As for a strategic attack...

Watching the first attack ads of election season usually inspires just as much excitement in me as offended ideological outrage. Attack ads are the first sign that its time to gear up for the fun to be had debating the merits of party platforms and dissecting the subtle (or blatant) political ploys on offer by the latest batch of Prime Ministerial hopefuls with other people who enjoy that sort of debate.

The most recent ones inspire something more akin to weariness.

 The jist of one of the ads is that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is an outsider who didn’t come back to Canada for the good of the county, but rather to collude with the Bloc Quebecois and the ‘high-tax NDP’ to form a ‘reckless coalition’(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urPwfuOWRSE&feature=relmfu ). Others focus on Prime Minister Harper in hard-at-work poses. All of them, with tired out, predicable messages and personal attacks, fail to do much but beg the question; does anyone actually buy into this stuff?

Obviously, Canadian political parties think that Canadians do, or they wouldn’t bother to run them. I, on the other hand, have trouble seeing attack ads as a constructive tool for an election. They more or less pander to ideological extremists, and have a high potential to backfire if deemed to offensive by the publics, like when the Conservatives questioned whether Jean Chretien had the ‘face of a Prime Minister’ in 1993.

But perhaps Harper isn’t looking for early advantage in a Spring election, hoping to get the jump start on badmouthing the opponent. Maybe Harper is only looking to remind the opposition that an election would be a hard fought battle, one that, if recent elections are anything to judge by, will likely yield indifferent results from the increasingly disinterested public.    

As for the State of the Union...

Last night’s State of the Union Address delivered by President Obama was a well crafted speech, chockfull of just the right kind of pageantry to seem powerful and uplifting, despite the fact that the president is now facing two years where every little thing is likely to be an uphill battle. Obama covered a vast range of topics in the hour he spoke, touching on education, immigration, the health care bill repeal. He spoke about trade agreements and curbing the sky-rocketing national debt by creating a government that doesn’t spend trillions of dollars more than it takes in. Obama talked about ending big oil subsidies, while offering a beautifully crafted comparison between developing clean energy now and the 1960’s space race to the moon.

It was inspiring, uplifting, and so full of promise that is was nearly empty of meaning.

But maybe that is all it was supposed to be. In his first two years in office, Obama managed to get universal health care legislation through congress, an accomplishment several decades in the making. It’s a feat to be proud of, certainly, but it was by no means an easy go, despite the Democratic majority in the House. Now, facing a Republican majority in Congress, Obama will have to cut more deals and make a lot more compromises in order to get any legislation at all passed, let alone anything with such blatantly partisan appeal.

And Obama’s speech did acknowledge that, opening with a quip about working together rather than just sitting together, but the speech that followed the joke made light of the fact that Obama will have to work a lot harder in the next two years to accomplish much less.

(Watch the speech on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZdEmjtF6HE)