Campbell, James, Swim for the Centre

I want you to visualize a nice looking lady, young but not too young, if you get my drift, swimming out to a life raft that will save her life. Unfortunately, as she swims, somebody keeps grabbing at her ankles and slowing her down so that her very life is in danger.

Picture a middle-aged man, getting more middle-aged by the minute, swimming towards the same life raft from the opposite direction. He too is plagued by nasty people who don’t want him to make it. That vision, dear friends, is my metaphor to describe the valiant battles of Carole James and Gordon Campbell to drag their parties to the middle. They both know that’s where it’s at, but many of their party just don’t agree and while they don’t really have another life boat in mind, they know this is the wrong one.

The last election had some messages. The Liberals saw that the reason they won, as much as anything else, was that the NDP had not been able to demonstrate sufficient atonement for past sins. The public gave them a double major in 2001 and they had one left to serve. Of course the Campbell Corps had pleased their basic right wing support but it’s always the elusive middle, the swing vote that must be wooed and Premier Campbell knows that if the NDP were not burdened by the memory of their past misdeeds, the election would have been too close for comfort.

Middling optics

Carole James also knows that the middle is where the fight is fought – if you want to win, not just look brave losing, that is - and considering where the party was starting from when the election was called, she realizes that she came tantalizing close to the brass ring.

Every party has its ideologues who simply won’t stand for any truck or trade with wimps that see compromise and peace as laudable goals. For the NDP it’s what’s loosely termed social values that are the lodestar, while the Liberals fuzzily term their philosophy as sound fiscal management. NDP purists see any serious attention to money as an abdication of their responsibilities to the poor. The Liberals are a little better at this game – while they espouse tenets of the marketplace that died a hundred years ago, they pay lip service to helping the less fortunate – the trick is being seen as sympathetic without actually having to do anything.

Carole James and Gordon Campbell can see over the heads of the party puritans and know that the first obligation of any politician is to get elected. To do that, they must each reach out into parts of the political honey pot where their fingers have never been before.

Premier Campbell has already telegraphed where he wants the party to appear to be in 2009. The word “appear” is deliberate. The premier knows that if he can look moderate to the public while showing his corporate bankers that he’s really on their side, he wins. Because most British Columbians don’t want to vote NDP unless forced to it by something like a Bill Vander government, a little smoke and mirrors from the Liberals is all it takes. But it does take that, hence an Environment Minister, the thick as a plank John Van Dongen to a junior ministry in charge of something or other, and an attorney-general who is seen as caring for public safety. (Geoff Plant may have cared but Wally Oppal looks the part better and because he is Indo-Canadian and seen by the general population as a man who might be able to deal better with ethnic violence.)

The Blair experiment

Carole James’s job is more difficult. She starts out as leading the traditional minority party trying not only to live down a past that won’t go away, but to present a new face to that cynical centre whose votes she must have. And her ideologues, organized labour, are less forgiving of her than business is of the Liberals, For 40 years Labour has been a special partner in the NDP and has been its banker. They look at what happened to the Labour movement in Britain when Neil Kinnock, the late John Smith, and Tony Blair eliminated the unions' special status in the Labour Party and took the party so deeply into the center that the Tories are pushed out altogether. The unions don’t like it. Not a bit.

One might ask, isn’t it pretty tough for Ms. James to turn her back on Labour?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. But her question to followers is simple – do we want to continue as the left wing conscience of the province, cooing and clucking when consoling our natural constituency, and only gain power when the Liberals screw up badly? Do we put philosophical purity ahead of getting elected? That’s the question the British Labour Party dealt with, successfully, and they not only have just won three straight elections, they have become the “natural governing party”, a role held by the Tories for 70 years. They’re not a “labour” party any more but they do occupy the government benches.

Ms. James has started down the right path by committing to “one person, one vote” at the NDP conventions but that’s still a long way from taking from Labour its special relationship.

What’s interesting is that while the divorce may be difficult to contemplate and implement, the penalty the Labour movement can extract is minimal compared to only, say, a decade ago. The fact is brutal – because of globalization with its outsourcing, unions are losing membership and thus political clout. Much of their claim to influence on the left is bluff and Ms. James knows that. Not a toothless tiger perhaps but one that spends more and more time in the dentist’s chair. The value of the B.C. Federation of Labour to the NDP is outweighed by the political price the NDP pays for that support at the ballot box. Besides, the union movement must support the NDP because it has nowhere else to go.

Premier Campbell must play his hand well. He must shut down the rhetoric from the far right of his party. This is tough to do because businessmen and women can be tough to deal with. Mr. Campbell’s task is to remind the boys and girls at the downtown business clubs that, as it is with the NDP and the Union movement, "business" has nowhere else to go except Liberal.

So, the race is on for that life raft. The one that swims best with lead weights on the ankles’ or better still shakes them off, wins the big prize.

Rafe Mair’s column for The Tyee runs every Monday. He can be heard every weekday morning from 8:30-10:30 on 600AM. His website is www.rafeonline.com.