? Is it all out civil war in the Republican ranks as the Tea Party calls the shots? We’re joined by a Tea Party leader.
And next week’s throne speech marks two years to the 2015 election. How will you decide how to vote? Well the answer might surprise you.
Plus, landslide in Nova Scotia, well that provinces politics are poised for a radical change.
I’m Tom Clark and this is The West Block.
Well the House of Representatives sits empty this morning and won’t be back in business until tomorrow afternoon. No talks, no meetings, no negotiations are planned, and in this vacuum, a cavalcade of blame. The president blames the Republicans and many Republicans blame the Tea Party. What is the Tea Party and why does it have so much influence? Here it is, your weekly West Block Primer:
The Republican Party: the party of Abraham Lincoln. It has produced more American presidents than any other party. But in the last six years, a fringe group of Conservatives known as the Tea Party has had the grand old party staggering. Their core beliefs: radically reduce the role of government. Radically reduce government spending and no new taxes. Exactly when and where it started isn’t clear but on February 12th of 2009, this is where it took off. CNBC Business News editor Rick Santelli on president Obama’s plan for a mortgage bailout:
Rick Santelli:
How many of you people want to pay for your neighbours mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills, raise their hand. (Crowd boos) President Obama, are you listening? We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.
Tom Clark:
Rallies were organized across the country; groups gathering under the banner of the Tea Party. And their real target the Republicans. Those carrying the party banner that weren’t Conservative enough for the Tea Party were targeted and removed and Tea Party candidates put in their place. Their influence is so strong that last week, the Republican leadership gave way to a couple of dozen Tea Partiers in Congress and shutdown the US government. According to public opinion polls, this civil war within the party is sinking the GOP.
Well joining me now from Atlanta Georgia is one of the most influential members of the Tea Party movement, Amy Kremer. She is the chair of the Tea Party express. Ms. Kremer thanks very much for being here this morning.
Amy Kremer:
Thanks for having me.
Tom Clark:
I want to go right to the heart of this issue. You want the repeal of the Health Reform Act known as Obamacare, even though it cleared every single democratic hurdle, including a presidential election. You lost why can’t you take no for an answer?
Amy Kremer:
Well because it was not passed the correct way. It wasn’t passed through the normal process. It was passed not with one Republican vote and they used a procedural trick to get it passed because they knew that they couldn’t get it through if they didn’t do it that way. With the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts rewrote it so that it was deemed as a tax. Well our constitution does not allow a law…a tax to originate in the Senate. It has to originate in the House of Representatives. So there’s that. And then everybody keeps saying, oh president Obama won. He ran on this health care law. No, I’m so tired of hearing that because you know what, the facts are that had all this bad information about how bad this law really is for America and our economy, had all this information that we’ve seen come out over the past several weeks come out before last November, I don’t think we would have had the same results law November. And look, I mean, what’s wrong with delaying this giving all of America an exemption when the president himself, which he doesn’t have the authority to do, has changed the law I believe some 17 times to give big business, special interest, Congress an exemption. Why can’t the American people have an exemption?
Tom Clark:
Just a second now, you don’t want to delay this, you want to get rid of this even though it has been signed into law.
Amy Kremer:
That’s true.
Tom Clark:
But listen what you’re doing, what the Tea Party is doing, a very small number; 49 members of that Tea Party caucus on Parliament…on Capitol Hill rather basically shutdown the government. Even Republicans are saying you’re the problem.
Amy Kremer:
No we haven’t shutdown the government. No, we have not shutdown the government. Harry Reid and president Obama have shutdown the government. They are the two… the House of Representatives have passed at least four continuing resolutions completely funding the government and not funding Obamacare so the government can run because the money is there. They’ve allocated the money but Harry Reid won’t bring it to the floor of the Senate for them to debate it much less have an up or down vote on it. So they have shut down the government and furthermore, I believe that they wanted to shut down the government because they both were talking about shutting down the government on July 26th. You can go read the Washington Post. The story came from the White House that if we were not willing to roll back the cuts from the sequester they were going to shutdown the government. They think this is a political victory for them. This is Harry Reid’s shutdown and it’s not fair to America. Let’s get back on track. Let’s give all Americans an exemption. This law is not ready for primetime.
Tom Clark:
Okay, I’ve got 15 seconds left. Is there going to be a compromise? Can you compromise on anything at all?
Amy Kremer:
We have compromised. We have given the president continuing resolutions that continue his deficit spending but what we want is to have a discussion about Obamcare and why it’s bad for America. It’s killing jobs. People are losing…I mean their health care, it’s not good. Costs are skyrocketing, it’s not good. And just because you have a piece of paper doesn’t mean you have access to healthcare.
