The statement has been poorly received. For one thing, why is a foreign ambassador announcing to the press what Canadian military policy will be? Especially when the Canadian PM continues to declare to all-and-sundry within hearing range that no decision has been reached? Martin rushed to inform reporters,"No such assurances were given."

It is a particularly sticky issue as Martin promised in his Oct. 5 Throne Speech to open Parliament to debate on the issue before signing on with the States. No such debate has occurred.

Canadian politics is a complex balancing act with at least four players who must constantly watch each other for reactions. The Liberals under Martin are in power but they constitute a minority government, which must look to Quebec for support or risk losing office. The Conservatives generally back the anti-missile defense system but they are bristling at not being consulted...indeed, at not even being shown the terms of an agreement into which Canada has -- perhaps -- already entered. The New Democratic Party (more left than the liberals) is adamantly opposed to the program as is the Bloc Quebecois and most of Quebec itself.

Nevertheless, sneaking the anti-missile program past Parliament at the last minute would probably have worked since the Conservatives would not have blocked it, and they're the only ones with sufficient numbers to act as a brick wall if they joined with other factions. But the prospect of easy, sneaky passage has been rendered more difficult by Celluci's statements. First, everyone is irritated at the US announcing Canadian foreign policy. Second, everyone is suspicious of Martin and his motives. Third, even politicians who agree with the plan are enraged at being kept in ignorance about it.

What on earth was Celluci thinking of? If there is/was a covert deal sliding through, then he's doing the best he can to jeopardize it.

For more commentary, please see McBlog.

In an earlier blog, I commented on the upcoming movie about Schuyler's daughter , Philippa Schuyler, starring Alicia Keys and produced by Halle Berry. I am pleased to hear from Charles Johnson that Berry may star in a television-made version of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel by Zora Neale Hurston.

The breaking news from Bloomberg: "Viacom Inc.'s CBS said it fired four employees for a September report by news anchor Dan Rather questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard Service, according to a statement issued on the network's Web site. CBS senior vice president Betsy West, `60 Minutes' executive producer Josh Howard and his deputy, Mary Murphy, were asked to resign along with the producer of the story, Mary Mapes." As an immediate reaction: 1) the word"scapegoat" comes to mind; 2) will anyone ever again discuss the significant question of where Bush actual was during his '72 National Guard stint?; and, 3) this is a prelude to and part of the spin being placed on the much-awaited release of the MemoGate Report (the `independent' investigation into the scandal), which I expect shortly. On his Sunday show, Matt Drudge announced [audio file] that it should be released later today, complete with news of Dan Rather's replacement.

Of course, the CBS spin has been building for a while. The media watchdog site RatherBiased reports, "CBS Hires Liberal Activist to Spin Memogate Report. In the first public move indicating that the network is going to be releasing the report from the `independent' investigation, the network re-hired--according to TV Barn--one of its professional spinmeisters, Donna Dees. But CBS wouldn't be CBS if it were just any pr flack. This Donna Dees is the same woman who organized the anti-gun Million Mom March [MMM] rally in 2000 and was the sister-in-law of a Hillary Clinton advisor, who also organized the event. This comrade-in-no-arms of Rosie O'Donnell, says CBS, `will join our press office next Monday, Jan. 10, as senior press representative responsible for the CBS EVENING NEWS, the CBS EVENING NEWS weekend editions and FACE THE NATION."

When CBS reported on the MMM in 2000, it did not disclose that the event's head organizer had worked for CBS for the past six years. The network is carefully disclosing everything this time probably because - with so many spotlights shining - it can't get away with much.

For more commentary, please see McBlog.

I have a brief exchange with Bill Bradford in the letters section of the February 2005 issue of Liberty magazine. Readers of L&P will find the discussion familiar; I argue that the evangelical and conservative Catholic vote in Ohio were crucial components of the Bush victory in that state. Bradford continues to argue that the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives"actually reduced Bush's margin of victory." I still believe that Bradford is not giving enough credit to GOP strategists for getting out the socially conservative vote, and I don't see how Bush wins in Ohio without that group of voters.

