AYLMER, QUEBEC | The ship of state is not a high-powered speedboat. It rarely lurches from one direction to its opposite; it's more like an oil tanker changing course inch by inch, starting its turn miles before its new destination. Who controls the helm is important, but looking only at the captain does not guarantee reaching a destination.

An Obama is not going to radically change America's trajectory (any more than Kennedy was able to do, despite the world's expectations). A Harper majority will not mean we become the newest ten American states.

We have to be careful what we expect. Not because our expectations set us up for disappointment, but they cause us to miss or ignore so much since we are sure we know what's coming or where we're headed, without ever looking out the window.

It's hard enough seeing into the future, given the fog of politics and an awful lot of useless noise coming probably from us, the media -- we all need whatever help we can get, and a bunch of expectations or cloudy high hopes are no help at all.

If the two paragraphs above are true, then, in the election campaign underway, shouldn't we be looking not for cozy family-sweetness, grand designs, or high-minded statements of principles but for the small measures, the small steps, the quiet moves, both in the last few years of parliament and during this campaign itself?

How the opposition parties and members voted on particular bills and issues tells us plenty about what to expect from each party and each member.

Is what they've done in the past what we want for the next four years?

Likewise for the government and its MPs. Which announcements were made late on a Friday so they'd miss the media attention (like cutting funds to cultural and arts groups) -- these quiet steps, not grand announcements like buying new weaponry, tell us what is coming.

The small, quiet moves in the past sessions of parliament will show us how to vote.

Election campaigns are a bit like smoke in our eyes. We've been convinced that an election in and of itself will create good governance for Canada. That's an honourable conviction, but it, too, leads us to miss so much, and the easiest thing to miss is the degree of manipulation -- the amount of dirty tricks -- we're about to experience, often without noticing. Attack ads, for example, are best when they're not noticed as attack ads; they do their attacking by stealth.

Most of us don't want attack ads, but it is American and British political machines that have perfected sophisticated and ruthless campaign techniques, far from any Geneva Accord for the Exercise of Democracy. They have perfected the means of counting votes in their favour, and have recently used them from the Ukraine to Mexico.

So another thing to watch for is any party bringing in campaign experts from those two nations . . . if they do, vote 'em down.

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Copyright © 2008 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/09.08