It's a great season for history-making politics. And not just in Washington.
Canadian politicos, still a touch caught up in Obama-envy, are often wistful for the more genuine, more substantive policy debates common to American politics and elections. Some try to keep up.
Yesterday, NDP Leader Jack Layton produced a notable entry for the Canadian political history books.
For the first time in memory, an NDP leader asked the Canadian Prime Minister to adopt U.S.-style policies.
"Why is the Prime Minister refusing to do for Canadians what President Obama is doing for U.S. citizens?" Lonely Jack demanded in Question Period.
Wow. A thousand Canadian campaigners for sounder thinking instantly recall the cheap face slaps perfectly good ideas often receive up here, derailed by the NDP simply for being "U.S.-style." It's the cheapest and easiest slur in Canadian politics, virtually guaranteed to render whatever discussion stillborn.
But these are historic times. Turns out, our Jack's been a closet U.S.-lover. Who'd a thunk?
Oh, sure, you could be cynical and see this is a fresh way for the fiscally reliberated NDP to remount their favourite hobbyhorse, the nostalgia for the good old days of out-of-control government spending and deficits our kids can pay off. Wealth transfer, they call it: you and I live better today, our kids pay for it tomorrow.
Maybe Jack's conversion to U.S.-style policies is not so historic, after all. Could the Fogbound Coalition be revived as the Foggy Bottom Coalition?
In fairness, and with respect to the federal NDP's longstanding (but recently suppressed) predilection for fiscal recklessness, it must be acknowledged that there is a certain amount of consistency in this apparent about-face. The NDP do know bad economic policy when they see it, and are rarely shy about embracing it.
The Obama administration and Democratic Congress are deep into accelerating the horrid fiscal pace of the last eight straight years, when Bush and Congress together ran up mega deficits. In just eight years, they doubled the national debt, from $5-trillion to $10 trillion. Ouch. All this stimulus (together with a little politically-motivated social engineering to make home buying "easier") helped fuel the market euphoria and the boom-bust thing that is today giving the world such a hangover. Double ouch. Now President Obama comes along, with a certain you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet approach, and in the name of doing things differently, collaborates with the ever-ready spenders in Congress to skyrocket those deficits even further.
The United States is now poised to boost its national debt by another trillion or two - some 10 per cent of GDP - in just one year. Totally unprecedented in peacetime, totally unsustainable. But apparently, to some, this feels like good policy. Or at least meets some weird political test of not "doing nothing."
No wonder the NDP loves it.
Ironically, or not, just about the time when Layton found his fondness for U.S. economic policies, the American public and financial markets began heading quite the other way. Polls show that while Obama himself remains highly popular (for a lot of good reasons), support for his economic plan has slipped about 10 points as its details became known. A USA Today/Gallup poll shows a plurality of Americans (48 per cent to 41 per cent) wish the President and Congress would reduce the bill's spending by $200-billion.
The same day that Jack was berating our PM to go down the U.S. road, the U.S. Senate was passing Obama's economic recovery plan and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was struggling to defend an awesomely hollow bank-support program (note: the most important aspect of all this). Pleaded Geithner: "I've only been on the job for two weeks," apparently forgetting that one reason he was picked is that as head of the New York Federal Reserve he's been centrally involved in the banking crisis since Day 1. Actually, since before Day 1. Showing up for school without his homework done, what's up with this?
