Opportunities Lost
September 3, 2010 | No Comments
Some Liberal bloggers are cautiously celebrating the recent EKOS Politics poll that shows the Liberals and the Conservatives as once again locked in a statistical tie vis-a-vis voter intentions. The part of the EKOS write up on the results that most grabbed my attention was the following,
Although the Liberals are doing better than they were at the outset of the summer, this may be more of a story of Conservative losses. A re-examination of leader approval ratings reinforces this conclusion. Michael Ignatieff may be getting better press coverage, and his party has at least temporarily drawn even with the Conservatives, but he still suffers from the lowest approval rating of any of the party leaders (22%). This figure has changed little over the last few months, but this new found party parity, as well as the Liberal Party’s strength with the highly educated ( a group rich in opinion leaders), may yield future benefits.
I can’t shake the feeling that Liberals have missed out on a massive opportunity, here. The drubbing that the Party experienced in both the 2006 and the 2008 elections had a lot of Liberal analysts scrambling to try to figure out how not to sound a long term death knell for Liberals federally. That the Liberals have managed to remain as viable as they have and come back to be such a thorn in the Conservatives’ side as quickly as they have is no doubt to the credit of its organizers and strategists.
But this temporary tying of the Conservatives seems to be about as far as those efforts are destined to take the Liberals.
The one up side to massive electoral defeat is that it offers an opportunity for substantial reflection without the pressure of messing up a formula that’s already working for the party in the polls. The whole point of the moment is recognizing that that formula isn’t working and being prepared to engage in an honest and critical assessment about the role your party plays in whatever level of politics it happens to be situated.
It takes a lot of guts and courage to engage in that process, but the only other alternative is to double down and hope that the winds of political change eventually blow in your direction once more. And while it might true that those winds do seem eventually destined to change course, taking such a passive approach to the situation with which the party is faced means that you really lose out on the opportunity to improve your party’s approach and offer meaningful changes to the political process and landscape itself.
Boldness of this variety is often seen as anathema to politics itself. But more often than not, it is rewarded by the electorate. I thought a poll a ways back from Angus Reid was instructive in this regard, though certainly not definitive. The poll indicated that Canadians feel that Pierre Elliot Trudeau was the best Prime Minister since 1968.
Like him or hate him, you have to admit that Pierre Trudeau was a bold politician, both in the lead up to and during his run as Prime Minister. Granted, Trudeau had a lot of things going for him and did not inherent the kinds of difficulties from Pearson that Ignatieff has from Chretien and Martin. But a tepid political style isn’t the kind of thing that inspires, “Trudeaumania“, and influences a nation’s politics for an almost twenty-year period.
At the end of the day, Trudeau’s approach to politics, though somewhat radical at the time, was rewarded by the electorate, both at the time and in the eyes of history.
The Liberals seemed at least somewhat willing to begin that kind of soul searching process with the election of Stephane Dion. But Michael Ignatieff has really failed to take up that mantle and has steered the party in a business as usual direction, relying on the tired, old natural governing party of Canada line of thinking. And I say that as someone who was very critical of Dion and cheered on the leadership of Ignatieff.
I’m still not convinced that Dion was the right person for the job. But the spirit with which he approached renewal of the party was undoubtedly in the right direction. It seems at least plausible to me that the malaise in whic Liberals found themselves meant that they wound up giving up on Dion too quickly. Especially given that the 2008 election was almost bound to be worse for Liberals than 2006 had been.
But I just don’t know how the Liberal Party has sought to differentiate itself both from its checkered past and from the other parties under Igntieff. I mean, sure, Ignatieff isn’t Chretien or Martin. But as Richard noted earlier this week, with the stranglehold that the Bloc has in Quebec, a face change is only going to get you so far.
Ignatieff has lots of good rhetoric about being an alternative that Canadians can embrace. But ultimately, the failure to actually generate that alternative based on substantive and bold changes in the approach of his own party lays squarely at his own feet and is reflected in his own numbers.
Tags: Liberal Party of Canada. Stephane Dion > Michael Ignatieff > party renewal > Pierre Elliot Trudeau
Comments
Leave a Reply