To let Smith be Smith, or not to let Smith be Smith? That is the UCP question

There's a heady moment from the first season of The West Wing — the Aaron Sorkin drama series that launched a thousand political clichés — where fictional president Jed Bartlet gets confronted by his chief of staff about struggles in his re-election campaign.

It turns out they're both weary of adviser over-management and Bartlet's cautious, middle-of-the-road positions. The prez wants to speak out. 

Leo, his aide, sketches out the beginnings of the new strategy for a less restrained candidate. In big marker letters on a notepad: Let Bartlet be Bartlet.

Since then, that phrase has become a rallying cry for those who believe in a leader's core message and character, and don't want a politician bogged down by focus-grouping and compromise. Let X be X has been used in the context of every U.S. president since — yes, even the woolliest and most chaotic White House occupant of them all. 

The credo has made its way overseas, and north of the border. Fencing in a leader, the wisdom goes, makes the leader inauthentic — let them become the dynamic or charismatic force that made them a leader in the first place.

In a new premier's Alberta, the prevailing sentiment in many United Conservative Party corners runs counter to the cliché.

Letting Danielle Smith be Danielle Smith is a fraught path, if political survival is the intent. Instead: ensure Smith is something or someone else.

Speaking words of wisdom

Even before she'd sewn up the UCP leadership, top advisers were quietly aware that the animating features of her pitch to party faithful — fury over COVID rules, vitriol toward Ottawa — were not going to sell anywhere near as well among Albertans. 

From the night she was elected leader, Smith strategists gave her a new focus on inflation. They let her be more like federal Conservative head Pierre Poilievre, complete with personalized examples of a struggling mom, senior and 30-year-old university grad stuck in her parent's basement.

Her scripted speeches have tended to steer clear of her leadership bid's polarizing rhetoric — or any rhetoric, really — about the COVID pandemic or vaccines. We didn't hear Smith mention it at her party convention, or her reintroduction to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, or her televised address.

Pivoting from an intra-party leadership race to the general electorate is… well, about as shopworn as Let Bartlet be Bartlet. But often, there's a level of affectation and embellishment on both sides of that pivot. That doesn't seem to be the case with Alberta's premier.

Smith has been genuinely preoccupied with depicting COVID health protections as profound affronts to liberty, well before launching a political comeback. 

It drove her to leave a mainstream radio job. And when left to her own devices, she'd explore conspiracies about COVID (and other matters) extensively on social media.

So try as her team might to steer Smith clear of matters of public health and science — even the premier herself trying to pooh-pooh off-topic questions at her new conferences — she has engaged and opined when asked.

That's how she got to awkwardly pronounce about the unvaccinated facing unparalleled discrimination, or that she's on the phone hectoring organizations about vaccine mandates. The devoutly vaccine-hesitant base aside, these ad-libbed remarks will land awkwardly among the broader UCP voter pool (most of which have gotten jabs), and give insiders paroxysms of frustration at an undisciplined Smith.

While she has tried to turn the page on a long career of filling airtime and news columns with controversial ideas, Smith has long-standing tendencies of absorbing, incubating and processing some quite odd theories and arguments.

It's how shortly after midnight Thursday, during the final debate on her Sovereignty Act,

Smith said something that's more familiar in grad-school seminar discussions than a premier's closing arguments:

"It's not like Ottawa is a national government. The way our country works is that we are a federation of sovereign, independent jurisdictions. They are one of those signatories to the Constitution and the rest of us, as signatories to the Constitution, have a right to exercise our sovereign powers in our own areas of jurisdiction." 

It's true, Canada's constitution doesn't explicitly refer to a national government! (It doesn't call provinces "sovereign," either!) But as many observers replied, the federal system includes a national government and subnational ones (provinces), and while there's divided jurisdictional powers, that does not equate to provincial independence.

Such theorizing of Smith's, a habit of synthesizing an array of novel or alternative arguments, is also how she seemingly arrived this summer at saying that cancers are within a patient's control up to stage 4.

Will the real Danielle Smith stand up?

Albertans get a front-row seat to this push and pull between Smith being Smith, and being a more conventional politician. The week of the TV address and affordability measures seemed like a successful UCP week; and the following week, her rocky release of her core idea to entrench Albertan "sovereignty" seemed a step back.

Many United Conservatives, in caucus and beyond, hope this week's amendments and passage of the Sovereignty Act are the last Alberta hears about it before the election, lest there be further bursts of volatility and unpredictable drama. Smith, meanwhile, has signalled in speeches and interviews that she wants cabinet ministers to bring forth special motions that put it into action this spring.

We should perhaps consider the Sovereignty Act like Chekhov's gun — if it's mentioned in the first act, someone will fire it later in the play. It's hard to know what wounds get inflicted, or what effect the recoil has.

Smith has generously stocked her premier's office with many senior aides who were in government under ex-premier Jason Kenney and supported her leadership rivals, and that could help pull her in a new direction. 

But her most senior adviser, longtime ally and fellow floor-crosser Rob Anderson, was part of the braintrust that concocted the Sovereignty Act. And she's given a sole-sourced contract to her leadership campaign manager Matt Altheim to shape Smith's social media and memes, with a starkly different, more unruly tone than her office's communications staff.

At times, it does seem Smith senses the right time to shift tone, and when to be looser. Friday, in a news conference with fellow premiers about federal health-care funding, she chimed in by stressing that Ottawa should ideally work toward 50-50 cost-sharing, within the partnership of the Canada Health Act. Absent were her regular domestic arguments that the federal government interferes in "exclusive" provincial jurisdiction and must stay in its lane — which would have been wildly off-message with her provincial counterparts.

The tension between who Smith is and who she is allowed to be will play out over the next several months. Let's remember that The West Wing took the "Bartlet be Bartlet" phrase from real American history — the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan advisors preached a "Let Reagan be Reagan" message for their inherently conservative president's re-election bid.

Reagan won that race. But that doesn't necessarily mean anybody can win by being anything they want, even themselves.