Dennis Glover, and a little emotional speechifying goes a long way before I reach for the revolver and the vodka ...

(Above: oh no do we have to get the hair to defeat the hair? Won't someone make a stand for the Audrey Hepburn look?)

Sterling ideas today, as we always expect to find in the Oz, but as also expected, they caused a few raised eyebrows amongst the chortling, inner suburban, sophisticated, swine herd, chattering, chardonnay swilling elites:

Hitler and the Nazi Party's potency is their ability to project belief and take people with them. They have the capacity - all too rare today - to interest everyday people in a political program that's fundamentally based on ideas. Those ideas may be at odds with economic common sense, flaky and at times ugly, but they are put with edge and passion. Therein lies the lesson for progressives in both the US and Australia: the need to fight passion with passion, belief with belief.

Oops, damn those Murdoch hacks we employ in the subbing engine room. They got it wrong yet again. Here's what Dennis Glover scribbled in Labor should learn from the passionate Ms Palin:

Pauline Hanson and One Nation's potency is their ability to project belief and take people with them. They have the capacity - all too rare today - to interest everyday people in a political program that's fundamentally based on ideas. Those ideas may be at odds with economic common sense, flaky and at times ugly, but they are put with edge and passion. Therein lies the lesson for progressives in both the US and Australia: the need to fight passion with passion, belief with belief.

Damn you Murdoch minions. Get it right, and get it right now!

Palin and the Tea Party's potency is their ability to project belief and take people with them. They have the capacity - all too rare today - to interest everyday people in a political program that's fundamentally based on ideas. Those ideas may be at odds with economic common sense, flaky and at times ugly, but they are put with edge and passion. Therein lies the lesson for progressives in both the US and Australia: the need to fight passion with passion, belief with belief.

Phew. Thank the absent lord that Hal Colebatch said breaking Godwin's Law was A-okay by him. Okey dokey, that's Godwin gone the way of all flesh, never mind the flaky ugly ideas, get with the passion.

So what else has Glover got to say?

I have to admit, as a speechwriter I can't get enough of Sarah.

I have to admit, as a reader, that I'm wanting less and less of Glover.

You see Glover wants mindless passion, perhaps mixed with a splendid dose of stupidity, as a way forward for the body politic:

Compare the gutsy if inane rhetoric of the US Right with that we hear from the American and Australian Centre-Left. Progressives are forever appealing to (an often illusory) consensus, always "taking advice on that", "waiting for the evidence to come in", "not wanting to pre-judge the findings of a forthcoming independent report", and "respecting other people's beliefs".

That's right. What we need is more gutsy, totally inane rhetoric. And to prove his point, Glover indulges in a splendid bout of fiery totally inane scribbling, blessed with rhetoric and perhaps a sprig of rosemary:

All of which in moderation are fine, but taken to excess, and done without even a semblance of ideological conviction, they can become a substitute for leadership and decision-making. In short, Australian progressives are becoming data and process junkies.

Yes, yes, bring back the good old days of ratbag ideological conviction, perhaps blessed by a bonus dose of Stalinist righteousness. That should sort things out.

The progressive movement has taken the otherwise laudable concept of "evidence-based policy" and raised it to the status of a governing philosophy. At every turn, we have a new report, undertaken by objective experts, based on the beauty of the numbers. But of course this encounters two serious problems: in the social sciences, numbers are not as objective as in the pure sciences; and the full evidence never quite seems to come in. Trial follows trial, study follows study, and then it's all undone by the only data the political tough nuts are ever really prepared to take a stand on: polling. The Centre-Left has the evidence on global warming, but the Right has the passion and the courage to pursue its convictions.

Actually, ahem, it's the scientists who have the evidence on global warming, and if the debate about climate change is turned into an ideological battlefield, then you end up with the ideological and theological certainties of a Tim Blair, and Andrew Dolt, or - the Catholic church preserve us - Cardinal Pell and the Pellite climate change heresy.

But we've heard this kind of call before, to abandon the scientific method, get down and dirty in the gutter, and outdo the persecution of the witches of Salem by persecuting the witches of Salem ...

This inability to project and connect is proving difficult for progressives to overcome. This is partly because both in the US and Australia the Centre-Left's policy machines have become over-professionalised. I don't mean they should go back to being amateurs but rather that they've let the best policy schools - and progressive policy makers increasingly graduate from the very best policy schools - convince them that we live in a post-ideological world. Any policy adviser out there tired of reading regression analyses arguing how social class doesn't explain social inequality will know what I mean.

Actually I don't know what you mean.

The problem with the Labor party of late is that its actual politicians come from the rarefied and hermetic world of politics, staring in university with the charades of student unionism, and then off to Canberra to serve an internship, and then off to a union, and then to stand for parliament. And the Liberals have the same kind of career path, though a detour through law school is the preferred mode so that we now have a flock of lawyers convinced that politics is a kind of case for the prosecution.

It's a miracle that either party managed the first indigenous and first Muslim MP in the House of Reps last time around ...

The lack of connection between professional politicians and ordinary punters isn't just a matter for the centre or the left, the right has its own fair share of alienation and disengagement, and the notion that we should return to the old ideological divides and posturing - anyone for the DLP? - is the worst kind of solution to this kind of disconnect and discontent ...

Right now anyone going around in NSW would settle for a government dedicated to sophisticated non-partisan management, and blessed with decent management skills, as opposed to the routine thuggery of the NSW Labor party right, and the tragically policy free zone, small target philosophy of the NSW Liberals ...

But back to Glover:

This isn't just my opinion. In his book The Promise: President Obama, Year One Jonathan Alter perceptively remarks that Obama, his White House staff and senior government office holders have been "in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a 'right answer' to everything. But a right answer to whom?" In other words, dangling the prospect of respectability, the public policy professors have persuaded progressive political advisers to forget one of the ultimate questions of their trade: Cui bono? Who benefits?

