Seldom has a party leader put forward so many promises....To show that the Conservatives were ready to govern [the party leader] offered a dizzying array of goodies, most based on policies developed by the Conservative caucus, hoping that individual policies would appeal to particular segments of the population and produce a Conservative majority government. During the campaign, [one not-for-profit association] circulated to its members an outline of the Conservative platform containing 211 general or specific promises made by the party in Opposition and in the campaign.That's just one excerpt from Discipline of power, Jeffrey Simpson's 1980 study of the brief Clark regime, specifically, p. 64. While I am no fan of directly translating one historical episode into current events, it is rather interesting to see the parallels to the Harper election campaign.
It's also interesting to see the lengths that some Conservative spokesmen are going to distance themselves from the 1979 Clark experience of a disparate group cobbling together a platform and gaining power in a minority government from a Liberal Party which was tired and falling increasingly into disfavour with voters.
Take a gander at some of Clark's 1979 speeches, some of which Simpson reprints in part, and you can see their echoes in Harper's speeches. You can also find an interesting analysis by Allen Gregg pointing out that the Conservatives had gained power in May 1979 by capitalizing on negative attitudes toward Liberals rather than positive attitudes towards the Clark Conservatives. Their platform had been designed to appear competent and comprehensive; it was written to appeal to identifiable segments of the population but the whole platform betrayed internal contradictions that could not be concealed or ignored for very long.
There are some significant differences between the 1979 Conservatives and the 2006 version, but some of the similarities are quite striking. Some of the challenges remain the same; how Stephen Harper manages his newfound success will determine his longer-term future.
