Blame Management

10 months, 3 chiefs of staff. Michael Ignatieff is following the Mo Johnston play book.

Mo helms Toronto FC in the MLS. Off the field, by all accounts they are a successful team. They have great attendance. Their fans are boisterous and loyal. And, on paper, they have the building blocks of a contender. On the field, they get slammed 5-0 by the last place team, in their final game, when they are fighting for the last play-off spot. So what does Mo do - what he always does - drops the coach. TFC has had four coaches in 3 years, failed to make the play-offs. Loyal fans of TFC are now non-believers. Back in August, with two months to go, only the most blindly faithful fan still believed that TFC might be in the play-offs.

With Liberals down in the polls, no consistently on messaging, candidate fiasco in Quebec, flip-flops on policy and exercising of poor judgment of pushing an election for no reason - Ignatieff is playing musical chairs. Out is Ian Davey. In is Peter Donolo. The official excuse - Ignatieff needs someone with experience. That is the same line that Mo is using with TFC - we need a coach with MLS experience.

May be it is not the coach or the chief-of-staff who should be blamed. All good managers know that a certain amount of self-reflection must be done when things are not going well. Firing your underling only buys you time.

In all fairness to Ignatieff, he inherited someone elses problem. Dion left the party long on policy and short on organization and financing. Ignatieff has attempted the reverse -the Liberals are short on policy, but focusing on fundraising and courting "high quality" people. But the Party cannot be blamed for it's leader flip-flopping on issues, and making bad judgment calls. Don't forget in the only leadership race that Ignatieff participated in (and lost), he did himself in by commenting on the Lebanon crisis at the time and then flip-flopping on it on Quebec television the next day. That is an issue of judgment, and judgment is not something that can be easily taught in a short period of time. Same thing with instinct - trying to go for the jugular when your party is not prepared, you have not done the ground work, you have no policies and voters do not want an election, but Ignatieff decided to push for an election. If his judgment was doing leaps of logic telling him it was a good idea to go, his gut should have told him otherwise. Trusting your instinct cannot be learned over night.

One of the problems that was publicized last month, was that Ignatieff is too reliant on his Toronto-centred circle. They did not understand Quebec. If they cannot understand the province four hours away, then I can guarantee that they do not understand the West either. So how does Iggy respond? The Toronto guy is replaced by the Toronto guy.

Considering that Donolo's father was part of the firm that built the headquarters of National Defence, perhaps the biggest eye-sore in downtown Ottawa, let's hope Peter does not have his father's eye for design.

UPDATE:

Blogging Horse is having similar thoughts, as is Paul Wells, employing a more apt metaphor.

Partisan to the bone

Thanks to Jane Taber and CTV, Joe Cressy is out of the closet. Yep – he is an environmentalist. I am sure God will spite him for the way he chooses to live his life. With every protest his Marley chain, partially sunk in the boiling tar sands of hell, is getting longer and longer.

There is some debate, about whether you can be partisan and an activist. Let see, a quick blog search suggests Joe works for those environmental heathens, the Polaris Institute, and he sits on the executive of the Ottawa Centre NDP Riding Association. Clearly, the Polaris Institute is some sort of cover for pro-NDP activities. An audit of there books will reveal that this nefarious group is funded by the NDP, possibly out of Jack Layton’s own pocket. After all, a party that fights for the underprivileged clearly has rich backers. And to be as high as 17% in the polls, such a party must have a vast network of think tanks that disseminate their socialist agenda. Socialism died with the USSR - how can the NDP still exist but for the deep pockets of certain benefacters trying to force their social justice views on an unwilling mass?

Clearly, this just shows how underhanded the NDP is. Other parties simply give their staffers a ten-minute break to go and protest. On the other hand, the NDP is transparent and admits to their underhandedness.

Asked Karl Belanger, press secretary to Jack Layton, about suggestions that the NDP was associated with yesterday’s protest. His response.

