Cue the political outrage

The moment every politician lives for, the answer to their most fervent prayers, is to be the subject of a vicious personal attack. If they are very lucky, it will be directed at their family. At once the preparations begin. The speechwriters and the handlers confer. The press is alerted: the candidate will make a statement at such-and-such an hour. Yes, he will take questions. At length he appears, ashen-faced, voice barely above a whisper. With immense dignity, in simple, direct language, he speaks. "This isn't about me. I can take the slings and arrows. But when you attack my family..." Or: "It is true that, like millions of Canadians, I struggle with my weight. Have done all my life. So it is not me that my opponent has called a 'fat pig,' it is every person living with my condition, a rare glandular disease called... " The eyes scan somewhere over the horizon. His approval numbers jump five points overnight. How many times have we seen this ritual played out in recent years? There's Pierre Elliott Trudeau, seizing on Rene Levesque's crack about his middle name: "Yes, Elliott was my mother's name..." There's Jean Chretien, after a Tory ad that appeared to make fun of his face (as if that had not been the stock in trade of every cartoonist in the country for decades). And look, there's Paul Martin, wife by his side, after an errant Tory press release accused him of being soft on child pornography. "This is personal. I am a father and I am a husband." And the media soak it up. (Well, mostly: As a National Post story drily noted, "Mr. Martin is the father of three grown sons.") We know it's hokum, but we report it straight, just as if there were genuine hurt feelings involved. For in truth, prisoners of narrative that we are, we need the sham as much as they: more, perhaps. If the public did not already have both professions pegged as frauds, we would have something to answer for. And so when Bob Rae claimed to be personally insulted by Stephen Harper's jibe about "most of" the Liberal leadership candidates being anti-Israel, trotting out various family members in a sublime, "some of my best wives are Jewish" moment of shamelessness, no one snorted with derision. When Michael Ignatieff invoked both his late mother and her Gestapo-tortured fiancé to get himself out of a sticky spot in a debate, analysts applauded it as a political master stroke. And then there's Puppygate. The image of Belinda Stronach boo-hooing into her pillow because Peter MacKay called her a dog -- or, as Ms Stronach maintained, because of the "chilling" effect this would have on women entering politics -- is so preposterous that only a very few people on this earth could manage it without cracking up. Yet for days on end we have all been seriously discussing whether this betrayed a secret Conservative agenda to keep women in kennels. (A note to copy-editors: No one in politics is ever actually "angry." I include in this not only professional politicians, but all those whose livelihoods depend on periodically erupting in rage for the cameras: farmers, union leaders, lawyers, Indian chiefs. It's not real, any of it, and yet we persist in reporting on "angry" whosits demonstrating in support of their demands for whatsit. Can't we impose a ban on this word?) If women are such fragile creatures as Ms Stronach and her opposition colleagues pretend, if they are so desperately sensitive to slights, then only one conclusion is possible: they are unfit for public office. But of course there have been many women in politics who were masters of the personal attack, often in explicitly gender-based terms. If you don't believe it, consult the newspapers or Hansard for any reference to "testosterone." I once had occasion to check, after the NDP's Marilyn Churley raised a stink in the Ontario legislature over a member's suggestion that her frequent, erratic outbursts might have been hormonally based, whether sauce for the goose might once have been for the gander. Sure enough, I found this quote, from the Toronto Star for December 13, 2002, describing an especially raucous session: "Some people were obviously drunk last night; there's no doubt about it. It's a combination of men, alcohol and testosterone going on here last night." The speaker? Marilyn Churley, MPP. In the wake of the Stronach business, the NDP are now agitating for a speech code for Parliamentarians, with fines for racist, sexist or homophobic remarks. But then the NDP specialize in a much nastier line of attack. Call someone a dog, and most people can laugh it off. But call them racist or sexist -- or "mean-spirited," "selfish," and other of the party's rich lexicon for imputing motives to their opponents -- and the slight is not only personal, but invites others to think the same, the more so because it is so clearly meant to be taken as the literal truth. Wasn't it Jack Layton who accused Paul Martin of killing the homeless? But I would not wish to ban such jibes. After all, when politicians call each other names, they are at least being sincere.