How To Acquire a Genius Reputation

No one knows for sure where Harper's genius reputation comes from.

Here's my take.

During his early NCC and Reform days he was always the smartest guy in a room full of morons and semi-literate troglodytes. They were impressed with a guy so much smarter than they were that they could barely follow a thought that emerged from his mouth. They told some western Canadian journalists about this really smart guy. They couldn't say much about what he said that was so smart because they couldn't really understand him. This impressed the hell out of the journalists, who are always impressed with the appearance of intellectually obfuscatory verbosity, and they decided to find out about this smart guy.

They found out his name and that he'd graduated from U of C (thanks Robert) with an MA in economics and were impressed that this strange western fringe bunch had attracted someone with an education beyond grade 12 or agricultural college.

In a spirit of equanimity these western journalists began treating this smart guy's pronouncements as worthy of serious consideration even though to many of them he sounded like a right wing western separatist crackpot. They had papers to sell and ratings to achieve and their target audiences were beginning to treat this reputed smart guy as the next coming.

Since journalists talk only to other journalists before you knew it central and eastern Canadian journalists were starting to repeat the notion that this guy was indeed really smart.

Journalists operate in a very similar way to academics within a specific discipline. That is to say there's a dynamic that operates very much like peer review. Peer review in academia requires that in order for a concept to become accepted it must first be examined by experts in the field. Except that in this case the field is journalism, not genetics or mathematics or political science or economics. Journalists didn't examine the ideas or thoughts of the alleged smart guy. They examined the journalism that said he was. And the journalism was solid. The journalists who said he was a smart guy were mostly reputable journalists with a track record who were published in major dailies or who broadcast in markets that weren't exclusively small.

So far so good.

Except no one really examined the central thesis, that this smart guy was really smart. It was just accepted as a scrap of received wisdom among journalists.

Who then more or less uncritically promoted their received wisdom to the rest of us.

Then, as happens with anyone who suddenly finds themselves the darling of the press, the smart guy was in the news all the time. Journalists were writing articles about him weekly.

Which, de facto, means he's important and attention must be paid. Which then simply becomes cyclical.

Well after a certain amount of this it becomes pretty much forgotten that the guy was once just the smartest troglodyte in the room and the press has to figure out for themselves why he's in the news all time.

It can't be them so it must be him.

That's it! He's brilliant at being in the news. Being in the news all the time takes planning and thought.

This guys in the news so much he must be a strategic and tactical genius.

Nothing else could possibly explain it.

And so it goes.