Ya, that’s right. We organized a protest to interrupt our Leader
during his question. Clearly, it was a socialist plot from the NDP.

Only through partisans eyes is an individual only a partisan hack, and not an individual of various interests.

UPDATE:

Apparently nefarious political ties underlie everything. Or it is simply a red herring. The Conservatives are using the NDP's-directing-mind story as a means to distract from the real story - 6 weeks to Copenhagen, and we a commitments and strategy to move on the issue of climate change.

Correction - Yesterday I incorrectly referred to Cressy being with the Pembina Institute. This is not the case, and I have been slapped around accordingly (see comments). I will donate all proceeds from this blog to those upstanding non-partisan organizations - Navigator (see G&M post linked directly above) and Strategic Council. With Peter Donolo gone back to the Liberals, who will provide non-partisan and objective views on the polling numbers that appear in the Globe?

On the Liberal void

Operating on the assumption that anything can be defined by generalizations, and media sources, in particular, can be pegged by partisan politics, over the past year I have viewed the Toronto Star as Liberal supporters. Aside from Susan Delacourt’s excellent blog, I have spent more time reading the Wheels section than their columnists (and I don’t own a car). There was a time in the post-2003 era when the Star paid lip service to Jack Layton and the NDP. A local boy poised for a Toronto breakthrough. As the breakthrough became a knock, the Star maintained a limited interest in the party as it poised for a Quebec breakthrough that was not the flood that was promised. More recently the Star has been advocating that Layton has over stayed his welcome.

And why not move on when you have two leadership hopefuls, Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff, from Toronto fighting to lead Canada’s natural governing party? Okay, maybe they have not showed the same commitment to local issues as Layton, but they could become Prime Minister. With Ignatieff assuming the mantle it was only a matter of time before those anti-Toronto and, thus, anti-Canadian values, Tories are booted out.

But the Toronto Star has proven that it, as a large media outlet, should not be pigeon-holed. James Travers provides a true service of succinctly addressing the problems with today’s Liberals:

Michael Ignatieff is not the Liberal problem. Liberals are the Liberal problem.
Three times they failed to stare at themselves while looking for a leader.
Three times Liberals opted for expediency over renewal.

The Liberals are waiting for everyone to hate Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. They only have to look south of the border to understand they may be waiting a long time - many Americans hated George W. Bush, but he was still re-elected. There is a certain arrogance amongst Liberal staffers that it is only a matter of time until they return to their natural state of ruling. Today’s non-confidence motion is a perfect example – the Liberals are not ready for an election and they know they will not defeat the government, but they pursue the idea anyways for no better reason but to say “we-are-not-Stephen-Harper”.

But it is not only the assumption that power is but an election away that is the problem. The Liberals don’t stand for anything.

If there's any consistency, it's the raw pragmatism of a big tent party so
sprawling that its canopy covers libertarians, fiscal conservatives and social
democrats. Determined to manage inherent internal conflicts and bury policy
contradictions, the once dominant natural governing party is content to follow
anywhere any leader likely to return Liberals to power.
From a distance,
Ignatieff was easily mistaken for that champion. A cosmopolitan public
intellectual with patrician bloodlines, the writer and professor blended exotic
success with domestic roots.

Under Michael Ignatieff shifting statements to the media has become policy. When forced to answer about concrete policies, Liberals return to notions of balanced budgets (but never say how!), the Kelowna Accord and national child care. As beneficial as these ideas are, for better or worse, the country has moved on. Kelowna, child care and fiscal policies would be different today then in 2004. The situation has changed but the Liberals have not because they have nothing to hang their hats on but “we-are-not-Stephen-Harper”. This absence of a unifying ideology or principles may work when the opposition is non-existent or hated (see e.g. the 1990’s and Mulroney/Campbell circa 1993). But it does not give Canadians a reason to vote Liberal. What it gives is a reason for potential Liberal voters to stay home.