For the Liberal Party to win the next federal election, the left needs to get out, get together, and vote, according to Warren Kinsella, political strategist and author of Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving the Coming Conservative Apocalypse.
“The brass ring is young people,” he said. “But when [young people] take a pass on democracy, you just elect Stephen Harper.”
Kinsella, a Carleton grad, was a special assistant to former prime minister Jean Chrétien and managed the federal Liberal Party’s war room in 1993 and 2000.
He was also chairman of the Ontario Liberal war room during two successful provincial election campaigns in 2003 and 2007.
He says seizing the message of the Occupy movement is the best strategy for the Liberals to win the next federal election.
“You had people in countries around the world, even right-wing people, saying ‘I agree with those kids, my life is getting harder, and Mitt Romney’s life is getting easier, and it’s not right,’” Kinsella said.
“That’s how we win the next election,” he said. “It’s the one per cent versus the 99 per cent.”
Despite the title, the book pays tribute to the federal Conservative Party and their ability to win elections. Taking advantage of the split in the left between the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party is one of two ways Kinsella said the Conservatives have been successful.
“If [Harper] has been able to win in circumstances where he had less than 40 per cent of the vote, principally it is because his opponent is split in two,” Kinsella said.
“The [U.S.] progressives are more sensible about this. They’ve come together and everybody is united behind Obama’s leadership, but here we’re fighting over the same real estate,” he said.
Kinsella said the second Conservative strategy is values and image. Harper’s image of a Tim Hortons hockey dad is in his favour, he said, because it captures values like family, parsimony, and disinterest in elites.
And how, he asks, do the Liberals answer with past leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff?
“Two university professors – in a row.”
For the next leader of the Liberal Party, Kinsella said he is confident in Justin Trudeau.
“He can speak to populist values and street level liberals much more readily than Ignatieff and Dion,” Kinsella said.
He said Trudeau needs to communicate clearly, talk about everyday Liberal values, and not get caught up in statistics or the image of his father.
“His dad was the reason-over-passion guy. That is the aspiration of politics – we should be preoccupied with reason over passion – but that’s not the world we live in,” he said. “Justin being a bit more emotional, a bit more unconventional than his dad I think helps him.”
“Picture the stage in 2015,” he said. “He’s going to be on stage with two older, kind of angry guys, and he’s going to be this younger, more energetic, more cheerful, more positive young guy. And I like his chances. The last guy to do that was Barack Obama in 2008.”
