Scare Tactics and Hidden Agendas: A Study in Canada-U.S. Contrasts?

The Canadian election is now done, but for many observers, the political strategies of the different parties remain raw in our minds.  The Conservative tact of defining Liberal leader Stephane Dion as too “weak” to be a leader, and their attack on his proposed Green Shift plan as a “tax grab” was by all measures successful.  So much so, that Dion cited the Conservative misinformation campaign as a key reason for his decision to resign as Liberal leader.

I want to focus, in particular, on Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s attacks on Dion’s Green Shift proposal– a policy, put in (overly) simple terms, to shift tax burdens onto polluting behavior. Harper, however, redefined the Green Shift policy via “scare tactics” focusing on Dion’s supposed latent socialism. The Green Shift was not an environmental policy, declared Harper, but a “hidden agenda” to tax everything in the country. In fact, Harper consistently stumped that the Green Shift was a secret socialist-style redistribution program:

“Dion’s carbon tax is not an environment policy. It is just a wealth redistribution program disguised as an environment policy,” Harper told the crowd. “The Green Shift is a green shaft and we must never let it happen to our country”

The economic turmoil of late September and early October only served to accentuate these poignant attacks; Dion’s Green Shift was transformed from bold environmentalism to a secretive socialist tax grab beset among tough economic times. Harper’s Conservatives won the election, albeit still with a minority. But the Liberals lost 19 seats.

Interestingly, here in the United States, the McCain-Palin campaign for the 2008 presidency have recently settled on a line of attack ominously similar to Harper’s. After toying with several different “scare” attacks over the last few weeks — including VP candidate Sarah Palin’s base assertion that Senator Obama has a history of “palling around with terrorists” — McCain and Palin have likewise focused on Obama’s supposed hidden socialism. Seizing on remarks Obama made to a voter now known as “Joe the Plumber”, that Obama, with is tax plan, wished to “spread the wealth around”, the GOP have declared Obama a closet socialist wanting to impose wealth “redistribution” on America. In McCain’s own words:

“He believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs. He is more interested in controlling wealth than in creating it, in redistributing money instead of spreading opportunity.”

Commonsense tells us that in Canada, a country with a greater affinity for socialized programs like universal healthcare, such scare tactics alluding to secretive socialist agendas would be less effective; conversely, such attacks should more effective in the United States, with its staunchly anti-socialist historical tendency. Ironically, however, the Republican attacks (unlike Harper’s election win) have been largely ineffective: the Obama-Biden campaign is widening its lead over the Republican ticket.

Is this one of those great inexplicable electoral ironies? Or perhaps evidence that certain communications strategies are ineffectual, given broader social, political or economic currents (such as concern among Americans that the Republican party has mismanaged the country’s finances)? But maybe we should not be too quick to judge– alas, we will have to at least wait until November 4th before beginning our answers.