I just saw the debate on youtube this afternoon. I thought I might post some of my thoughts.
For those who have not seen it yet, you can see it here
I'll say first of all that I'm not the biggest Canadian political junkie. I'm not the most avid follower of Canadian politics. I prefer to follow the politics of America, China (and around East Asia), and the middle east. I think that in relative comparison, Canadian politics is not that interesting. Nevertheless since I am a citizen of this great country (not sarcasm) I figure I ought to do my share of following in this 2011 federal election.
I'll admit right off the bat that crazily reading up on what each party stands for is not my utter most priority. I have other reading priorities(reading about Christian spirituality, the wisdom of different Christian denominations, psychology, biographies, history etc.). I do read the (very liberal) Toronto Star at work though, mostly because it's free haha. Man, the Star is so unabashedly liberal it doesn't even try to put up a veneer of surface-level neutrality. It's just blatantly left without apology. I read blow after blow against Harper. I don't know, something about Harper makes me like him. I don't know why. I think I'd like to meet him personally one day too. It's kind of mysterious too because I only read anti-Harper articles on politics haha.
All that to say, my personal take on what I weigh heavily in who I'm going to put my trust in is significantly swayed by assessing the character of each leader in each party. I realize a lot of things in this. I can't see their character behind closed doors when the cameras are off. I can't fully know what they honestly think about a lot of things. I can't judge the deepest depths of their heart (I have trouble judging the deepest depths of my own heart sometimes). But nevertheless, I do believe Jesus' words that whatever is stored up in people's hearts just flows out, or in the arena of politics, it "leaks" out in people. Superficial "social cosmetics" can only do so much, sooner or later the natural contents of what's in people's hearts leak out of people's word choice, speaking pitch, microexpressions on their face, and subconscious body language. I see this fact in myself, in my family, in my close friends, and in my acquaintances. I think Anthony Bloom (an eastern orthodox dude) has a lot of wisdom when he says that the human body is a barometer of the person's state of mind. While it doesn't have 100% correspondence to a person's state of mind, it nevertheless somewhat reflects what's going on inside of someone.
I sometimes read newspaper articles on political leaders, and hear tidbits of headlines of "drama" that occurred with the party leaders (i.e. Harper "rejecting" a girl in one of his rallies because she had a picture with Michael Ignatieff on Facebook), but I figure at the end of the day, the media a lot of the time puts such a spin on "facts" that it's so hard sometimes to filter through what's exaggeration, what's a lie, and what REALLY took place. And the media has it's own agenda a lot of the times. I don't need others to tell me the motives of actions of politicians. I just need to know the facts of what objectively occurred, then I can decide about motives myself (which I'll be cautious about anyway, because I know I know very little and can know very little if I've never met them personally).
I've also learned (when I led a team of 5 Canadians in East Asia last year) all the heavy responsibility of leadership. It's so easy to point fingers and blame someone if something bad happened. Very simple. It takes less than 10 calories (I'm completely guessing haha). But I've learned that when one's in leadership, one just has to naturally take responsibility of all the negative things that happen under one's team. Sometimes it is one's own fault, but sometimes it's not, but nevertheless, the leader has to shoulder the responsibility and take the blame. For an outsider that does not know what really goes on in the team, frankly speaking, most of the time they don't really know what's going on. I'm not saying that people and leaders shouldn't be held accountable, I'm just saying that unless one has truly reliable inside information, it's nearly impossible to accurately assess the root of issues by looking at the superficial symptons. Since I've only tasted a little bit of this "leader shouldering responsibility and covering for blame within his team" phenomena, I can hardly imagine what political leaders go through when something goes wrong in their team. Like all the "scandals" that happened in each party recently. It's so easy to point the finger, and come up with a make-shift blame-inviting-framework to make sense of the "facts" when frankly speaking, a lot of people don't know what the heck is actually going on. I'll say frankly that I have no idea, for the most part, what the character of the middle east dictators are like. I'm not saying that the revolutions aren't justified at all, or that governments shouldn't be held accountable, but I'm just saying that I've never been an "insider" to fully understand what the heck is going on. There are personality factors, cultural factors, subcultural factors, historical factors, personal history factors, interpersonal-history-within-the-team factors, social dynamics/chemistry within the team factors, psychological factors, biological pressure/physiological fluctuation factors(different moods during different times of the day that affect social dynamics), spiritual factors, amount and type of education received factors, best-friend-influence factors, personal habits/lifestyle factors, self-deception factors. If I don't 100% fully understand all of these factors influencing my own life, how the heck can I fully understand what goes on inside of Mubarak, or Gadhafi? Am I just going to fully rely on what a foreign reporter, who has probably never spoken to them personally, thinks? Same thing to a lot of Canadian reporters writing condemning articles bashing certain party leaders when they've never even had a substantial conversation with the leader themselves.