Tom Clark:
We’re out of time I’m afraid. We’re out of time but I appreciate your time this morning. Thanks for coming in.
Amy Kremer:
Thanks for having me.
Tom Clark:
For more on this I’m joined now by John Harwood, CNBC’s chief Washington correspondent and columnist for the New York Times. John good to have you here.It seems that theTea Party is really sort of at the centre of all of this through its grip, iron grip I guess on parts of the Republican Party. Do they really control the outcome of this crisis?
John Harwood:
Get daily National news
Not ultimately they have limited the freedom of movement of Speaker Boehner but I do think the published statements from the Speaker about his commitment to avoiding default are such that when it comes right down to it, he will reassert his control of the conference. There’s no question that he can make a deal with Democrats and resolve this if he wants to but he has withheld doing that to try to keep his conference unified and that’s what the power of 30-40 Tea Party members of the House caucus gives them but that’s not ultimate power over the outcome.
Tom Clark:
Yeah and really what’s going on here as many people have said is like a civil war within the Republican Party itself. Here you have Speaker Boehner as you’ve said basically trying to keep the party together, trying to balance out all these various factions but at the end of the day, if he is going to say when it comes to the debt ceiling issue on October 17th, if he says don’t worry about it world, we will pay our bills, isn’t he at the same time declaring war on the Tea Party members of his caucus?
John Harwood:
If he ultimately makes the decision and pulls the trigger on a coalition with Democrats to raise the debt limit, yes. If they don’t acquiesce in that, that will be seen as a declaration of war. On the other hand, there’s some people who’d think that an element of the Tea Party group knows the Speaker will do that, will acquiesce in that. They want him to in effect save them from the consequences of their public position even if they can’t repudiate their public position themselves.
Tom Clark:
What does this do to the Republican Party itself being torn apart like this? What sort of shape are they going to be in after this is over?
John Harwood:
It’s damaging to the Republican Party. Remember that the Republican Party walked into this confrontation with lower public esteem than Democrats hold. They’re viewed as less reasonable, less willing to reach out and work with the other party and that is an image problem that may not matter in many House elections when districts are drawn so that one party to the other will win the election easily. The primary is the only real election but in Senate elections which are state wide and more importantly in presidential elections which are national, that is a critical vulnerability for the Republican Party. They’re not going to win presidential elections again barring extraordinary circumstances unless they can repair the image damage to their party
Tom Clark:
Is moderate conservatism in the United States effectively dead?
John Harwood:
It looks that way. That doesn’t mean that moderate conservatism won’t reassert itself and one of the outcomes of the current situation if this strategy is discredited. And this is unusual Tom because usually when you have partisan standoffs you have both parties with an equivalent level of support for their own position. This is a case where Democrats are unified and Republicans are very visibly divided. Many, many Republicans think the strategy that the Tea Party is pursuing is stupid, is counterproductive, is going to hurt them and the party. So there will come a point where the moderate Conservatives say, you guys are not going to drive the train anymore, we’re going to drive the train. This could be the episode that triggers that or it could be something further down the line.
Tom Clark:
Just cast the net a little bit wider John. I mean there’s a lot of countries, but I’m thinking of Canada in particular, the largest trading partner of the United States. A lot of Canadian companies do business with the US government and at a time of shutdown, we get sideswiped by this as well in many ways. Is this just the way the US government is going to be operating for the next 15 years and should we just get used to this?
John Harwood:
We can all hope not but look, this is the logical conclusion. We’ve talked for a long time Tom about polarization in American politics. That polarization is by ideology, by party, increasingly in the United States it’s about race. We’re talking about white resistance to the Obamacare law. African Americans and Hispanics to a greater or lesser degree support the law. What happens is you get the parties moving to their ideological sides but the Republicans are more intensely ideological. Why? There are more Conservatives than Liberals in the United States and so Conservatives have a greater grip on the Republican Party and they’re spinning themselves into a tighter weave of reinforcing Conservative positions and that is what produces the kind of intransigence we’re seeing in this circumstance. Something may break that spell. The president called it a fever last week in an interview with me and you know this could be that moment, maybe not.
Tom Clark:
John Harwood CNBC joining us from Washington. Thanks for your time this morning John. Good talking to you.
John Harwood:
My pleasure.
