The unveiling of the Tories’ formidable new war room in Ottawa underscores everything the Conservative Stephen Harper team has been doing right and the Liberals have been doing brutally wrong in the lead-up to the imminent federal election.

In a very short time, Harper’s Republican groomers and powerful PR team have repackaged the former ivory tower stiff-shirt into an affable, avuncular man of the people. Though his still somewhat forced gestures but more relaxed way of speaking and dressing don’t necessarily ring entirely authentic, he’s clearly a better performer than US President George Bush, who speaks with an obviously fake Texas accent and often trips over his own words in comical fashion. Indeed, the polls show that, in spite of Bush’s unpopularity on both sides of the border, the Tory rebranding effort has been pretty successful and that this newfangled Harper is potentially poised for a majority government.

Of course, Harper couldn’t do it without a little help from the Liberals. When the centre-left party chooses as its leader an effete, uncharismatic academic who comes across as uncomfortable in his own shoes, everyone who witnessed the tragedies of the 2000 and 2004 American elections has to stop and shudder—even more so when you take into account Dion’s mousy stature, pathetic grasp of the English language, and lack of media savvy.

Charisma matters

Not that such superficial issues should hold so much sway. But they do and perhaps more so than ever. And even though Dion’s worldview is likely much closer to that of middle-of-the-road Canadians (outside of Alberta, perhaps), the way he’s presented it has been nothing short of weak.

First off, as much as Canadians care about the environment and want to see Harper unglue himself from Bush’s rear-end, it was foolhardy for Dion to expect that he could simply present his views on this one issue and everything else would fall into place. The net result was that he came across as a one-issue candidate and slowly receded into the background while Harper continued to address a broad spectrum of issues and stayed in the limelight.

Meanwhile, in a brilliant move that echoed Bush’s firing of Rumsfeld, Harper made Rona Ambrose—who, like everyone else in the tightly controlled Conservative party, was just following orders—the scapegoat for Tory opposition to Kyoto and replaced her with a softer-spoken John Baird. Then all the PM had to do was pay a little lip service to the environment: “We recognize we need to do more on the environment,” he told reporters, most of whom are either too naïve or too indifferent to probe beneath the surface. The bait and switch has been successful, and most Canadians don’t have a very clear sense of just how cynical and manipulative Harper’s “Clean Air Act” really is.

Environmental groups are quick to point out that the act is really little more than a clever ruse to obfuscate Harper’s stated intention to abandon Canada’s international commitment under the Kyoto Protocol. By eliminating short-term targets and postponing any meaningful action until 2050, the original wording of the act, in effect, does nothing to change the industrial status quo. As the Climate Action Network has succinctly put it, “if passed, the Clean Air Act will establish a long and unnecessary consultation process with industry that puts off for years the emissions cuts we need to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Clean Air Act is a delay tactic. It does nothing new of significance, and worse, it causes dangerous delays in regulating Canada's largest polluters.”

This is the true genius of Harper’s ploy. As the Bush administration has brilliantly illustrated in both its disastrous environmental policy and its War Against Terror, the general public has little tolerance for complexity. So it’s a hell of a lot easier to wrap a complicated story in a simple, palatable sound-byte—even if it’s a complete lie—than to be in the unfortunate position of having to deconstruct such weapons of mass distraction.

Conservatives on the move

And while the Liberals squabble about the wording of the act and dance daintily around the landmines that Harper’s laid out for them, the PM has intensified his attack.

At the symbolic level, by opening a 17,000-square-foot war room in Ottawa, Harper is putting everyone on notice that he is ready to take on all comers.

The effect of this gesture is two-fold. First, it puts the already-diminutive Liberals on the defensive because, at bottom, the polls are telling them that, at least for the time being, they don’t have a fighting chance against Harper. This, in turn, shows the Canadian public that Harper is a strong leader who isn’t afraid to project power over his cowering opponents.

Regrettably, this show of strength has buttressed Harper’s stature as a leader of men while the Liberals’ fortunes continue to fade.

Not up to the job

In the end, in spite of his good intentions and relatively left-leaning orientation, Dion is an abjectly poor politician. If the Liberals expect to be able to take on the Tories, they need to revive some of that “Just watch me” magic that carried them for so many years. If only they’d been able to synthesize a candidate with Kennedy’s charisma, Rae’s political experience, Ignatieff’s good looks and oratory skills, and Dion’s environmental stewardship, the Harper government would finally have something to worry about.

It seems their brightest hope is an up-and-coming Justin Trudeau. But that’s way off in the distance. As things stand, it appears that none of the parties can present viable contenders for the PM’s throne. If this is in fact the case, it will likely take a terrorist attack on the home front or a well-publicized military disaster of Iraqi proportions to change Harper’s standing.

Hopefully, by then he won’t be entrenched in a majority government, because once he doesn’t have to worry about being toppled by a non-confidence vote, he can abandon any pretence of appealing to the values that most environmentally conscious, peace-loving Canadians share.

In the Google Era, the average web-surfing consumer’s attention span has dwindled down to next to nothing. Consequently, in the digital goldfish bowl that we all inhabit, appearances often count for a lot more than substance.

Unfortunately, the Right is much savvier than anyone else at exploiting our cognitive deficiencies. Part of the reason is that it’s a lot easier to stridently repeat well-packaged clichés than to wrestle ambivalently with complexity. These right-wing mantras that the Bush and Harper teams are so good at spinning create an aura of consistency and reliability while they call out their mealy-mouthed opponents as flimsy flip-floppers.

But the flipside of the Google era is that the internet also offers a panoply of tools to combat such mendacious oversimplifications. To take just one example, YouTube, one of the web’s most popular sites, is a wellspring of creative resistance. Just google “YouTube Harper” and the first thing you’ll get is “Harper the Chameleon,” a pithy, entertaining expose of the Harper agenda set to Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon.”

And if the YouTube video doesn’t manage to convince you that we’ve got a problem here, google “Stephen Harper quotes” for a selection of the nasty things Harper had to say about the Canadian “Northern European welfare state,” his eagerness to participate in the Iraq War, and his disdain for the Kyoto Protocol—that is, before his Republican groomers got him to tone down his hawkish rhetoric.

After that, if you still don’t believe Stephen Harper is capable of such duplicity, just watch him. danadleman@gmail.com