First, I like Bob Rae. As mentioned in previous posts, Rae is Canada’s Bill Clinton, sans Monica. Any politician with enough sense-of-humour to go skinny-dipping on National TV with Rick Mercer has to be a lot more fun on a weekend of fishing and drinking beer, than say Michael Ignatieff.
Unfortunate for Bob Rae however, it isn’t that his more likeable and straight forward personality aren’t enough, on the contrary, that’s what’s so exploitable.
Like it or not and as Stéphane Dion learned the hard way, facing-off against the current crop inside the Conservative Party has less to do with being the guy (or the gal) who can win, but more so with not being the caricature that can be taken advantage of by the Photo and Audioshop weenies at conservative.ca.
As I drove my near-weekly trek last week to and from the Nation’s capital, I quite literally cringed in my seat when over the radio waves of CFRA I heard Bob Rae say the following on the day he officially declared his candidacy: “It’s a simple fact that I can’t hide my record, even if I wanted to. And I don’t, because it’s part of my life, something I’m proud of, and it’s not something that I would run from – the very valuable lessons that I learned from the experience of governing Ontario during very tough times.”
Fast forward six months and imagine Bob Rae winning the Liberal leadership. How long do you think it would take for the aforementioned weenies to produce an attack-ad that lists and twists everything Bob Rae ever did, and didn’t do, as Premier of Ontario with a not-so-heavily edited voice-over in which Mr. Rae can be heard saying “…I can’t hide my record … it’s part of my life … it’s something I’m proud of, and it’s not something that I would run from…”
What’s that? Not possible you say? Then I guess you never saw the infamous “not a leader” image and website all of which was designed, produced, and hosted as an adjunct to conservative.ca.
Or, how about the Conservative attack ad featuring a clip from the last Liberal leadership convention in which Mr. Ignatieff is clearly heard trashing Mr. Dion’s Environment record with “we didn’t get it done.”
One doesn’t spend the number of hours I have in a focus group room for the past 20+ years and not learn to tell the difference between what people say they want, versus what they really want. As a side-note I highly recommend, to those who can’t tell the difference, Martin Lindstrom’s newest book Buy-ology.
An fMRI image of Liberal delegates brains would surely show as “nice a guy” as Bob Rae is, and as much as most Liberals might prefer the more personal image of Bob Rae over Michael Ignatieff as leader, at the next convention both conscious and subconscious Liberal minds will be working in unison against Mr. Rae.
At the end of the day, Mr. Rae is the Liberal leadership candidate with which the Conservatives could most easily mop the electoral floor. Conservatives know this, but more importantly so do Liberals.
The reality Liberals, the NDP and the Green’s still haven’t shown they are prepared to accept what they should collectively be doing now, instead of in 3 years from now if they want to dislodge the Conservative’s grip on incumbency.
Granted anything and everything can and does seem to happen in politics today as compared to 10-15 years ago. So who’s to say it’s completely impossible, if the economy continues to tank as my friend Garth says it will, the country won’t be ready to kiss the feet of a new Liberal saviour? If history is any guide, this may in fact be the true meaning of a new Liberal hope.
If I was Bob Rae’s advisor, I’d be looking not toward the leadership of the Liberal party, but rather at the leadership Mr. Rae could be bringing to the role as a unifying force among the three parties who today still mistakenly and naively believe they have some sort of shot alone, as opposed to united.
Is Bob Rae a candidate for that new party entity? No more than were Peter Mackay or Stockwell Day. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t a more important role to play than in yet another futile exercise in May.