Which misses the point of one of the ultimate questions of the politician's trade. Which is to compromise. Obama has copped it from the left and the right, because you can never please everyone all the time. The notion that Obama is moving along in thrall to the idea that he has the right answer to everything - or is in quest of same - ignores the way he came from the politics of Chicago.

And that his favourite character in The Wire is Omar, the stick-up artist who steals from drug dealers, isn't afraid of a little killing, and doesn't do it for the loot, but for love and for the principle of the thing ... until he gets topped of course at random, because this is The Wire after all (here in the Las Vegas Sun).

Glover almost seems to get the contradiction in his posturing, which urges posturing but then gets worried about the vacuous populism that might arise from said posturing:

Here's another fundamental question of the politician's trade: What is to be done? We don't want the Centre-Left to become a mirror image of the US Right. Vacuous populism isn't the answer; its hollow promises are seldom delivered and are damaging to the nation when they are.

Uh huh. If Sarah Palin isn't the very essence of vacuous populism, and the fruitier parts of the Tea Party Xmas cake along with her, then I simply don't have the first notion what constitutes vacuous populism.

But didn't Obama take a dive when people rallied around him, thinking he was the new messiah, and then found that like every other messiah, he was just a naughty boy? As in The Wire, when contemplating Carcetti's bid for power, Parker sobs in to his drink "they always disappoint. All of them."

No, no, Glover wants more vacuous populism and hollow promises and strident appeals to emotion:

But progressives need to ditch the silly idea that voters are nothing but rational calculating machines. Such a view ignores the reality that political decisions are based not just on reason but on emotion, too. If the Almighty had intended politics to be reduced to competing Gini coefficients, he would have given us a USB port instead of a brain.

Such a view - that people think other people are rational calculating machines - is so silly it could only be led as a straw dog so we could all have fun having a bash at the piñata.

Somehow Glover thinks that Obama can recover the magic by getting back to speech making. And others should follow his example:

Here are some ideas. Obama, go back to speaking with force and passion: it's what got you elected. Minister, halve the thickness of that scientific report, shorten the public consultation period and double the persuasiveness of your public statements. MP, talk about the issue, not the process. Pollster, here's a revolver and a bottle of vodka - you know the rest.

But once you've lost the magic dust bestowed by rhetoric, you have to get back to doing things - actual things actually involving policies and a host of contending forces removed from the easy simplicities of rhetoric and speechifying - and listening to Glover evoke the spirit of Hanns Jost isn't going to help matters - though Johst was suggesting others pick up the revolver: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" ("Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety catch of my Browning!")

Phew, thank the lord we can get back to unreasonable times and dabble in pure emotion:

SCHLAGETER: Good old Fritz! (Laughing.) No paradise will entice you out of your barbed wire entanglement!
THIEMANN: That's for damned sure! Barbed wire is barbed wire! I know what I'm up against.... No rose without a thorn!... And the last thing I'll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from '18..., fraternity, equality, ..., freedom..., beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook 'em. And then, you're right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You're disarmed..., you republican voting swine! — No, let 'em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish.... I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture..., I release the safety on my Browning!"
SCHLAGETER: What a thing to say!
THIEMANN: It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.
SCHLAGETER: You've got a hair trigger.

Sorry, don't know where that came from.

Well, actually I do know where it came from, here, but it was all this sudden damned desire for emotion and rhetoric which has quite unhinged me. Can we hope for a smidgin of consensus?

Yes, it's right to have reason on your side; it's right to amass facts; and it's right to listen and forge consensus and even occasionally to assess voter research; but even these things require passion and belief for success. Bob Hawke was a consensus man, but he was also a persuader.

Phew that's a relief, and Bob wasn't a hidden persuader, he was a jolly good bloke and a mate and a digger.

But apart from turning former Chairman Rudd into blokey Bob, by some magical incantation not yet invented, what's to be done?

This approach is especially important in this age of confident and aggressive movement conservatism, and when Labor faces competition from its Left. Progressives may spurn emotional appeals as unbecoming, and reject conviction and forthrightness as undemocratic, but conservatives never will, and neither will the Greens. If you find the prospect of President Palin frightening and worry about a similar movement invading our politics, it may be necessary to fight fire with fire.

Uh huh. So in order to defeat a Palin, we should abandon logic and ideas, and embrace rhetoric and emotion and shoddy shonky ideas? Become a cannibal? Consume Palin by becoming Palin, in some kind of magical transubstantiation?

Well we've dabbled in long lost emotions, now's surely the time to bring out the old Orwellian routine as the pigs bung on a do to welcome Mr. Pilkington back to the farm, and the foolish habit of calling each other "comrade" is abandoned:

He had only one criticism, he said, to make of Mr. Pilkington's excellent and neighbourly speech. Mr. Pilkington had referred throughout to "Animal Farm." He could not of course know-for he, Napoleon, was only now for the first time announcing it-that the name "Animal Farm" had been abolished. Henceforward the farm was to be known as "The Manor Farm"-which, he believed, was its correct and original name.

"Gentlemen," concluded Napoleon, "I will give you the same toast as before, but in a different form. Fill your glasses to the brim. Gentlemen, here is my toast: To the prosperity of The Manor Farm! "

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover's old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.

But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

If the world has to become like Palin to defeat Palin, pass me the revolver and the vodka now ...

By the end of the read, I could see that Glover was a speechwriter and author doing a little press to pump up the volume for the release of his book The Art of Great Speeches in December.

At last all was understood and forgiven, another soul just trying to make a buck in these difficult times ... but sadly peddling another book I can live without reading ...

(Below: working on their speechifying).