Here's the text of a speech I gave to the Ontario Libertarian Party
on November 7, 2009.
**********
It’s a pleasure for me to be here at the Libertarian Party’s annual general meeting, and I’d especially like to thank everyone for the warm welcome I’ve received today.
I truly appreciate it.
You see I often promote ideas or views which rub people the wrong way, which in turn generates negative or even nasty reactions.
Just recently somebody rang me up and called me a “greedy, capitalist, fascist, pig-dog.” I don’t know about you, but I hate it when my mother calls me at the office!!
But I know you like me. And I like the Libertarian Party.
Yes the Libertarian Party may not be the biggest party in Canada; and yes the Libertarian Party may not be the richest party in Canada; and yes the Libertarians may not get the most votes of any party in Canada.
But there’s one thing for sure, the Libertarian Party has the best ideas of any party in Canada.
I also happen to think it’s the coolest party in Canada.
And most importantly, the Libertarian Party is the only party which invites me to speak at its annual general meetings.
Of course, the reason I like the Libertarian Party is that we both have more or less the same ideology.
We both believe in minimal government; we both believe in maximum individual freedom; and we both liked Stephen Harper better when he was president of the National Citizens Coalition!
Mind you, because we have so much in common it presents something of a challenge to me as a speaker, when it comes to coming up with a topic.
I mean what can I talk about?
I could explain why high taxes are bad, but you already know that. I could talk about why individual freedoms are important, but you already know that too.
And I guess I could explain why deficits and debts are bad, but that would require me to do real research ---- and that’s never going to happen.
So I pondered as to what I should talk about for days and days, and then it finally hit me.
The best thing for me to talk about, I decided, was me!
Now before you accuse me of being some sort of an egomaniac, hear me out. I have good reasons to talk about me.
First of all I figured if I talked about me, it might spur you to buy my book, Loyal to the Core.
I realize, of course, if I were to say something like I just said in any other venue, before any other crowd it would probably elicit boos and hisses.
But as libertarians I am sure you would support and even applaud my desire to promote my own economic self-interest.
The other reason I am talking about me, is that I have been in the front line political trenches of freedom for more than 20 years and during that time I have learned a lot of stuff.
And perhaps you can pick up a tip or two from me which will help you in your fight for freedom.
OK so now that I have justified my egomania, let’s begin with my story.
I was born in Windsor, Ontario – famous for cars, casinos and a never-ending stream of Liberal and NDP MPs.
And you have to understand, I was always a contrarian. I always wanted to be different. To stand out from a crowd.
Maybe that’s because I had an independent spirit, maybe it was because I saw the world a little differently, or maybe it was because I was a jerk.
Who knows?
The point is my contrarianism caused me to move to the left as a way of being different from my family which was staunchly Roman Catholic and socially conservative.
Now I wasn’t a communist or a hippie or anything. But I did flirt with the NDP and I did admire Pierre Trudeau and I was an anti-American, Canadian economic nationalist.
I think the proper political science term to describe my beliefs in those days is “Goofballism.”
I continued to be a goofball until I entered the University of Windsor, where all of a sudden I was surrounded by left wingers, teachers, students, student groups.
And this caused my contrarian gene to kick in again. Once again, I wanted to be different, only this time I became a small “c” conservative.
Boy did I ever become one.
I read Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, I read every issue of Bill Buckley’s National Review and I even joined the campus conservative club, which consisted of me and one other kid, whose chief political goal was the restoration of the Hapsburg Monarchy.
I stayed a conservative after I left university which is why I jumped at the chance in 1985 to work for the National Citizens Coalition.
The NCC was Canada’s leading conservative organization; an organization which fought for political and economic freedom, and most importantly it was going to pay me a salary.
My job at the NCC was communications or public relations. I wrote news releases, dealt with the media, wrote fundraising letters and gave speeches. I also oversaw the group’s national media advertising campaigns, a job which chiefly required me to figure out ways to compare MPs to various barnyard animals – especially pigs.
In fact, I think my lasting legacy at the NCC was that I helped to lower the standard of political debate in this country.
Anyway, at the NCC I was surrounded by conservatives. A lot of the people who worked there were conservatives and a bulk of the membership was conservative.
