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Watching a video compilation of family home movies – a movie within the movie The Iron Lady – the ghost of Denis Thatcher says these words to Margaret. The Iron Lady is the latest in the genre of films about the elderly people who attempt to deal with this sad reality. The movie argues that, politically, there was little Margaret Thatcher would want to have changed. She set out to make a difference and, by God, she did. She had no regrets about her key decisions, for example going to war over the Falklands, confronting the miners, or privatizing much of the public sector.

Her political regrets were over lives lost in military conflict (the soldiers killed in the Falklands War) or political conflict (IRA assassinations, in particular her supporter Airey Neave). At a personal level, while she made clear to Denis when accepting his marriage proposal, that she would not be a typical housewife, the movie still suggests some regret that her political career so dominated her family life.

Nonetheless, for both the historical figure and the protagonist of the movie, Edith Piaf’s “je ne regrette rien” would be the personal anthem of choice.

The Iron Lady thus invites comparison with two overtly political films about aging, Errol Morris’s documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, and the superb Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Kuzuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize winning The Remains of the Day. In both, the protagonists express deep regret. In McNamara’s case, despite his successes as a senior executive modernizing Ford Motors and as Secretary of Defense controlling the hyper-aggression of the generals, his name remains eternally linked to the futility of the Viet Nam War. In The Remains of the Day, the fictional protagonists all have their regrets, Lord Darlington over his embrace of appeasement, and the butler Stevens over his inability to escape the personal and psychic imprisonment of domestic service.

Movies about regret have an intellectual and emotional appeal. Characters can in their minds replay the past and imagine what would have happened had they made different decisions. We in the audience all have regrets about some of the choices we made, and watching characters in movies express regret and show the sadness that comes from regret provides identification with and validation of our own emotions as well as a measure of schadenfreude.

A triumphal movie about an elderly person who expresses no regret would be unlikely to facilitate much connection between protagonist and audience. Imagine Errol Morris trying to make a movie based on an extended interview with Margaret Thatcher. Despite Morris’s interlocutorial skill at both expressing sympathy for and challenging his interviewees, Margaret Thatcher would be far less interesting than Robert McNamara. Morris might show headlines and photos alluding to her controversial ministry, just as he did for McNamara, but he would not elicit the moments of dismay, regret, self-doubt, and sadness that he elicited from McNamara. Likely, all he would have received was a shrill scolding.

The creators of the Iron Lady have necessarily taken a different tack in their attempt to humanize and ironize Margaret Thatcher. They have seized upon the fact that she now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, the movie depicts her as both physically frail and intellectually confused, suffering from the failure of her short-term memory as well as hallucinating through the entire movie about the presence of her deceased husband Denis. The interesting mental mechanism that is evoked is how a person suffering from Alzheimer’s can still channel into her memories, mainly of her triumphs and occasionally of her regrets. The one late life victory Thatcher achieves – only with considerable prodding from her daughter and her handlers – is to divest herself of Denis’ clothing and personal effects and finally to convince herself that he is dead.

At its core, The Iron Lady is a movie about Alzheimer’s disease rather than a movie about politics. The political recollections are too fleeting to deal adequately with her controversial ministry. The movie attempts to depict the mechanisms of a mind remembering, of a mind failing to remember, and of a mind hallucinating to replace the present with the past. It also tries to show what of her character remains and what is lost.

Meryl Streep has received accolades for her portrayal of Thatcher. It has two aspects: the mimicry of the voice, facial expressions, and bearing of the public figure we all remember, and the creation of a victim of Alzheimer’s who happens to live within the body of the former prime minister. Portrayal of people with disabilities requires believably demonstrating the disability while still communicating the person’s essential humanity. When done well, and two instances that come to mind are Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, the audience will be riveted.

The critic’s consensus is that Meryl Streep has succeeded at doing this here. But the film critics are more knowledgeable about politics than they are about psychology. It would be valuable to hear what gerontologists and psychologists think about The Iron Lady. Do Phyllida Lloyd’s directing, Abi Morgan’s screenplay, and Meryl Streep’s acting ring true? Have they created a clinically realistic version of Alzheimer’s? With the aging of the boomers, the question is an important one. It matters less what the movie says about the actual Margaret Thatcher’s politics than about the character “Margaret Thatcher’s” dementia. If much of what we all think we know comes from the movies, has this movie taught the right lessons?

