Sure, she's writing for the Toronto Star, the notoriously Liberal-favoring, hard-left paper, but Chantal Hebert is, I've found so far, a serious political analyst and commentor and doesn't seem to be anything other than fair and balanced, so I have no problem highlighting her take on Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff here.
Chantal presents her analysis, and I agree with it. It makes sense at this point in time.
I suspect, however, that Iggy and other Liberals wish she'd shut up, lest some more swing voters get the idea that Iggy sucks and themselves gravitate towards the Harper Conservatives, following other swing voters who've concluded that Iggy's better off in an American classroom, eagerly, seriously praising the very-controversial former President Bush (whom Leftists love to hate, and in whom real conservatives lost confidence and trust) and talking about the virtues of war and torture. Of course, in an election campaign, the NDP will naturally go all out to attack Ignatieff's horrific-to-NDP-types views so as to shake loose the Leftist swing voters and hopefully avoid losing their existing seats.
This is what happens when short-sighted, negligent, star-struck Liberal elites impose the Leader upon the Party without carefully examining his background (like the US Senate failed to do for new Obama Regulatory Czar and frighteningly dangerous revolutionary crackpot Cass Sunstein), and without a trial-by-fire grassroots campaign and leadership vote by the members. They get both more and less than they bargained for. More of the stuff they didn't want and less of the stuff they did.
But what do we expect of Liberals? They're impatient. They're just too itching, too antsy, to get back into power. It screws up their judgement. They end up shooting themselves in the feet.
Of course, they're not so great at picking a leader, either, as we saw with Do-Over Dion. Perhaps they need to reform the whole institution, including how they select a leader. They need a proper one-member-one-vote election scheme. But, being Liberals, the fact of the matter is that they believe that the Elites know better than the Members, so that's why they either select leaders via backroom dealing or via Elite selection.
As I've said before, the problem with the Liberals is the way they do things, the way they think, their culture. As long as they're so corrupt, undemocratic and Elite-centered, they'll continue to shoot themselves in the feet like this.
The Liberal Party itself is a basket case, an unworkable anachronism, a dinosaur.
I'd rather not wait for the asteroid with their name on it. They're just uselessly taking up space and stowing their poopers all over the place. Time for the Liberal Party to fold its tent and for whatever to replace it, not that it'd necessarily be any better.
ht: Bourque Newswatch