Yup, once again I wanted to be different. But what could I do to be different? What new philosophy could I adopt? It wasn’t as if I could go back to socialism/
The answer came one day when I was talking to NCC president David Somerville, a man who was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. How conservative was he? He was so conservative Atilla the Hun used to criticize people by saying “You sound like you’re to the right of David Somerville!”
The point is, while David and I were talking the topic of libertarians popped up. He didn’t like them. In fact, David contemptuously dismissed libertarians as “sex-crazed, drug addicts.”
My reaction was immediate: “Where do I sign up?”
But I didn’t know a lot about libertarianism so I went to the library and borrowed Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. That book opened my eyes to a lot about libertarianism or objectivism or whatever you want to call it – but it didn’t convert me.
What did convert me wasn’t a book, it was an individual, an individual named Arthur Finkelstein.
Arthur was an American political consultant who worked for the NCC, he gave us political, media and fundraising advice. He was, in fact, truth-be-told, one of the chief reasons behind the NCC’s success.
He was also the top Republican political consultant, if not the top American political consultant period.
Arthur worked for just about every major Republican candidate in the 1980s and 90s. He worked for Ronald Reagan, and Jesse Helms and George Pataki and Al D’amato and for many other freedom-oriented causes.
He was also the guy who basically invented the negative ad. His nickname was the “Merchant of Venom.”
Now you might be asking yourself, “If Arthur was so great, why haven’t I ever heard of the guy?”
Well, let me tell you a secret about political consultants. The ones who promote themselves a lot, the ones you see on TV talk shows and speaking at seminars are not usually the top consultants.
That’s why they need to get the public limelight. That’s why they self-promote.
The really top consultants don’t need to do that. The insiders know who they are and they are always busy.
Arthur fit into that category. If anything he did everything possible to avoid media scrutiny. He never did media interviews and no known photograph of Arthur exists.
He was kind of like the Howard Hughes of political consultants.
Anyway, we were lucky enough at the NCC that he worked for us. And Arthur was a libertarian. He once told me one of the highlights of his life came when he interviewed Ayn Rand for his school newspaper.
And he was he guy who explained to me the values, the principles and the ideals behind libertarianism. He was the guy who converted me to the cause.
But don’t get the idea Arthur was some sort of intellectual or philosopher. He wasn’t. Far from it. Arthur in fact was born and raised on the mean streets of Brooklyn.
He was as tough as nails.
How tough?
Well in my early days at the NCC, whenever Arthur came to Toronto for a meeting, I would actually get physically ill from anxiety.
You see if there was anything Arthur wouldn’t tolerate it was incompetence and laziness – and those were my two chief traits!
I could get away with it with our President, David Somerville. David would say something to me like “Gerry you got that report done yet?” and I would say something like “Yeah, it’s coming” and then go back to reading the newspaper.
With Arthur you couldn’t get away with stuff like that. He had the uncanny ability to cut through BS like a laser beam.
We would be in a meeting and he would say, “So Gerry what kind of returns are we getting from the latest direct mail letter.” And I would respond, “Well the money is coming in dribs and drabs.”
Arthur’s face would darken, his voice would lower an octave and he would glare at me and say in a deliberate, measured tone: “How many dribs, how many drabs.”
Then I would melt in my chair … and the next day they would be cleaning my blood off the wall.
But you know, fear can be a powerfully motivating emotion. And I was afraid unless I got better at my job, I would lose my job.
So I got better, I got darn good at it.
When that happened, I began to see Arthur as less of a tormentor and as more of a mentor, a teacher.
Because he was a genius. He was a genius at polling, a genius at media strategy, a genius at political tactics.
Everything I learned about politics and the art of politics I learned from Arthur.
For instance, Arthur taught about how to communicate a message effectively.
He taught me how you needed to keep your message concise and to the point and to avoid bogging it down with too much “substance.”
“What you need to do” he would say, “is hit people’s emotional buttons”. In other words, your goal isn’t to get people to think, it’s to get them to react.
For instance, onetime Arthur went after a liberal Democratic Senator named Jack Reed. He ran radio ads that said something like “Jack Reed voted to raise taxes. That’s liberal. That’s Jack Reed. That’s wrong.”
He would play that ad again and again until the message hit home.
Another example came in the mid-1970s when Arthur was acting as a pollster for Ronald Reagan, who was running for the Republican presidential nomination against a sitting President, Gerald Ford.