All that to say, I'm not going to fully trust the media when I try to assess each leader. I want to hear from the leaders themselves. No leader is going to say "I am for the destruction of Canada" or "I want Canada to continue regressing economically". All leaders are going to say something positive along the lines of "I believe my party can competently lead in power for the next few years" and "I believe our policies and proposed plans/bills are capable of making Canada a better place". One of the keys for me is how they say it. What is the tone of their voice? what is their word choice in their message? What are the microexpressions on their faces like? Does their body language below the neck show calm-confidence in what they say? Of course I can only learn so much about them in a public debate, but I think I can learn more about them by observing them directly rather than having a newspaper reporter ascribe a biased pre-committed/interpretive framework on the politicians for me. It is like a father trying to find out if his son lied to him about something. If the father wants to find out the truth, he should not rely on what other third-party-people report about what the son said. The father should ask his son about the truth and not exclusively focus on the contents of what the son says, but how he says it. Any son can say "I didn't steal from the cookie jar" or "I didn't steal money from your wallet". The father would be wise to analyze how the son says the contents rather than rely on 3rd party information that relays the exact same contents of what the son suspected of lying said. The father should not focus exclusively on the contents that comes out of the son's mouth, but see whether his overall behaviour is in natural congruence in the flow of the son's speech, to see if there's any on-the-spot behavioural inconsistencies that lead him to believe that his son is lying. A roughly similar attitude takes place in how I want to assess the characters of the politicians. And for me, the characters of the politicians matters a lot, not just their "brilliant" political plans on paper. Their characters will trickle downwards to each sector/level of society and have a profound influence. Laws and legislation can change behaviour, but not character. It takes character to change character. Character is contagious. Not only on a social level, but I believe on a spiritual level one's character somehow mysteriously affects those in his circle of influence in ways we won't fully understand in this life.
With all that said, I have to say that I was impressed by Harper's overall character throughout the whole debate. By seeing his response to things as well as his lack of response to things, I was very impressed by how he remained calm and composed in the midst of all the verbal cross-fire going on. All the other leaders were angry and letting their emotions fuel their refinely coated venom. Harper was an exception. The other 3 were mudslinging. Ignatieff and Duceppe, especially, got pretty angry. Layton seemed somewhat angry and viewed the other leaders with contempt. I think that Harper remained respectful and refused to join the mudslinging session. I have to say, his lack-of-emotional-response with his consistent "emotionless stare" towards his accusing opponents when they each taunted him made me laugh out loud literally repeatedly. hahaha. I can't get enough of that. Once again, I reiterate that I have tasted a bit of the burden of leadership in leading only a team of 5 for a year. Harper has had to lead a team that has been in power for the past few years of an entire country. Even though I only led a team of 5, I felt the crushing burden of both justified and unjustified accusations aimed at myself as well as those I was responsible for looking after. After receiving just a dose of criticism from outside the team (other church leaders in EA, the school, dissatisfied people within the spiritual movement in our EA city) I can see how much of a good character is needed to withstand negative/critical accusations without responding back critically and sinking down to the accuser's level. It truly takes strength to not only turn the other cheek on the outside, but on the inside. And in this debate Harper had to take simultaneous heat from all 3 party leaders aggressively triple-teaming him nonstop. And although he wasn't perfect, he for the most part did not sink low to the level of mudslinging, name-calling, personal insults, and fuel the antagonistic fire of interpersonal enmity in the debate. I truly have respect for Harper in this regard. I am not a political expert, and admit that I don't have the political background to comprehensively assess whether or not his proposed plans/promises are wise for the country long-term, but I have to say that I'm really impressed by his character. He's either a really good actor, or a man with a solid character. His body language and microexpressions on his face show that he didn't seem bothered to a significant degree, or respond with fire against fire, or in this case respond with arrogance against arrogance.
I have to say that the closing remark of one other political leader truly gave away his lack of confidence in his party. Of course political leaders are highly trained to modify their macro-facial expressions, so that is the last place to look when assessing a politician's confidence. But man! This politician's body language really gave away his lack of confidence in either his party, himself, or his arguments in the debate! I don't know exactly what his lack of confidence was attributed towards or what caused it, but I did see it present in his final speech in the debate.
Also, from a purely a political standpoint, I was impressed by the skill of conceptual framing from the leaders. Over these years, I have learned more and more about the skill of framing an issue in debates for political reasons. This is different from purely philosophical debates (for example about the existence of God), where the debaters (at least ideally) have arguments with identical definitions of terms that enables their arguments to "run on the same tracks and collide". In politics, it seems different. It seems that a lot of the times the "tracks" of an argument are shifted (intentionally) to make it seem that the arguments are running on "parallel tracks" that don't meet. This is not done unintentionally a lot of the time, but intentionally to impose another interpretive framework on the issue at hand. This is an art and it takes skill. I think 3 of the debaters (excluding Duceppe) were excellent at imposing an alternative interpretive framework on the issue at hand that allowed them to escape or counter uncomfortable "cornering" in arguments. This truly takes skill, and all 3 are brilliant at it (this is expected since all 3 climbed the political ladder so high).
My purpose for watching the debate was for several reasons. Learning about each party's policies/plans were only one of them. I was more interested in assessing the character of each party leader in what they did (and what they didn't do) on a moral level. I also wanted to see their great political skill of thinking on the spot to change an interpretive framework on the issue at hand to get out of tight spots. I was surprised that the leaders didn't use more imagery to coat their arguments, because I know how powerful imagery can be in persuasion.
What do others think of the debate?
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