Tom Clark:
Coming up, in their push to win, political parties slice and dice voters to target those most likely to vote. Susan Delacourt is up next on how political parties divide and conquer.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back, well the National Household survey, that voluntary questionnaire that replaced the Census, it’s being called worse than useless by many experts. They say it’s misleading and it’s incomplete. The government though isn’t about to reverse its decision to make it voluntary and so take the numbers any way you want. The survey does however paint a new picture of Canada and that includes a number of firsts. Take a look:
For starters there’s a population shift point going. For the first time, more people in Canada live west of Ontario than east. Nearly 31 percent in fact; just a hair more than Quebec and Atlantic Canada combined but it is the first time that we’ve ever seen this. Canada is also home to more immigrants than ever before. Twenty percent of the population, one in five are foreign born and that is the highest proportion of any countries in the G8. Another first: women surpassing men when it comes to higher education. Sixty-five percent of working aged women have some sort of post-secondary education. Only 63 percent of working age men can say the same thing and that’s new.
Well so when there are these types of demographic shifts, political parties scramble to figure out how to crack the code to get more votes. In Susan Delacourt’s new book Shopping for Votes, she explains how political parties are increasingly using the same techniques to get your votes as a car company uses to get you go buy their car. I spoke with her earlier this week.
Tom Clark:
Susan Delacourt, thanks very much for being here. One chapter in your book is called, “Slicing and Dicing” and it’s not just the slicing and dicing of policy but it is the slicing and dicing of the electorate as well. The old days of having one national message politically for the whole country is a thing of the past. Talk a little bit about that but also, how corrosive is it to our politics?
Susan Delacourt:
The book goes all the way back to the 1950’s as you probably read and when Keith Davies started in the 60’s, started talking about winnable ridings. There were some ridings in Canada that were more winnable than others. That’s been taken now to its logical extension which the Conservatives now look at winnable people. They try to find the people who are likely Conservatives and they’ve got data that shows for example that snowmobile owners are likely to vote Conservative.
Tom Clark:
And they know this as you were saying before because they use loyalty cards, because they use all these things that give the marketers a track on you.
Susan Delacourt:
That’s right. The NDP is trying to catch up with this too. During the last election, the NDP bought data to find out who was paying the biggest cell phone rates and then they would do up little postcards and put them in the mailboxes of the people who were paying the highest cell phone rates so that they could sell that message. The party that has not been good at this oddly enough is the Liberals. They’ve been behind. I think they’re furiously playing catch up right now but I think we’ve come to a spot in our democracy, to your question about corrosiveness, where marketing and politics are almost interchangeable. I title the chapters on that, “Sealing the Deal”. And I end the book by asking, do we really want to choose our politicians the same way we choose our detergent or our loaves of bread, or…
Tom Clark:
Well this is the question I have, when you get to that point, is it sort of like choosing between Pepsi and Coke? Is it more about, if you use the word tribalism in politics rather than policy?
Susan Delacourt:
Yeah, and the really fascinating thing in that Starbucks and Tim Hortons would never run ads like you see in politics because they don’t want to run down the brand. You don’t want Starbucks accusing Tim Hortons of having poison coffee because people will just say well all coffees…
Tom Clark:
I’m not going to drink coffee.
Susan Delacourt:
Yeah, I think…but you see that because there are no standards that advertisers actually have been better at upholding standards in the private sector than they have been in the public sector. And I think maybe we want to talk about bringing advertising style standards to politics. If they’re going to do this, they should do it by the same rules.
Tom Clark:
Politics was always something different. It was about policy. It was about ideology. Marketing is all about getting you to buy the product. When those two things come together, is there anything that you found that would lead that to be an explanation for the disengagement of people in politics when it is all about consumerism, what’s there to get excited about?
Susan Delacourt:
The way I put it is that we’ve moved from talking about values of the head to value for dollar. I think, it’s not actually speaking up to citizens. It’s not giving them anything to aspire to. And the politics that speaks to people as they are rather than what they could be is I think that turns people off. You can sell hope in the grocery stores and you can sell hope on the campaign trail too but I don’t think you use the same tricks for both.
Tom Clark:
We know that you can never go back to the way it used to be in the 1860’s or even the 1930’s but the real question I guess is where does it go from here? How much is this going to sort of morph into nothing more than consumerism, or do you see some hope that the two can be separated?
Susan Delacourt:
I wrote the book hoping that people would put it down and say wait a minute, is this what we want? Should we have some standards over advertising? Should we be knowing what’s in those databases from the political parties about us? I would like people to say that being a citizen and being a consumer are two different things and I do see signs of hope in that, especially in young people. So it’s not a lost cause.
