When U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term ‘bully pulpit,’ he was talking about the White House. He said that it was a pulpit to which people have to listen. Lacking an institution such as the White House, Canadian politicians have to work to chase their pulpits and a bully pulpit is a rare occurrence.
But there was no question that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s address to the Conservative Halloween convention last night was a bully pulpit. He had thousands of loyal followers in the hall to cheer him on. He had a national audience on the news channels. It was his time. And he blew it.
It was about 45 minutes of badly written, self-congratulatory, ideological, repetitious sound bites. It was visually boring with static cameras. The giant flag, the ethnic mix in the human wall and even the simple ‘Canada’ on the podium grated from too much exposure. The presentation lacked life, charm, eloquence, reason or a future.
There was no future offered. The speech would have made more sense as a swan song. The only promise in the entire time was legislation to forbid deficits—which would be meaningless. He promised it before but it was assumed that he realized that it would be a waste of time. Such legislation is easily thrown out when necessary.
The use of French to bring up each new subject became an irritant and was annoyingly condescending. He once completed the translation before the simultaneous translator had completed it.
Ostensibly a celebration of two years of majority government, it was interesting to be reminded that Senators Duffy and Wallin acted as masters of ceremony plenipotentiary at the last gathering of the Conservative Party two years ago. O’ how times change! The only reference to those Senators was a segue from praise for the Federal Accountability Act—that got him one of the few genuine standing ovations of the speech.
The well-positioned cheerleaders in the audience failed in their first three attempts to get people standing and cheering. After the loyal Conservatives in the audience got the idea, you wished that they would sit down and stay down.
Mr. Harper made much of his 86 promises to his party. Since he included the proposed European free trade as one of the 86 promises, it obviously did not mean completed.
The only personal note he included in the speech was to tell the faithful in the audience that he does not like Ottawa. He spent time in his talk to denounce the Ottawa elites. He does not want to be one of them. Now, if the voters will just accommodate him!
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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