- Reaction score
- 5,543
- Points
- 1,260
Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the OIttawa Citizen is, I think a pretty fair assessment of Liberal Party of Canada leader Bob Rae:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Tandt+loud+aches/5676946/story.html
I heard Mr. Rae on the radio today, talking socially left, fiscally right sense.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Tandt+loud+aches/5676946/story.html
Den Tandt: Rae won't say so out loud, but he aches to be PM
By Michael Den Tandt, Postmedia News
November 8, 2011
OTTAWA — Bob Rae won't say whether he wants to be prime minister. But he does want that, with every fibre of his being.
And here's the curious magic that charisma, gravitas and a dash of hubris can effect: Listening to Rae speak, it's hard not to believe, at least for a while, that he might pull it off. Certainly he thinks he can. The pat responses about heeding party rules calling for him to stand aside in 2013? Let's quietly set those aside. Rae is crafting a come-from-behind run for the country's top job. And he's going about it in clever, methodical fashion.
The Ottawa Citizen
On the face of it, Rae's situation could not be more grim. Last May 2 the once-mighty Liberal Party of Canada, led by Michael Ignatieff, was reduced to a pitiful 34 seats. It was a humiliation on par with John Turner's drubbing at the hands of Brian Mulroney in 1984. Rae has the unenviable task of sorting through the ruins looking for salvageable beams.
As he himself acknowledges: "If you look at the results of the last election, we pretty well lost everywhere. It would be hard to say we we've . . . succeeded in defending any particular bastion in the last little while. We've been receding. That can't continue."
In the past nine months, Rae told an online audience Sunday, Conservatives have raised $18 million to the Liberals' $8 million. With both corporate and government "sugar daddies" out of the frame, Liberals must rely on themselves, Rae says: "We need thousands of shoulders to the wheel."
It's a nice image. But what can it yield, if Grit supporters are an increasingly grizzled group of primarily urban, retired, degreed professionals and civil servants — while the Conservatives and New Democrats carve up Main Street between them? Polls suggest this is precisely what has happened, and continues to happen.
One knock against Rae has been that, though he loves to speak and is very good at it, he's not a natural listener. The same might be said of his party. After May 2, just as they'd done to former leader Stephane Dion after his loss in 2008, senior Liberals dragged Ignatieff out behind the barn and put him down. It was quick and relatively painless.
The implication? If the leader had only been more effective, dodged the dastardly Harper attack ads or returned fire more effectively, they could've been contenders.
A possibility many Liberals still fail to acknowledge, is that large numbers of Canadians simply don't agree with them any more, on some core issues. The long-gun registry is one, certainly in rural and small-town Canada. Borrowing billions to fund new federal programs, as Ignatieff promised to do in the last campaign, is another.
For years, Grit politicians have bemoaned the loss of Canada's international reputation. Oddly, that message doesn't seem to have caught on internationally, where Canada is, in fact, widely respected — particularly by our closest allies the United States and Britain, whose troops fought alongside Canadians in Afghanistan. The world likes our banking system too, apparently. Canadians have the Internet, and can read the foreign news.
Liberals have tried hard for half a decade to turn the plight of Omar Khadr into a rallying cry for human rights. They have a point: Khadr was just 15, a child by UN convention, at the time of his arrest. But do ordinary Canadians empathize enough with an enemy combatant, whatever his age, to make this anything but a loser, politically? The answer is no.
Rae appears to understand the branding problem, which Ignatieff did not. He also knows the prize is the solid centre — with a leftward tilt on social issues, and a rightward one on economics and geopolitics. On Iran he's a hawk. On marijuana he's a dove. On taxes he muses about lowering, not raising. "It's productivity that speaks to our prosperity — we have to look at everything."
If it holds, it could be the germination of a Liberal shift back to the moderate centre-right, where the party had its success in the '90s. Pragmatic Liberals would cheer. Rae's biggest problem, should he manage to stick around until 2015, will be Ontarians' memories of the recession of the early '90s. That's a big problem. For now though, it doesn't appear to be spoiling his fun. "I enjoy it," he says of his role as scrapper and underdog. "I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't enjoy it."
Fair enough. Aside from all that, however, would Bob Rae like to be PM? Honestly? Don't ask. He won't say.
mdentandt@postmedia.com
© Copyright (c) Postmedia News
I heard Mr. Rae on the radio today, talking socially left, fiscally right sense.