Tom Clark:
Susan Delacourt, author of Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them. Thanks very much for being here.
Susan Delacourt:
Thanks Tom.
Tom Clark:
Well coming up why the results of the Nova Scotia election are so important to the federal NDP. Stay tuned.
Break
Tom Clark:
Welcome back. Well on Tuesday, Nova Scotia voters will choose their next government and while Christy Clark and Alison Redford might warn against these sort of predictions, right now the polls suggest an NDP defeat and a possible Liberal landslide, so why this big swing? Well joining me now is Ron Kronstein, the senior anchor at Global Halifax. Ron, good to have you here.
Let’s first of all talk about Steve McNeil, the Liberal leader. Polls put him about 20 points ahead of the NDP. How did he get there?
Ron Kronstein:
Well I don’t think it’s because the Liberals did anything particularly well. I think the Nova Scotia voters are saying, you know what we gave the New Democrats four years to sort things out. We don’t necessarily like how fast it’s gone so we’re going to give the Liberals who have been out in the political wilderness for the last 14 years; we’re going to give them another four years. Darrell Dexter really didn’t do anything horrible. I mean he came in, this is not a traditional New Democratic province either. It’s only been under Darrell Dexter that the New Democrats have become first the opposition and then the government. But he became the government at the worst economic times in the history of Canada, certainly in modern history. So he had challenges. But I think now the people are saying it’s time for a change.
Tom Clark:
Well you know in that sense the history of Nova Scotia suggests that governments usually get two terms. I mean the voters in Nova Scotia are pretty patient people. What changed this time?
Ron Kronstein:
I think they’re impatient for the boom that’s not here yet. I think when the shipbuilding contract was announced to the Halifax shipyard, I think a lot of people thought that the streets are going to be paved with gold immediately. This is something that’s going to take a lot of time and I think the government giving the Irving shipbuilding company $300 million to retool the shipyard so they could build those ships didn’t go well with a lot of people. Jobs are a main issue here; a huge issue. We need to keep our young people in Nova Scotia with good paying jobs. Health care is another huge issue and I don’t think the Nova Scotia voter felt the New Democrats were doing things as quickly as they wanted them to be. There’s a little impatience here for success.
Tom Clark:
Ron let’s put a little bit of a national overlay on this because both Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau campaigned during this election campaign in Nova Scotia. How did those two federal opposition leaders play out there?
Ron Kronstein:
Well all politics is local and I think while the leaders appreciated that Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau were here and Peter MacKay certainly backed up Jamie Bailey, I don’t really think it makes a big impact on the average voter. The average voter will go either way depending on what the issues are. So the fact that they were here was value added but I don’t think it’s going to make a big difference.
Tom Clark:
Let’s assume that there is going to be a change in government on Tuesday night in Nova Scotia. Is the rest of the country going to hear a different tune from Nova Scotia on all sorts of issues?
Ron Kronstein:
I don’t think so. I really don’t think so in the short term. In the long term, this province is probably five to ten years away from an economic boom, certainly not the huge economic boom the people think, but it could be a big one. The ships are being built. We’ve got huge potential on the offshore. Halifax right now has more construction cranes up and buildings being built than I’ve certainly ever seen in history. And even the Financial Times reports that there’s more foreign investment in Nova Scotia than there is in any other province and any other state in North America. So the future looks bright. We just have to get to that future and I think whoever becomes the government on Tuesday night, and it does look like it’s going to be the Liberals, whoever becomes the government on Tuesday night will certainly have their work cut out for them laying the groundwork for that.
Tom Clark;
Ron Kronstein, I’m going to be joining you out there in a few hours’ time to take a look at that election. Thanks very much for joining us today though. I appreciate your time.
Ron Kronstein:
Thanks a lot Tom. Looking forward to seeing you here.
Tom Clark:
Well as we reported at the top of the show, two Canadians have now been released from prison in Egypt. Tarek Loubani and John Greyson were held for seven weeks without charge. Egyptian officials said that they were involved in protests in Cairo, an allegation that the two men flatly deny. Foreign Affairs says that both of them are safe at this hour but there is no word yet on when they’ll be back in Canada. Greyson’s sister tweeted earlier this morning thanking everyone for their help, adding, “It was like Christmas came early this year.” Global News will be following this story throughout the day. Tune into Global National this evening for the very latest on this and other stories.
And remember, if you have questions for us, any question at all, email us at: TheWestblock@GlobalNews.ca. We’ll do our best to get the answers for you and put it on the show.
Well that is our show for this week. I’m Tom Clark. See you back here next Sunday. In the meantime, have a great week.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.