I've always had trouble telling my left from my right, as I'm reminded, not always politely, whenever someone asks me to navigate on car trips. I tend to be equally hopeless about my place on the political spectrum.
Over my years as a journalist, the sort of people who write anonymously
in angry capital letters have kindly tried to help with this confusion by informing me that I'm a lefty, liberal basket-weaver or, worse, a feminist.
But then real left-wingers have often found me a disappointingly running dog capitalist and women's groups, other than the kind that meets on the last Friday of the month for a wine or two, have never held much appeal.
Things were a little less complicated in my youth. Vietnam? Clearly a bad idea. Nuclear weapons? I don't think so. Muldoon? Please.
But even then I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the hard left, either. I could never support the political system of the sort of country where they won't let you out when you want to leave. The only party I ever briefly joined - didn't everyone? - was the Values Party, which, from memory, stood uncompromisingly for macrame.
In more recent times, as the differences between Labour and National became harder to discern, issues of left and right scarcely seemed to matter. Deborah Coddington tried to substitute the terms "pro-interventionist" and "pro-market" in her report on alleged anti-pro-market (or something) bias in Radio New Zealand. That wasn't much of a success with anyone but Act ideologues.
When Don Brash first became leader of the National Party he was asked which way he leaned. He also claimed he didn't know what right or left meant any more but was sure of the difference between "right and wrong". Cute. We really should have seen Orewa coming.
So now we're all going to have to redefine ourselves along a spectrum where, if Don's right (of Genghis Khan, I'd say) that makes everyone who doesn't agree with him wrong. And he's polling very nicely.
How did this happen? Even Tom Scott seemed bewildered, though his commentary on the TVNZ documentary Hurricane Brash tracing Don's first 100 days, was revealing in other ways.
It revealed that Scott has morphed into a sort of lite version of Clive James. And that any version of Clive James is most welcome in the wasteland that is TV One these days.
We saw how lucky Brash was to get away with a coup that resembled a French bedroom farce, with the scorned Nick Smith being chucked out one door as a thrilled Gerry Brownlee was ushered in the other.
There were insights, too, into Brash's personality, if that's not too extravagant a word. As he enters his new office for the first time, Scott observes: "He finds the decor bare, Spartan, severe, austere, uncluttered, featureless and functional. Don't change a thing, Don, it's you."
We see Brash demonstrating his common touch while out and about by homing in like a heat-seeking missile on anyone of non-European ethnicity, demanding to know where they come from. "Forsythe Barr", replied one poor woman but that wasn't good enough for Don. "Hong Kong", she finally admitted under pressure, allowing Brash to continue with his mission to personally inform every vaguely exotic-looking person in the nation that his wife is from Singapore.
He tried it on a woman at an A&P show and, flushed with success when she confessed she came from Thailand, blurted: "Thai women, they say, are the most beautiful women in Asia! I don't say that to my Singaporean wife!" Scoring two mentions of "my Singaporean wife" in one encounter was a personal best.
The documentary gave Brash full credit for his "Not a bad shot" response to the Waitangi mud pie. But the scene where his wife rings afterwards to inquire about the state of his suit - "The tie was not badly affected" - was just plain weird. A lot about Brash is just plain weird. Making Helen Clark look socially adept is no mean feat.
But the really scary thing about the documentary, apart from Brash's potentially politically suicidal revelation that Neil Diamond is his favourite singer, was not the differences between Brash and Clark but the similarities.
Think about it. They both come from religious backgrounds they later abandoned. Clark was a student radical. Brash, when he left university, would have been too left-wing for the Labour Party. Clark, before the makeover, used to look almost as much of a geek as Don.
She has that punishing get-in-behind baritone. He has that enervating gameshow buzzer "Eeehhhh". The scenes with Brash's wife hovering devotedly called to mind similar awkward scenes between Clark and Peter Davis in an "a day in the life of" documentary a few years ago.
Both Clark and Brash project all the human warmth of liquid nitrogen. Who knows, Clark might even harbour a secret passion for Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show.
Now would be a perfect time for someone to write a thesis on the sort of qualities we look for in a leader. The results would probably suggest that the entire nation needs therapy.
Thank goodness that at least the two leaders' policies are different. Aren't they?
I've always had trouble telling my left from my right, as I'm reminded, not always politely, whenever someone asks me to navigate on car trips. I tend to be equally hopeless about my place on the political spectrum.
Over my years as a journalist, the sort of people who write anonymously
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