I was asked by iPolitics.ca to put myself in Premier McGuinty’s shoes to think about priorities and problems at the start of his new mandate. While the iPolitics article, with contributions from a variety of pundits, will be coming out early in January, here are my un-media-ted views now.

The leadership of the federal Liberals is McGuinty’s for the asking. While leading the third party in opposition is always a hard grind, after this overview, the conclusion might be that it is preferable to governing Ontario now.

The province is running a substantial deficit in an economy that is not rebounding as quickly as anticipated a few months ago, and the debt ratings agencies are watching carefully, with the possibility of a downgrade looming. In addition, the generosity of the federal government, for example in constantly increasing transfers for health care, can no longer be taken for granted. It has its own fiscal concerns.

The province has little, if any room, for tax increases as a way to achieving fiscal balance. Economically, higher taxes decrease growth. Politically, higher taxes would confirm the “taxman” image the Conservatives, with at least some success, stuck on McGuinty. The alternative – spending cuts – militates against two key components of McGuinty’s style and substance of government.

First, he has taken pride in improvements in the quality of public service, for example decreases in hospital waiting times, reduction in class sizes, and better student performance in province-wide tests. All of these have required increases in spending. Second, after the public sector turmoil of both the Rae and Harris governments, McGuinty has brought a measure of stability and cordiality to the public sector, achieved through generosity in labour settlements, within both the OPS and the broader public sector. In addition, the McGuinty government has directed considerable spending towards key priorities, such as green energy. Spending cuts will make it very difficult to extend all these components of an activist agenda into the next mandate.

The McGuinty government may face two microeconomic challenges, the worsening situation at RIM and a possible collapse of the high-rise condo market in Toronto. RIM’s troubles may be the result of better strategizing and implementation by its competitors. Or they may be the consequence of co-CEO’s who, instead of sticking to their kitting, were attempting in one case to emulate Albert Einstein and in the other Larry Tannenbaum. A turnaround seems increasingly unlikely, so the best-case scenario would be takeover by a competitor and the worst-case bankruptcy. RIM has spawned an agglomeration of technological and entrepreneurial expertise in the Waterloo-area, and losing it would be very damaging to the Ontario economy. Just as the McGuinty Government intervened to prop up the auto industry in 2008, it can be expected to intervene to ensure a transition that maintains Waterloo’s technological and intellectual capital.

If Toronto’s high-rise condo market collapses, one implication will be major layoffs in the construction industry. The collapse of Toronto’s housing market in the early Nineties is a precedent, as the slack was taken up by the construction of Highway 407. The debt rating agencies were cooperative, agreeing not to add spending on the highway to the Rae government’s debt because of the prospect of cost recovery through tolling. The expansion of the Toronto subway system may play a similar role now, though the financial model and the likely reaction of the rating agencies would be different this time.

Politically, while McGuinty no longer has a majority, the Liberals have the advantage of straddling the political centre, making it hard for the Conservatives and NDP to find common cause and bring down the government. Furthermore, McGuinty has an advantage over the Conservatives in that leader Tim Hudak still chooses to wear the mantle of Mike Harris’s common sense revolution. McGuinty’s response would be that, if austerity is inevitable, it would be better to have it delivered by a leader who will do his best to mitigate the damage than by a leader who relishes it.

Ultimately McGuinty’s challenge will be to find some way to both recast himself and maintain continuity with a self-definition that has worked.

This will be my last post of the calendar year. I wish my readers a relaxing holiday season and healthy and happy new year.

In Governing Fables, I outlined three American political fables: the cynical (Primary Colors), the pragmatic (The Candidate, City Hall), and the idealistic (Seven Days in May, The West Wing). The cynical fable – and I take the liberty to quote myself – includes candidates and their handlers who are “cynical power seekers, loyal to no ideology larger than self-interest.” In addition, “marital unfaithfulness/sexual license is a marker of moral failure.” Finally “the political system is a familiar witches brew of influence peddling, hypocrisy, special interest lobbying, self-seeking, and personal betrayal.” (all on page 135).

Through and through, The Ides of March expresses this view of politics. The two main characters, Ohio governor and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (George Clooney) and his junior and eventual chief campaign manager Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), epitomize this fable.

