Pierre Poilievre And Not Swinging At Every Pitch

On Skippy's Discipine Issues

Why is Pierre Poilievre sending out a (frankly unhinged) press release about a Global article about the ties the Convoy and Skippy’s friends have with the far right?

On some level, this is an Ottawa bubble story – Poilievre sent out a press release about a media story on Twitter, and everyone will forget about the exact contents in a day (if it takes that long, even) – but in another sense, it’s a telltale sign of how a Poilievre leadership will function, and it’s not a good sign.

In March, I wrote about how Poilievre’s leadership campaign has been all about getting to the end of the day, every day, and it’s probably the most valuable insight into the Poilievre campaign, and the man himself, that I’ve ever had. There’s no long-termist planning here – think about the totality of the Poilievre messaging, and campaign. When Charest got in the race, Poilievre’s immediate reaction was to declare him a Liberal. When Patrick Brown called Poilievre out for missing a vote on COVID vaccine mandates, Poilievre introduced a bill banning all vaccine mandates. When attacking the Liberals, he hones in on issue-of-the-day stuff – the passport office messes or Pearson being shambolic. Nothing about any of this is long-termist.

The reason that the political class think he’s doing a good job is because we’re all fucking addicted to the morphine drip that is political activity, and what ends up happening is that people who can provide us political tragics our fix get elevated in the public estimation. Is Pierre Poilievre a good General Election candidate? I don’t think so, others do, but what those who think he is think is that because he’s providing us the supply, he has cutthrough, this hilariously ill-defined concept that basically means “I found his Twitter video to be compelling work”. The problem with that argument is that what is cuttrough to them never even makes it to the average voter, and this is the problem with the argument he is singularly himself electable (as opposed to the argument that by 2025, any non-Nazi could beat the Liberals because of fatigue).

Why did Stephen Harper get a majority government? Because for 2.5 years he had the exact same message about Michael Ignatieff and every word out of the Government’s mouth was “he didn’t come back for you.” Why did David Cameron win in 2015? Because for 2.5 years he hammered home that his Conservative Party had a “Long Term Economic Plan” that was working, and that Ed Miliband would bring the UK back to Blair and Brown era economic ruin. Why did Obama beat Romney? Because everything Obama and his campaign argued was around a single, holistic attack – that Romney cared about the big end of town and not working class voters.

Everything these politicians did was built around a holistic central narrative about their records and their opponents – remember all the “island of stability” crap Harper kept saying at every press event in 2011? It was nauseating how much he said it, but it was his whole argument – Canada was in much better economic times than the US or the EU, and it helped him win an election. Tony Abbott was able to win a landslide in Australia in 2013 in part by blatantly lying (“no cuts to health, no cuts to education”, etc etc) but also because he framed every failure of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years as weakness – too weak to govern, too weak to secure their borders, too weak to get Australia’s fiscal house in order. It was a relentless, multi-year campaign that got them over the line in both cases.

“Ah, but what about Justinflation? Isn’t that relentless and overarching?” I can hear someone ask, and while it’s not an unreasonable point, it illustrates the point. To whatever extent people think inflation is a political cost to the Liberals, it’s probably led by gas prices – and those prices are currently falling. If you want a national average, it’s down 16.5 cents from the monthly average, and (to the extent that I’m smart enough to guess these things), it seems like a trend that’s gonna continue for a bit. I’m sorry, but the idea that the economy in 2022 is going to be the ballot question in 2025 is absurdist nonsense, and anyone saying so is the same as the people still begging that every January 6th revelation will be the End Of Trump.

If the argument was Trudeau will get blamed for bad times, as indirectly he is responsible for the rise in prices (and his spending decisions did have second order consequences, as did a lot of things outside his control), then it has to be logically consistent that he will reap the benefits of prices falling. The idea that rampant inflation will remain for three years is a considerable misunderstanding of both economics and politics, and in this case, Poilievre is going all in on an issue that is likely to have fallen back down the issue salience charts by the next election.

The other thing going against the Conservatives is the idea they can tie the Liberals to the NDP, because every time Jagmeet comes out and attacks the Liberals, it’s an in-kind contribution to Trudeau’s re-election chances. The Conservatives tying Trudeau to Jagmeet would be very good politics, but unfortunately for them, Jagmeet isn’t taking the bait, giving the Liberals plenty of room to triangulate off both their rivals. And so, they’re stuck, having spent this period potentially creating a new problem for themselves (the chance of some form of potential split or fracture, especially given the Patrick Brown of it all) and not having found a long term message that works to hit Trudeau.

But why this press release matters is that the Poilievre team just tipped their hands about a very important point – they can get blown off message incredibly easily. A TV interview with Evan Solomon got Poilievre to confirm he’d fire the Governor of the Bank Of Canada, and now an article about Convoy ties to the far right has Poilievre invoking Trudeau’s Blackface (I’ll leave it to your imagination how those two things happened). It’s genuinely thin-skinned bullshit, but even more than it being thin-skinned, it’s just not a good trait in a political leader to have the political equivalent of Tourette’s Syndrome, to quote the post-Sorkin West Wing.

Swinging at every pitch in politics is a disaster, because sometimes the right move is to avoid the trap, and this pattern of behaviour from Poilievre and his team is evidence that he doesn’t have that tool in his arsenal. He is as addicted to the news cycle and the Twitter likes and the Facebook views that he has to pump out this shit daily, but the problem is, sometimes you don’t have to make news. Sometimes, it’s better to sit one out, and just leave an unfriendly article alone.

How many more people do you think saw the Global article at the core of this fight after his press release? Giving oxygen to this story is an insane idea if you’re Poilievre, and while it won’t be an election decider or anything like it, this tendency both to swing at literally every pitch and to go straight to 11 at all times is a fucking disaster for the Conservatives, because in a Parliament likely to last the full four years, this is unsustainable. Anger works in politics when it’s a sign of sincerity – when it’s your default, you either come off as in need of help to calm down, or you come off as phony. Whatever you think of the actual contents of the Canada Day video he released about Gratitude, it certainly wasn’t angry – and that clearly is the “real” Poilievre.

I don’t know Pierre, but I know enough people who do to know that he isn’t a frothing mad person who thinks this country is some shithole. He knows it’s amazing and incredible, and he knows that this is a country to be proud of, its warts and ill-history included. I actually genuinely think Poilievre has thought about the historical ills of this country more than most, and I think his Canada Day message was a thoughtful, considered, and reasonable response to the complicated legacy of this country. But this isn’t that. This is derangement on a nearly clinical level, an anger that is matched by many of the loudest in our country, but is not shared, in either sentiment and certainly not in fervour.

Pierre Poilievre is going to win the Conservative Leadership. He is doing so by exhibiting that he and his team have the discipline of Wile E. Coyote, and that will come back to haunt him.