As L&P readers know, I've never denied that other issues, especially the war, had an effect in shoring up Bush's winning coalition. But the point is that it takes coalitions to win votes. In my view, the anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were promoted by GOP strategists to bolster one aspect of the winning Bush coalition.

Coalition-building among interest groups is the modus operandi in American politics. This is a point that our L&P contributing editor makes very clear in his fine Liberty essay,"Politics vs. Ideology: How Elections Are Won." Cox sees validity in the observation that"[t]here are such things as political 'bases,' communal sources of political identification." There are also"political ideas and social movements, and these can have noticeable effects on elections, occasionally dramatic effects." But, for Cox, most American presidential elections are"won by small margins." Cox maintains that Americans"are people of multiple social identifications." Thus,"[t]he task of the American political party is to exploit as many of these personal identifications as possible. This is not science," he argues,"and it cannot be." Indeed. We can argue over whether or not this group or that group, this bloc or that bloc of voters provided the crucial margin of victory. (I, myself, have not argued that social conservatives were the crucial bloc; but I have argued that Bush could not have possibly won without exploiting what Cox is here calling"personal identifications," in this instance, of a religious sort.)

Still, Cox is right:"Voting behavior is like other forms of human action, as explained by such economic theorists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; it proceeds from individual, variable, nonquantifiable preferences." He continues:

What happens in American elections is that the party that lost the last one looks for a way to win the next one, knowing (if it's smart) that it cannot rely implicitly on any stable bloc of voters. Even the legendary strength of African-Americans' identification with the Democratic Party can easily recede sufficiently to keep most potential voters in that"bloc" away from the polls. The best that each political party can do is to go through its list of possible voters, trying to interest as many as possible, beginning with those most strongly identified with itself (at the moment) and proceeding as far down the list as its funds and energy permit. If the gay vote is sixth on the list, a party that has any possibility of getting it will try to do so, altering its own character and"ideas" when alteration is necessary to optimize its capacity for winning.

Precisely.

Cox argues, however, that

American elections are won not by stable power blocs but by shifts in party identifications among people who used to be in those blocs, until they escaped. Some of the shifts, which go on all the time, in every conceivable direction, coincide with major intellectual or social movements, the kind of movements that change large patterns of intellectual and social history. But electoral politics has its own more intricate, local, and self-adjusting patterns, the patterns of the marginal gains and losses that happen as parties hunt the all-important plurality of votes.

Again: precisely. From my perspective, Karl Rove and other GOP strategists did not take it for granted that socially conservative evangelical voters were a"stable bloc" that would vote for Bush. That's why the anti-gay marriage initiatives were so important to GOP strategy: they were a way of keeping that bloc stable. The GOP also targeted voters at the margins, which would explain how they bolstered the GOP"share" of the traditionally conservative Democratic Catholic and Hispanic-Catholic vote.

We can debate the effectiveness of Rove's strategy in terms of Bush's margin of victory. But I don't think it can be debated that, as Bradford himself puts it,"the Bush campaign followed a strategy that they hoped would exploit the ballot measure and that the ballot measure was quite popular with certain voters."

The major parties work hard to perfect the building and maintaining of winning coalitions of interest groups with which voters personally identify. It offers something to each group. As Cox states:"This is what supporters of minor parties usually do not understand. Almost every minor party is an ideological party, and that explains why such parties either remain minor or cease to exist." They don't learn how to play the game of coalition-building, an expression of what Theodore Lowi once called a system of"interest-group liberalism.""A minor party invariably has a well-disciplined set of ideological positions," Cox writes,"but it lacks the wide array of personal identifications that are necessary to unite a large proportion of American voters over a substantial period of time."

Cox does not believe that this translates into a glowing future for the Libertarian Party, since the major parties are obviously here to stay for the foreseeable future. But he argues that"[t]he libertarian idea really does offer something for rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Christian and atheist." Even if Libertarians can't get elected en masse,"being elected ... isn't the only way to affect the political system."

Amen.

Hmm, I see there's lots of heated discussion I need to catch up on below. That'll keep til Monday. Right now I'm going to celebrate the aforementioned holiday by putting on that new live 3-CD set....