A few weeks before our recent election unpleasantness began, I had lunch in Ottawa with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, two young U.S. Republican blogger/pundit types whose book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream competes with my own in the hard-fought category of Political Books With Really Long Subtitles. To caricature their argument, Douthat and Salam believe U.S. Republicans should seek to attract middle-class and working-class voters with families, roughly the kind of people who used to be called “Reagan Democrats,” with narrowly targeted bits of small-scale interventionist government policy, often tax benefits. In other words, they argue for Harper-Muttart micro-policy along the lines of the tool-belt tax credit Patrick Muttart used to get “Dougie’s” attention in the 2006 election. Or the ban on candied tobacco that helped get the party noticed by mothers this time around.

I found Salam and Douthat fearsomely intelligent, humble about what they don’t know (Douthat has shown real class on his blog as he witnesses the flameout of the woman who was his preferred candidate for Vice President, Sarah Palin) (Oh, hush. Nobody’s perfect), and especially in Salam’s case, almost weirdly up on the details of Canadian politics.

Now, in a piece for the website of the Atlantic Monthly, Salam connects the dots and argues explicitly for Harper as a model for the U.S. Republicans. His article will confuse Canadian readers who believe Harper already gets all his ideas from south of the border — why reverse Niagara Falls? Why should Charlie Parker copy Sonny Stitt? — but it will provide a novel perspective for others.

Doug Bell over at the Other Place sends two emails to Brian Topp, who sure doesn’t look 48, and gets two fascinating answers in reply.

President of Montreal Board of Trade, who argued that Montreal must be represented in the Harper cabinet even though no Conservative could manage to get elected there (*cough* MichaelFortier *cough*), quit today. She’s going to pursue a “new challenge.”

Highlights from the two-year (really-badly-)hidden agenda:

• Joint communiqué from Canada’s prime minister and EU president Merkel after the Canada-EU summit, vowing to “study…a closer economic partnership.” “Leaders will review the results of this study at the 2008 Canada-EU Summit with a view to pursuing balanced and closer future EU-Canada economic integration.” That 2008 summit is today.

• Column in Maclean’s by A. Fellow, dated Aug. 30, 2007, on Canada-E.U. free trade. “The Quebec premier is working closely with Ottawa to get the Europeans interested in a transatlantic, Canada-EU free trade accord. The payoff would be tremendous: guaranteed low-cost access to a European market of a half-billion people and an economy the size of the United States’; new investment; new workplaces for skilled Canadians overseas; new skilled manpower for labour-starved Canadian employers.”

Continue…

Not so much. “Sarkozy and Harper will sign something vague that commits to nothing.” What killed the momentum? The no-fixed-date federal election, is what. And that’s problematic, because the whole point of the strategy Jean Charest had been pursuing doggedly since early 2007 was that the best friend Canada could ever, ever have for these negotiations was a European presidency in the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy. That was only going to happen for the six months at the end of 2008 or, as we like to call them now, “the two months at the end of 2008.”

So Charest’s legacy agenda as a free trader on a scale even Mulroney could not have attained has been scuttled. In entirely unrelated news, Harper’s office thinks Charest was mean to them during the election.

Here’s the top of our Inside Story, the epic history of the 2008 federal election. The rest — six “chapters,” plus an epilogue — is in the current issue of Maclean’s. There is much to confound and amaze in there, including surprise cameo appearances by Nicolas Sarkozy’s press secretary and — and — well, I can’t say, but you’ll be confounded and amazed.

I’ll be over here tonight, (small-) group liveblogging the Obama-McCain debate with a few colleagues, starting at 9.

As for the last election, I’ll be on the back half of The Agenda on TVO tonight as part of their panel. And starting tomorrow on newsstands across this wonderful, wonderful country, we’ll have a lot for you to read about what just happened. More on that tomorrow.

“Ms. May rejected suggestions that her campaign helped to elect more Conservative MPs. She said that if Canada allotted seats in proportion to the popular vote, as is common in many other countries, Greens would have won about 20 seats.”

CalgaryGrit on the new, more compact Liberal caucus:

“The one bright spot in this is that it will be a small, but impressive, Liberal caucus. Dion, Rae, Ignatieff, Kennedy, Dryden, Hall Findlay, Goodale, Dosanjh, Trudeau, Garneau, LeBlanc, Dhalla, Holland…I could name a dozen more quality MPs easily.”

It is easy to quibble with any of the names Dan mentions, but take the broad point. These people are grownups.

Is it too much to ask, then, that they act like grownups in the next Parliament?

I’m not talking about decorum. Tempers will rise and insults will fly. But on the long list of complete Liberal failures in the last Parliament was an inability to take the long view; to look past tonight’s national newscasts and the apparently overwhelming need to get a clip of a barking MP onto them; to remember last week’s story and keep reminding Canadians of it; to build a narrative, using the simple crafts of storytelling, about the government they faced and the government they wanted to become; to use supportas strategically as contention; to notice when one day was different from others and use a variety of techniques to spread that message among Canadians; to develop a communications strategy more sophisticated than firing off six identical emails a day to the automatic-delete sections of 100 reporters’ emailboxes (“Minister X is letting Canadians down on xxxxx by his performance on file yyyyyy, said Official Opposition Whatsis Critic zzzzzz. ‘I see here in the Globe that frumf frumf frumf frummp,’ Mr. zzzzzz said….”).

Here is some gentle counsel for the next Liberal caucus, from a guy who watched the last Liberal caucus: if you discover you’re devoting 80% of your energy in Ottawa to Question Period, then soon enough you’ll look back at 2008 as a high point.

‘k thanks.

The Conservative share of the popular vote was three to four per cent higher than most of the last-round polls suggested. This will allow me to lord it over two of your other favourite bloggers for a while. But it raises an interesting question: Why? A few possible answers:

(a) The Conservative vote kept rising over the weekend

(b) Much like (a), but with an explanation: Thanksgiving Family Dynamics

(c) The Conservative get-out-the-vote mechanics are hugely better than their equivalents in other parties

(d) The question is meaningless as all the polls were within the margin of error, and it’s mere coincidence that the meaningless differences were all on the same side.

I give some credence to all of these answers, except (d). You may have your own theories. Discuss. Oh, and folks? I’ll be paying close attention to see whether I was hasty in threatening to shut down the comment boards here on Inkless.