May 16, 2008
It's just more Liberal delusions
By MICHAEL HARRIS
fctAdTag("bigbox",MyGenericTagVar,1);
No they can't win an election.
That's my short response to an article by the former campaign chairman for the Liberal Party of Canada, David Herle, in which he asserts that the Dion-led Grits can still form the next federal government.
David is a smart guy, but the fine intelligence has been distorted by years of taking the hallucinogens of partisanship.
The wishful thinking also comes from viewing the world through power-crazed 3-D glasses, a pair of which every Liberal owns. Take his assertion that the Liberals have been positioning themselves to exploit "a Conservative party stationed too far right" on the political spectrum. The Liberals haven't been positioning themselves anywhere. In fact, the only thing they have been good at recently is a long and shameful political retreat from their own principles, abstaining from votes, supporting budgets they say are taking the country in the wrong direction, and abandoning their position on the military mission to Afghanistan.
As for the Conservatives being too far right for a lot of Canadians, that is not what I have witnessed during the two years of the Harper government. If anything, the Tories have been steadily inching toward the Holy Land of Canadian politics -- the unoffending middle. Stephen Harper's shilly-shallying on his promise to dump the gun registry shows how scrupulously he has tried to avoid being pegged as a bug-eyed neo-con. It is working.
I also wonder about Herle's peculiar notion of how to save the party from Stephane Dion. Under Dion, the Liberals are headed into the Gelded Age, without the testosterone to fight for anything but more breathing room between themselves and the next election.
Yet Herle argues the Grits should stop measuring Dion by the usual standards reserved for an Opposition boss -- the better to stress his strengths as a "new and different type of leader."
And what kind of leader is that? One who hopes to win office by loading a new tax on an electorate that experiences chest pains when it pulls up in front of the gas pumps. One who struggles in one official language and is ignored in the other.
Herle makes much of the fact that despite Dion's deficits as a politician he still managed to win the Liberal leadership from the likes of Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff.
But was it Stephane Dion's magic that carried the day in Montreal, or was it what Ipsos-Reid president Darrell Bricker opined after attending the convention: "The Liberals actually lost control of their own convention. The ego of the leading candidates made deal-making impossible and they got a leader that no one really wanted."
And when they don't give you money, David, they don't give you votes either. Just ask Hillary.
Still, Herle congratulates Dion for being an "anti-politician" with a passion for the environment. More delusion. Dion "didn't get the job done" when he and the Liberals presided over the environment for a decade; and no one in recent history has jockeyed more for partisan advantage, if ineptly, than Stephane Dion.
The surest sign that Herle's endorsement of Dion is, ahem, somewhat disingenuous is his advice for this hapless man miscast as a leader. He says Dion should make the final retreat and leave the daily grind in the House to his caucus, while he travels the country converting voters to the Grit cause. Herle even suggests the party should "re-introduce" Dion to Quebecers who have known the man since William Shatner was exploring strange new worlds.
The one thing Dion has done is turn Jack Layton into our Barack Obama. No, seriously.
