Monday, November 27, 2006
Who do you want? Who do you need? Who do you like? Who's gonna make a stand?
(Hey, come on - a lot of bloggers base their post titles on lyrics from their favourite songs.)
Regular readers, if the drugs have worn off, have probably noticed my conspicuous silence on the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race. This silence wasn't intentional - I fully intended to post something just as soon as some element of the race engaged me. And now I find that the first round of voting is past without my single criterion having been met.
Do you know who's either stupid or lying to you? Anybody who tells you what a surprise Saturday's results were. Elements of the results surprised me. I was surprised that Ed Stelmach won the position of second round sacrificial lamb, a title that I had anticipated going to Lyle Oberg. I was surprised that Dave Hancock beat Mark Norris. If I really tried, I could probably muster up some surprise that Victor Doerkson finished ahead of Gary McPherson. More surprise than interest, anyway.
But what happened on Saturday? Jim Dinning came in with a substantial lead. Ted Morton came in second, close enough to appear to be within striking distance of first, but really isn't because most people who are going to support Ted Morton are already supporting him (Will's posts would suggest otherwise, but Will is probably also the partisan blogger who is, among those I know who pretend not to be slavish followers of a party line, the worst at hiding it).
What did come as a bit of a surprise was Dave Hancock's immediate endorsement of Stelmach. Oberg's endorsement a little later was less surprising. I don't see either making much difference, less because those candidates lack the capacity to lead their first round supporters to another candidate and more because the electorate in the second round is going to be so different from the first. Teachers who joined to back Hancock will discover that none of the remaining candidates are to their liking. Unionists and busloads of recent Vietnamese immigrants who joined to back Oberg will behave similarly. And plenty more people will join. And then, Dinning will win, just as everybody's been predicting all along.
For that reason, you probably shouldn't expect to see much provincial politics coverage on here in the next little while (though evidence is beginning to suggest that the surest way to see what my blog won't look like is to read what I say it's going to look like). If provincial politics are your bag, check out The Alberta Report, an anonymous muckraker of a blog that strives to hate everybody equally among other things it's recently claimed, Liberal MLAs Bruce Miller and David Swann are allegedly unhappy with Kevin Taft's leadership. What do these two have in common? Both were considered better fits for the NDP, and at least one of them (Miller) was reportedly a member of the NDP up until just before the election.
In my next post, I might go a little into the irony of the damage the recent focus on Canadian unity doing so much to hurt the Liberal leadership candidate best qualified to talk about national unity, Stéphane Dion. I might talk a little about the results of the federal by-elections. I might go into the staggering, incomprehensible incoherence of the National Post editorial board (anybody wondering what I'm talking about should read this and then peruse the comments sections of some of my recent posts). Or I might vanish for four months or more.
|
(Hey, come on - a lot of bloggers base their post titles on lyrics from their favourite songs.)
Regular readers, if the drugs have worn off, have probably noticed my conspicuous silence on the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race. This silence wasn't intentional - I fully intended to post something just as soon as some element of the race engaged me. And now I find that the first round of voting is past without my single criterion having been met.
Do you know who's either stupid or lying to you? Anybody who tells you what a surprise Saturday's results were. Elements of the results surprised me. I was surprised that Ed Stelmach won the position of second round sacrificial lamb, a title that I had anticipated going to Lyle Oberg. I was surprised that Dave Hancock beat Mark Norris. If I really tried, I could probably muster up some surprise that Victor Doerkson finished ahead of Gary McPherson. More surprise than interest, anyway.
But what happened on Saturday? Jim Dinning came in with a substantial lead. Ted Morton came in second, close enough to appear to be within striking distance of first, but really isn't because most people who are going to support Ted Morton are already supporting him (Will's posts would suggest otherwise, but Will is probably also the partisan blogger who is, among those I know who pretend not to be slavish followers of a party line, the worst at hiding it).
What did come as a bit of a surprise was Dave Hancock's immediate endorsement of Stelmach. Oberg's endorsement a little later was less surprising. I don't see either making much difference, less because those candidates lack the capacity to lead their first round supporters to another candidate and more because the electorate in the second round is going to be so different from the first. Teachers who joined to back Hancock will discover that none of the remaining candidates are to their liking. Unionists and busloads of recent Vietnamese immigrants who joined to back Oberg will behave similarly. And plenty more people will join. And then, Dinning will win, just as everybody's been predicting all along.
For that reason, you probably shouldn't expect to see much provincial politics coverage on here in the next little while (though evidence is beginning to suggest that the surest way to see what my blog won't look like is to read what I say it's going to look like). If provincial politics are your bag, check out The Alberta Report, an anonymous muckraker of a blog that strives to hate everybody equally among other things it's recently claimed, Liberal MLAs Bruce Miller and David Swann are allegedly unhappy with Kevin Taft's leadership. What do these two have in common? Both were considered better fits for the NDP, and at least one of them (Miller) was reportedly a member of the NDP up until just before the election.
In my next post, I might go a little into the irony of the damage the recent focus on Canadian unity doing so much to hurt the Liberal leadership candidate best qualified to talk about national unity, Stéphane Dion. I might talk a little about the results of the federal by-elections. I might go into the staggering, incomprehensible incoherence of the National Post editorial board (anybody wondering what I'm talking about should read this and then peruse the comments sections of some of my recent posts). Or I might vanish for four months or more.
