4 - Friday, October 11, 1931 - North Shore News Consulting the experts Never ignore the oracle at your elbow 1 HAVE consulted the experts on this election. I have listened to them. I have examined their prose. I have heard from my colleagues on the various election trails those wonderful back-room and off-camera stories at their most hilarious — before they appear in print. Strangely, though, there is one expert I have not consulted. My wife. I suppose it would be easy to slip into a predictable domestic satire about this. You know, the kind in which the husband suffers from delusions of being smarter than his wife, but she looks up from the dishpan, bats her eyelashes a few times, and in three words says something devastating- ly wise that gets to the heart of the matter while he’s still pawing around for its pulse. Well, I can’t promise you that won't happen in what follows. Such off-the-rack satire wouldn't be possible — and the formula for 36,273 TV situation comedies could never have been born — if it weren't based on some extreme- ly well-worn, scuffed-up human experience. The serious fact is that the elec- tion results will be determined by experts like my wife. Hundreds of thousands of them. Into the mil- lions. The nominal experts — the rei- atively small and, yes, let us stare unflinchingly at the word, elite band of souls who are directly engaged in the election or, like journalists, live off its avails — these experts are not always right.. l admit I was going to use a lot more pungent and pain-inflicting phrase than ‘‘not always right.’’ But I did not wish to cause toc serious an injury. After ail, am, albeit in a minor way, one of them. I would not wish to bleed to death from a self-inflicted wound. Still, the stark honesty that has kept me from seizing the brass cing of success and popularity and maybe even a list of female con- Trevor Lautens GARDEN OF BIASES quests like Brian Mulroney's and Pierre Elliott Trudeai:’s — that terrible candor of mine impels me to record that I have often been wrong about elections. My wife, the real expert, hasn’t been. That's my guess. The truth is that, like all semi-experts, I tend to ignore the oracle who is right at my elbow. Occasionally — very occasionally — even closer than that. Distracted by other concerns, principally three children under 6, my wife seldom looks up from the dishpan, bats her eyelids, and punctures my elaborate polit- ical analyses in three words. A former colleague — and, i should add, the odd cowardly, vicious and always anonymous phone-calier who doesn’t like what I say and takes it out on my wife or whoever else in the house- hold answers the phone — once made the great error of assuming my wife influences my opinion on a certain issue. “If only 1 did,’’ my wife prob- ably murmurs to herself. As many writers’ wives must. Would I, indeed, be betraying a confidence by revealing that the most riveting, most-read, and most provocatively right-wing columnist in the North Shore News is married to ... a liberal? And for long years? And, I would dare say, as happily as two clams? But I wander from the subject, though pleasantly. The subject is elections and expertise, you'll recall. Of course there are differences even within the elites. I remember an office pool on a provincial election 20-odd years ago. It was not won by a member of the wise, such as Allan Fother- ingham or another political gnome. It was won by George Dobie, then the Sun’s labor reporter, No Ane could accuse the direct and plain-talking George of intel- lectual pretensions. Nor did he claim any. Asked about the secret of his clairvoyance, he said, un- forgettably: ‘‘I talked to the oolichans.”’ Yes, he’d sat on a beach, wat- ched the fish, thought for a while, and prognosticated magnificently. At least George found the time. I rarely have time to talk to my wife. And, even more, vice-versa. Furthermore, at this writing I haven't attended the all-candidates meetings — the political equivalent of beauty contests — in my own riding, West Van- couver-Garibaldi. So i have to withhold my final advice and prediction even there. But of course there are a few timid shoots peeping out of the Garden of Biases ... New Democrats: Don’t give them a single vote. Keep the North Shore pure. I voted for the CCF/NDP in my youth, and still have a lot of penance to do. Social Credit: Generally, I like Rita Johnston. I suspect that if returned to power with a hell of a scare, she’d box the ears of the party’s sleazy miscreants and run a more sober ship. But in my riding i’m soured by the revelations of the bankruptcy of Dr. Rodney Glynn-Morris. And he was nailed very well on the subject by a small businessman caller on Bill Good’s CKNW show last week. Liberals: And speaking of bankruptcy, Gordon Wilson through bad iuck and bad judg- ment has put the provincial Lib- erals on their uppers. The massive non-support he doesn’t enjoy from the party’s top figures speaks volumes. Its candidate in West Van- couver-Garibaldi, David Mitchell, will win — and be the tone Liber- alin the neat fegislature. But those are just my opinions, My wife is the expert. And — at the ballot box — every one of us. With magnificent equality. 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