Major Canadian political party seeks leader, bilingual, able to take charge of faction-ridden caucus. Must have personality plus, strong and determined TV persona, and must have his own red tie...
Canadian readers may remember last year's federal election. (Was it only last year? ed.) The TV campaign -- the debates, the ads, the 24/7 analysis and punditry -- stick in my mind. We had five (5) parties contesting the election (being charitable to the Greens), led by four (4) strong personalities.
Who was the weakest link? Give you a hint...it wasn't the woman! Step forward, poor little put-upon Stéphane Dion. Yes, he of the red tie, pencil-neck and somewhat owlish visage...that's when he didn't appear more like a deer caught in the headlights.
I felt genuinely sorry for M. Dion. Being portrayed in a Tory attack ad with a puffin shitting on his head was just a small portion of the indignity and scorn heaped upon him every day. He was indeed shat upon from a great height, and by all and sundry including many within his own so-called united party.
I remember him as playing the 97-pound weakling to "Call me Steve" Harper's beach bully. It seemed he wore the glasses to protect his eyes from having sand kicked in them! And when he tried to go on the offensive himself, as in the debates, it was rather like watching a sheep trying to savage a wolf.
M. Dion must have been mightily relieved when it was all over and a bloodless coup put him out of his misery. But he was no more relieved than card-carrying Liberals who thought that now they could crown a new leader, a strong leader, one who would impose some order on the fractious party and stand up to the attacks of Mr. Harpoon and the barking of the dreaded square-jawed Baird.
Alas, the Liberals chose Michael Ignatieff, the latest in an increasingly long line of urban liberal intellectuals who have difficulty relating to Joe Sixpack from Otter Haunch SK.
How can one describe the Iggster? He is taller than his predecessor, more...saturnine, perhaps? He is thin, angular...another Abraham Lincoln, maybe? Except you can't picture him splitting rails or operating a jackhammer or anything vaguely physical like that.
Indeed, in the truly awful ads in which we see him standing in a copse near Cherry Beach, he manages to look quite uncomfortable, as if afraid that a squirrel or raccoon might jump on him. Maybe that's why he keeps his voice so low. And the vapid script... I keep waiting for him to say "Gosh, so these are trees, eh. We should do something with these...something better!"
Dear readers, Walt has seen this movie before. We've got yet another bemused and feckless dude (in the old sense of the word), a puppet in the hands of the Toronto Liberal establishment (hello, Senator Smith!), who's going to shoot it out against the Sundance Kid. Guess who's going to get killed?
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