{"id":5803,"date":"2021-05-03T12:53:10","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T16:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/?p=5803"},"modified":"2021-05-03T08:06:05","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T12:06:05","slug":"paul-wells-on-stephen-harper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/?p=5803","title":{"rendered":"Paul Wells on Stephen Harper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-13310\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Harper_01-201x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"201\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Harper_01-201x300.jpg 201w, https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Harper_01.jpg 301w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 201px) 100vw, 201px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Paul Wells book on Stephen Harper\u2019s politics \u2013 <em>The Longer I\u2019m Prime Minister<\/em> \u2013 is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the man and his modus operandi in office. Here are ten quotes extrapolated from Paul Wells\u2019 book \u2013 but, to get an insightful glimpse into the Prime Minister, <a title=\"Get the book on Amazon \" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Longer-Im-Prime-Minister-Stephen\/dp\/0307361322\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">get the book \u2013 read it<\/a>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;You know, the longer I\u2019m prime minister\u2026. the longer I\u2019m prime minister.&#8221; \u2013 Stephen Harper<\/li>\n<li>He is a very particular fellow: fiercely intelligent, combative, secretive, intense. \u2013 Paul Wells<\/li>\n<li>He survives politically in large part because he is uninterested in debates that are of concern only to people who live within ten kilometers of Parliament\u2019s Peace Tower. \u2013 Paul Wells<\/li>\n<li>The point of everything he does is to last. The surest rebuttal Harper can offer to a half century of Liberal hegemony is not to race around doing things the next Liberal could undo. The surest rebuttal is to last and not be Liberal. \u2013 Paul Wells<\/li>\n<li>\u201cMy models aren\u2019t Conservative prime ministers. My models are successful prime ministers.\u201d \u2013 Stephen Harper<\/li>\n<li>He needed to last, because most of what he wanted to do could not be done quickly. He wanted to disabuse Canadians, especially immigrants, of the expression that they would be governed Liberals. He wanted to implement deep changes\u2026 a degree at a time as if boiling a frog; and to make those changes as hard to reverse as it would be to reconstitute the frog. (This is politics as boiling a frog: if you raise the temperature a degree at a time the frog won\u2019t notice.) \u2013 Paul Wells<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;One of the things I\u2019ve learned is that surprises are not generally well received by the public. So, we intend to move forward with what Canadians understand about us, and I think with what they are more and more comfortable with.&#8221; \u2013 Stephen Harper<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;His focus, in terms of the legacy he\u2019s trying to create, is very much on identifying what he sees as the long-term challenges and opportunities for the country. Yet his strong bias is towards arch-incrementalism. He backs away from ideas which he feels may be controversial. And that creates a lot of frustration.\u201d \u2013 un-named Harper advisor<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Stephen Harper is Mackenzie King without a ouija board.&#8221; \u2013 Tom Flanagan<\/li>\n<li>What has he accomplished? It is in the nature of Harper\u2019s project that he would have less to show for his time in office than some of his predecessors. They saw themselves as builders; he is a skeptic and, to use the gentlest available word, an editor. \u2013 Paul Wells<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In Fall 2014 Chris George attended a breakfast where Paul Wells spoke \u2013 and here is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/?p=5601\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>By George Journal<\/em> post <\/a>on that address.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Chris George<\/em><\/strong><em>\u00a0is an Ottawa-based government affairs advisor and wordsmith, president of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cgacommunications.com\/m\/\">CG&amp;A COMMUNICATIONS<\/a>. Contact:\u00a0<a href=\"mailto:ChrisG.George@gmail.com\">ChrisG.George@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Wells book on Stephen Harper\u2019s politics \u2013 The Longer I\u2019m Prime Minister \u2013 is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the man and his modus operandi in office. Here are ten quotes extrapolated from Paul Wells\u2019 book \u2013 but, to get an insightful glimpse into the Prime Minister, get the book \u2013 read&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[71,30,32],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5803"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13311,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5803\/revisions\/13311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bygeorgejournal.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}