Morris is a left-liberal Democrat who spouts the appropriate ideology (for example, with an energy independence speech taken almost verbatim from Tom Friedman’s New York Times columns). But he violates what the movie refers to as the cardinal rule of politics – “don’t fuck an intern” – and then engages in a coverup of the biological consequences. In pursuit of the presidential nomination, he submits to blackmail by reversing himself to agree to a mediocre senator’s demand to be Secretary of State as the price of supporting his candidacy.

Meyers is no better. While working for Morris, whom he describes as “the real deal”, he nonetheless agrees to a meeting with the campaign manager of the other Democratic presidential candidate, in effect opening the door to a bigger, better deal. When fired for his disloyalty, Meyers immediately crosses the street and offers himself to the other candidate. When he’s not accepted, he contacts Morris, using his possession of evidence regarding Morris’s dalliance to blackmail Morris into appointing him as campaign manager.

For both Morris and Meyers idealism or political ideology are nothing more than a patina. Politics is ultimately about personal ambition. Meyers, in particular, sheds his professed idealism so quickly that I see it as only a cover masking ambition, and his essential character as opportunistic.  The Ides of March presents the loss of political innocence much less believably than The Candidate. In the latter,  candidate Jim McKay’s (Robert Redford) loss of innocence is gradual and grudging, the subject of continual struggle between him and his campaign staff.

The dalliance-with-intern lacks plausibility because it results in her pregnancy. Though Morris is a lapsed Catholic and the intern a practicing Catholic, either one of them would have heard of party hats or the morning-after pill. The intern gets an abortion and, then, fearing exposure, commits suicide. This sounds like something out of the Fifties. In addition, it portrays on the intern’s part a mental instability entirely at odds with her behavior to that point. While the cynical fable of American politics is a well-known and legitimate one, I would rather have seen a plot built on more plausible premises.

I’m not happy to see the return of the cynical fable, particularly to narratives about Democrats. The West Wing presented a much more idealistic fable that, at least for a time, was culturally influential. While the Obama Administration’s story to this point has been ambiguous, in particular because of Obama’s difficulties in moving forward an ambitious agenda in the face of determined ideological opposition, it has not been marked by the same sort of lapses of personal morality as the Clinton Administration. So, even if The Ides of March were intended as commentary on the Obama Administration, it misses the mark.

The Ides of March is an adaptation of the 2008 play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, who wrote it after a backroom career in the office of Senator Charles Schumer and the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. It’s unfortunate that the play was another retelling of an archetypal fable, rather than a reflection of what he observed.

The October 6 election gave the Liberals a surprising near-minority. We can find lots of reasons for it. First, Premier McGuinty projects himself as an experienced hand in troubled economic times. In addition, after eight years of governing, he still appears fresh and enthusiastic. That’s no small feat; long-time incumbent governments often defeat themselves because they and their leader appear worn-out and cynical: I certainly remember that Premier Ernie Eves projected fatigue in the 2003 campaign and especially the debate.

Conservative Tim Hudak’s message was critical, as it should have been. But the simplistic message — “Hudak lower taxes, more jobs/McGuinty higher taxes, fewer jobs” – was repeated to the point of overkill. Mike Harris, the last Ontario Conservative to defeat an incumbent, had a much more comprehensive platform in his “common sense revolution,” and more gravitas than Hudak. And watching Rob Ford’s conservatism-in-action in Toronto and hearing Stephen Harper’s wish for a “hat trick” didn’t help.

Andrea Horwath’s enthusiasm was undercut by the unreality of some of her promises – cut emergency waiting times in half, freeze gasoline prices – and her lack of priorities, as reflected in the number of different groups she was willing to “put first.”

For me, the campaign in microcosm was a candidate’s debate in my constituency of Don Valley West, between two heavyweights, former Education and current Transport Minister Kathleen Wynne and Conservative Andrea Mandel-Campbell, a high-profile business journalists. (The NDP and Green candidates, while well-meaning, and far less experienced and articulate).

In the debate, Mandel-Campbell was able to seize the issue of public debt and taxes, claiming that the Liberals had enormously expanded public debt and raised taxes during McGuinty’s eight years in office. She added, as an aside, that Ontarians have a higher per-capita public debt than Californian’s.

Wynne was never able to adequately respond to Mandel-Campbell’s position. While she made the point that Tim Hudak would not repudiate any of the decisions made by the Harris Government – in which he was a minister – she never explored the implications. She could have reminded the voters that when the Liberals came to office, they were hit with an unexpected $5 billion deficit the Conservatives had left. She could also have reminded the voters that the Liberals eliminated the Conservative deficit and essentially balanced the books for the remainder of their first term.