Reagan was a huge underdog. He needed an issue to define his campaign. Arthur’s job was to find it. By the way, that’s how pollsters earn their money. They comb through hundreds of issues and seek one that will mobilize the candidate’s base while attracting uncommitted voters.
Arthur found one: the Panama Canal issue. The American government was talking about handing over control of the canal to Panama. Arthur discovered in his polls that a lot of Americans and a lot of Republicans didn’t like this idea.
So that became Reagan’s issue. When he appeared on radio shows, when he appeared on TV or when he spoke before audiences, Reagan vowed not to give away the Panama Canal. His message was simple: “We bought it. We built it. We paid for it."
See how simple that message is? You can explain in less than five seconds. You don’t need studies or experts to explain it. People understand it immediately and it resonates.
Using that single message, Reagan very nearly won the nomination.
Arthur also taught me more than just the nuts and bolts of politics. He also taught me the importance of principles in politics.
Indeed for Arthur politics was really all about promoting freedom. He was not a hired gun, not a mercenary; he would not sign up for the highest bidder. He would only take on clients who would do the right thing.
That’s why he worked for the NCC. I mean why would a top American political consultant work for a small Canadian organization like the NCC? The answer is he liked what we were doing. He wanted to help us make Canada a freer and better place.
Mind you, he had some problems with pronouncing certain words. For instance, he could never pronounce “Saskatchewan.”
Arthur also firmly believed you could win an election while sticking to conservative values. He didn’t buy into the notion that the only way conservatives could win was to moderate their views or dilute their principles.
He believed all you needed to do was package and market your ideas in a way that would win support for conservatism.
It was through proper messaging that Arthur managed to win elections for numerous conservative candidates often against great odds.
Unfortunately, Arthur left the NCC in 1996. It was a sad day for the organization. A sadder day for me.
But I vowed that I would continue to carry on Arthur’s tradition of tough, principled pro-freedom messaging.
And I guess that’s why I became so critical of the Harper government when it became obvious that it was abandoning conservative principles and values.
I knew why the Tories were doing it. They believed a true conservative party couldn’t win power. They saw it as a choice between principle or power and they chose power.
But as Arthur taught me, that’s a false choice. Power and principle are not mutually exclusive. You can win power and stick to your principles.
The real problem with the Conservatives is they don’t have an Arthur Finkelstein on their staff, someone who knows how to communicate conservatism in a winning manner.
Instead of pushing a conservative message, for instance, the Conservatives feature cutesy-wutesy ads of Harper wearing a sweater-vest talking about his kids.
It’s terrible.
And unfortunately, when a party starts to turn its back on its principles, it can end up in some strange ideological places.
Just consider where the Conservative Party is today.
Earlier this year, I was amazed when Prime Minister Harper basically threw libertarians and fiscal conservatives under the bus. He basically said they have no place in the Conservative party. This from a man who was once head of the NCC!
But of course, that gives the Libertarian Party an opportunity to scoop up some of these homeless libertarians and conservatives. And that’s the value of the Libertarian Party, you give voters, who believe in freedom an alternative to the Conservative Party.
What’s more, the Libertarian Party is also performing a valuable role in helping to win the war of ideas. And when you think about it, that’s the important fight, more important even than even winning elections.
In short, Libertarians are a strong and needed voice for freedom.
OK that’s my pep talk.
Let’s get back to Arthur Finkelstein for some closure. As I noted, he left the NCC in 1996. Well in 2004 he broke his own rule and gave a media interview to the Jerusalem Post.
He had some negative things to say about then-president George W. Bush. Specifically he said Bush was pushing libertarians in the Republican Party to the side and handing the party over to the Christian right.
This, said Arthur, was bad for the Republican Party in the long run.
Now his quotes soon made their way into the American media. And to make a long story short, the White House was not happy and Arthur became something of a persona non grata among Republicans.
So now he is specializing in Eastern Europe. He is winning campaigns in places like the Czech Republic and Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria. I spoke to him recently and he told me there is a real thirst for freedom in these former communist countries. He also told me all his political tricks seem new over there!
All’s well that ends well.
I am going to conclude my talk by making what I consider the most important point of the day: Please buy my book!
