EVEN CANADIANS EVENTUALLY FIGURE OUT THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY, THE THIRD:

Stephen Harper's Canada?: Just look at John Howard's Australia. (Greg Barns, January 17, 2006, Globe and Mail)

[M]r. Harper's party is employing the same campaign tactics that Mr. Howard first used in 1996 for his landslide win and that he has used to great effect in three successive elections.

As The Globe and Mail disclosed on Jan. 7, it's no accident that the Harper campaign feels like it has been ripped straight from the pages of the John Howard campaign manual. Mr. Howard's national campaign director, Brian Loughnane, is advising the Conservatives; last fall, Conservative Party strategists closely watched the tactics used by Mr. Howard to record his fourth election victory.

Mr. Howard's electoral success can be put down to his capacity to capture the support of working-class and lower-middle-class families who used to vote for the ALP; he did this by lining their pockets with tax cuts and middle-class welfare payments, such as cash bonuses for new mothers. And he appealed to their moral conservatism and desire to slow down the pace of social change.

In 1996, Mr. Howard's campaign slogan was "For all of us." Mr. Howard said the ALP was more interested in what he called "elite" issues such as aboriginal reconciliation, Australian republicanism and the arts.

Mr. Howard's phrase for those who have switched their support from the ALP to his Liberal Party is "mainstream Australians." These voters, who primarily live in the western suburbs of Sydney and southeast Queensland, don't like gay marriage. They fear social change; Muslim and Asian migrants moving into their neighbourhoods scares them. They believe aboriginal Australians get too much welfare. They like tough-on-crime policies. And they focus on their economic bottom line - they like tax cuts and low interest rates.

The beauty of capturing these voters' support is that, for a left-of-centre political force such as the ALP to win them back, it has to shift to the right - and that causes public brawling among its membership and makes the party seem a weak alternative to Mr. Howard's.

Mr. Harper's strategy appears to be a carbon copy of that adopted by the Liberal Party in Australia.

And here's the mind-boggling thing--Democrats have, instead, shifted Left.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2006 10:54 AM