Liberal leadership post-mortem thread

I don't know who I was rooting for because I still don't like the libs. Maybe Ken Dryden. HOCKEY PRIME MINISTER. Or something. I guess it's good for the Liberals though, to have a French name on the next ballot.

next up, the alberta Tory race. i'm rooting for Steady Eddie.

OTM. I was calling Ignatieff vs Dion for weeks, since I visited Montreal (i've been in the UK for 2 years) and felt the Dion-buzz there. and in that kind of showdown, barring a Rae defection to Iggy's camp, there was no doubt Dion would take it.

i think it's good. I like Dion, think he's an intelligent and sincere guy, and think that the environment will be a trump card in the next election.

I was another person in the anyone but Iggy camp and I must say I'm glad about Dion. This may sound strange but he just seems like a sweet guy.

Apparently there were Conservative operatives at the Lib convention handing out anti-Rae buttons. They'd also "leaked" a fake document claiming they feared an Ignatieff victory the most to try to pull votes away from Rae. It's both funny and offensive - that the ruling party has nothing better to do than fuck with the opposition's convention - and then brag about it! If the same had happened to Harpo we'd probably still be hearing him bitch about it.

So what happens to the other leadership contenders now? I'll bet Kennedy runs in the next federal election and (assuming he wins) could be an important player in Dion's cabinet (assuming they win). Iggy will probably slink back south of the boarder. And Rae will most likely vanish from politics again - most like choosing a life of hermit-dom, earning his way playing banjo for dumbfounded citizens in remote train stations. Just a guess.

might kennedy run in manitoba? he's made a big deal about having been born there, and having grown up in edmonton.

Dion owes Kennedy bigtime for delivering almost all of his delegates on the third ballot.

I can't wait for the fur to fly during the federalism discussion during the next round of election debates. Particularly in the French debate.

A few weeks back, on real-ILX, I posted a link to a poll on the leadership candidates. IIRC, Dion had the best approval rating -- IOW, Ignatieff and Rae had their supporters but also had a lot of enemies. Dion was fairly well-liked across the board, he didn't really have a lot of enemies, which is a huge help when it comes to picking up support from delegates once their #1 candidate drops out.

though he seems like he may have been close to the sponsorship scandal given that he was intergovtal affairs minister at the time

The fact that this was virtually never mentioned during the whole campaign shows that fundamentally, nobody really gave a crap about the sponsorship scandal and that it was stupid for voters to "punish" the Libs by voting them out of govt in the first place.

You'd think, given that Dion will very likely become the PM at some point, that there'd be a rash of editorials proclaiming "How can we trust the Libs if they elect a leader with possible ties to the scandal? They haven't learned their lesson!" (i.e. the whole point of the January election was to teach the Libs a lesson, right?). However, this never seemed to be an issue and now everyone is giving big ups to Dion.

My stance has always been that the Libs screwed up badly and mismanaged our money, but despite this, were still the best party for running the country. Punishing a party just for the sake of punishing them or using directionless reasoning a la "it's been 13 years, so it's time for a change for the sake of having a change" is the type of stupid thought that brought us PM Stephen Harper.

(I know that YOU didn't vote him, I'm talking about the general voting populace)

I don't think it was at all flawed logic in the slightest that a change of the guard would be a healthy thing for our nation. Although I was more of a proponent of that idea when I thought Harper would keep at least some of his promises that weren't based on hating teh fags!

I see what you're saying -- in the long run, change can be better because the opposition freshens up their approach and makes changes that they wouldn't have been compelled to make otherwise. I'm just not sure that it's worth suffering through a crap government to produce those results ... isn't that how the Harris Conservatives were swept into power?

(I actually think that many Ontarians supported Harris' "Common Sense Revolution" at the time though.)

Again, it's all about who can govern most competently! When one party screws up, it doesn't mean that the other parties won't screw it up even worse!