09-16-2008
Today's buzz: 'Herbert Hoover in a blue sweater'
Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service
The meaning of Bob Rae's comments about Stephen Harper may be lost on younger voters. (Chris Young/National Post) At a Halifax rally on Tuesday, Liberal MP Bob Rae referred to Stephen Harper as "Herbert Hoover in a blue sweater," adding, "I think we can do better than that."
Why that's an insult: Within months of Hoover assuming the U.S. presidency in 1929, the stock market crashed and sparked the Great Depression. He was defeated in the 1932 election and became the scapegoat of that period of American history.
"What he was saying was that Herbert Hoover was kind of the master of disaster," says Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University in Montreal. "He was the face of the great failure of the Republican party to keep the great prosperity of the 1920s, and was blamed as the individual who failed to lead America effectively during the Great Depression."
On a personal level, Hoover was known as a "dour, uncharismatic engineer who once had a kind of boy-wonder reputation," Troy says.
The recent context: Amid disastrous news from the U.S. stock market on Monday, Harper - who wears a blue sweater-vest in a series of Tory ads - maintained the Canadian economy is on solid footing.
The problem: No one under a certain age is likely to understand Rae's would-be zinger, Troy says.
"In the 1940s, if a Canadian politician were saying that, we'd all give a knowing laugh," he says. "But I can't imagine even many of my students who study history would really get the Herbert Hoover reference."
The jab is "not something I'd want to be called," Troy says, but it's an ineffective comment that may ultimately say more about Rae than anyone else.
"I think what Bob Rae did with that comment is show that he's a well-read man, he knows his history, but he might not quite know where the voters are at."
Posted by: jgreen