Choosing a Liberal candidate: an outsider's view

While I was busy with more mundane things, Liberal bloggers were all a-twitter over Maurizio Bevilacqua's decision to drop out of their leadership race and support Bob Rae. Jason Cherniak was "shocked," Calgary Grit called it "a big coup for Rae," and Any Idiot Can Have a Blog snarked: "kudos to Maurizio in retaining his strong right wing values, where money talks and personal values walk."

Miles Lunn went so far as to speculate that "Rae promised him something in return if he is elected," and while he may well be right in this particular case, there are other explanations as well. There is, after all, a longstanding tradition in the Liberal party of supporting a particular candidate for reasons other than ideological ones. A Touch Left of Centre characterizes himself as "a centre-left Liberal and a strong supporter of Michael Ignatieff," who's anything but centre-left. Jason Cherniak, on the other hand, refers to himself as a "blue Liberal," but he's supporting centre-left candidate Stéphane Dion. Pragmatism ("can this candidate beat Harper?") and personal factors ("does this individual have the charisma necessary to gain a following beyond True Grits?") seem to weigh more heavily than ideology into many Liberals' decisions. So maybe Bevilacqua was promised something, but maybe he just thinks Rae's going to win and wants to jump on his bandwagon while there's still a seat available.

Over at the Tory blog Political Staples, there's been much sneering over this sort of pragmatic decision-making. "Policy and platform always takes second place to power with these guys," says one commenter, and another says that this is an indication that Bevilacqua "believes in nothing in particular, but merely adopts policy positions and backs candidates purely out of political expediency." There's another way of looking at this, though, and it's at least somewhat less cynical: many Liberals seem to go into a decision-making process like this with the assumption that because Liberals are all centrists, they're already ideologically close enough to any of the candidates for their own comfort. And once you've taken that on as an underlying assumption, it's much easier to support a particular candidate because of other factors such as personal charisma and ability to win elections. To those of us on either the left or the right of the political spectrum, this can look unprincipled, but maybe it's just a different ordering of the same priorities all of us have.

The reason for this difference is clear--it's simply less threatening for Liberals than it is for either the NDP or the Tories to choose candidates on a more pragmatic basis. For the NDP, for example, the purely pragmatic decision would always mean always picking the most centrist candidate possible. This would throw off the balance in a party that has members ranging from the far left to the centre left, and would disenfranchise a large portion of the membership. The Liberals, on the other hand, will always be able to lay claim to the middle, so whether they tilt a little to the left, a little to the right, or land dead centre doesn't make nearly as much of a difference to their internal makeup.

I'm an American who always used to choose the furthest-left candidate in any primary election, and so I find this to be a foreign way of thinking. But at the same time, I do see the logic in it. And I also have to wonder whether the parties that are closer to the edges of the spectrum might not benefit from some small element of this logic as well. Choosing between members of your own party should mean balancing ideology, electability, and one's own personal affinity for the candidate. I'm not convinced that the Liberals are on to the right mix of those three factors, but a choice based solely on ideology doesn't make much sense, either.