Turning to the second term, she could have reminded the audience that the deficit increased, not because the Liberals were willfully wasting public resources, but because they were responding to the global recession, and it meant major expenditures on keeping the auto industry functioning and participating in the Economic Action Plan. So Ontario was running a large deficit, just as the federal Conservatives were. She could have asked Mandel-Campbell whether she wouldn’t have bailed out GM or whether she wouldn’t have participated in the Economic Action Plan.

Wynne could have also mentioned that the California comparison was completely irrelevant because the State of California plays a much small role than the province of Ontario, so it isn’t a surprise that we have more per capita provincial public debt.

Looking to the next four years, Wynne could have made the case that if the Conservatives were so intent on making deficit and debt reduction as their number one policy priority, they would likely be making very drastic cuts in public spending that could well drive the economy into another recession. She could have compared their fiscal plan to that of the Tea Party in the US, or the one that external agencies are imposing on Greece, which she might have called “Hudak’s Grecian Formula.” She could have argued that we aren’t Greece and the McGuinty Government hasn’t governed as though we were. More broadly, she could have made the point that, while it’s important to eliminate deficits and pay down debt, it shouldn’t be done so quickly that it can push the economy into another recession and drastically drive up unemployment.

I came away from the debate thinking that Ms. Mandel-Campbell was promulgating Tea Party economics and Ms. Wynne didn’t call her on it. The Liberals shouldn’t let a Canadianized version of the Tea Party’s story prevail in the campaign. Perhaps if they had responded more aggressively, they would have won their majority. But looking to the new term that starts today, they must begin to tell their own story, one that balances a concern for the economy today with a concern for the fiscal balance sheet in the distant future.

Watching the leaders’ debate in the Ontario election, I noticed that New Democrat Andrea Horwath and Progressive Conservative were making considerable use of story-telling. The stories Horwath told were of named individuals, including her son, whom she claimed had been badly served by the Ontario health care system, in particular hospital emergency wards. The stories Hudak told were personal, dealing with his Slovakian immigrant ancestors, and his daughter’s medical treatments.

Horwath used her stories to attempt to refute Premier McGuinty’s assertion that the quality of health care (as measured by indicators such as waiting times) had improved during the last eight years. So when McGuinty presented data, Horwath adamantly shook her head, claiming that her cases told a different story. It appeared that the two leaders had different versions of reality.

Of course, it is always possible to have individual stories of service delivery problems or failures in an institution that, overall, is improving performance. The stories can reflect mistakes made by service providers or areas that remain problems (so, for example, cancer care could be improving faster than emergency services because spending on the former is increasing faster than the latter). While stories are no substitute for empirical policy analysis for a government in power, their intrinsic drama may be more persuasive in an election campaign than the recitation of statistical indicators.

How is an incumbent to respond in a debate to the opposition’s horror stories? One approach would be to ignore the stories and continue citing statistics. Another would be to admit that there are occasional problems, but that overall service is improving. Yet another might be to recognize that stories of problems always evoke public attention, while stories of successful treatment receive less attention. The incumbent could then argue that for every horror stories there are hundreds of stories of service being delivered successfully.

Both incumbent and opposition are appealing to the electorate to determine whether their own experience matches their claims. Still, the opposition has an advantage here, because, even if people have received good care in the past, the horror stories suggest that they might not in the future.

In Hudak’s case, the stories served both to introduce himself to the electorate and as a touchstone of his policies. His opposition to the Liberals’ proposed tax credit for new immigrants seems rooted in his family experience of getting ahead in Canada without such benefits. McGuinty accused Hudak of exhibiting a thread of xenophobia in his policy positions. Another way McGuinty might have put the point is that Hudak hasn’t transcended his own narrow experience, while he as premier has been required to think more broadly about the province and its role in the international economy.

So stories were a key component of the Ontario leader’s debate. Which of the stories we heard will resonate with the voters? Which will lead voters to identify with a candidate’s values or upbringing? Which will describe a fear, even a nightmare, that the voters share? Now that the debate has raised public attention to what has so far been a lackluster campaign, it will be fascinating to see which of the stories we heard in the debate continue to be retold during the final week of the campaign.