As a Canadian looking out across the border to the U.S. in the election year, I often feel glad that we're in a parliamentary system. What it means is that every day on television, we get snippets from the Question Period: the leader of the opposition hurls caustic, withering questions at the PM, and the PM has to give a song and dance. It means, in short, that a certain critical voice is built into the system of media representation.
Now from a strictly selfish standpoint, that's not the best thing for me, since the leader of the opposition heads the Canadian Alliance, a bunch of neoconservative Republican wanna-bes, a party whose base is not surpisingly centered around Alberta, the Texas of the north (think deregulation, oil money, etc.). (Don't get me wrong! Some of my best friends are Albertans!) A victory for the Alliance would be a profound defeat for the idea of Canada as a nation independant from the United States, with its own conception of the social contract. However, the fact that the criticism of the government is coming from the right doesn't change the fact that it is the government that is being criticized -- and not the opposition.
The thing that cracks me up, looking South, is that for a nation with such a self-congratulatory attitude towards its democratic institutions, there is an almost total invisibility of the opposition. I don't mean that there isn't coverage given to 5- or 10-second soundbites from Dean, Kerry et al. What I mean is that there is no situation in which Bush is forced to stand across the aisle from his opponents and face their pointed, barbed questions. Hell, he doesn't even have to do this in front of reporters: he gets Scott whats-his-face (taking over from Ari, who "had to spend more time with his family") to handle all of that. Unless, of course, there is a capture of a notorious dictator, and boom! presto! first press conference in months, if not years.
But the most insidious thing, the thing that sticks in my craw, is that the media is utterly complicit with this erasure of public opposition. In fact, they set out to do Rove's job for him: faced with Saddam's capture, they start asking Dean's people questions like, "in the face of the almost total hopelessness of your position, Mr. Trippi, why do you continue to feel that Mr. Dean has even a snowball's chance in Hades of beating Mr. Bush?" In other words, the kinds of questions that render the answer a foregone conclusion.
But if you'll notice, Bush's approval ratings have not shot up to the low 80s; people of Iraqi, Polish, and American descent are still dying in Iraq; Bush's reckless deficit spending -- while not electoral poison in it of itself -- is still not generating the robust job growth that is supposedly part and parcel of an economic recovery. In other words, any reasonable media representation of this situation would not present Bush's 2004 victory as anything near a foregone conclusion. So what gives?