Posted on 06/29/2004 6:06:41 AM PDT by Clive
PAUL MARTIN lost this election. Yes, yes, he pulled off a minority -- and a bigger one than most anyone predicted, thanks to Ontario voters -- but for those who think there's more to the game than winning, he has lost plenty.
Martin may have hung on to his job, but he lost, too -- and not just because he turned what was once expected to be a fourth straight Liberal cakewalk into a squeaker.
No, what Martin lost isn't measured in votes and seats.
Think back to his glory days, as the revered finance minister, the guy who many thought made Jean Chretien look good. The second-in-command who many thought was the brains of the operation; the educated, worldly, elegant foil to the streetfighter leader.
His overthrow of "le petit gars," a decade in the making, was viewed by many as a cause to hang in there and trust the Liberals, even after the Shawinigate scandal, the HRDC mess and the gun registry fiasco surfaced. Not to worry, it was whispered (actually, the Globe and Mail said it outright in the 2000 election) -- soon Paul Martin will be in charge and the lustre of the PM's position will be restored.
Martin would be a leader Canadians could be proud of on the world stage. Martin would be a leader fiscal conservatives and lefties could love. Martin would bring the vision and hope and integrity the country so strongly craved after so many years of shrugging arrogance.
Today, that Paul Martin is dead, if he ever existed.
The distinguished millionaire statesman has been exposed as a cheap, desperate politician -- the figurehead of one of the dirtiest campaigns in memory.
He abandoned his crusade against the "democratic deficit" to appoint friends and "star" candidates. His omnipotent handlers ran anti-Conservative attack ads that were so far from true they insulted every voter's intelligence. (It's not that there was nothing about Stephen Harper's party to attack, it's that it was so, to borrow their pet term, extreme.) Through it all, Martin stammered and mangled words, at times worse than Jean Chretien and Joe Clark combined.
So what, you say -- it worked. He won. Along with the likes of Carolyn "Damn Americans" Parrish. But he lost in stature.
He promised vision but gave us only fear. Oh, and the empty vow that health care was his "No. 1 priority." Whatever.
He professed to be "mad as hell" about the sponsorship scandal and promised answers, but went trolling for votes instead. (Will we ever get to the bottom of that mess now?)
Old tricks
He said he would change the way things were done in Ottawa, but he resorted to the oldest, shoddiest political tricks in the book -- associating his opponents with images of gunfire, weeping women and a disintegrating Canadian flag.
He vowed to reach out to the West. That promise dissolved faster than the flag in his disgraceful ads when he lashed out at Alberta premier Ralph Klein's allegedly nefarious plan to privatize some aspect of health care. And he all but handed Quebec to the Bloc, reigniting the very separatist threat that the whole stupid sponsorship scheme was supposed to have killed.
After all that -- and his last-ditch scare campaign targeting the NDP -- how will he handle the compromises of a minority, especially one concentrated in Ontario and the East?
He told voters this election was about choosing "the kind of Canada we want." Somehow, I don't think "fractured" is what we had in mind.
Mark Steyn's take this morning:
The morning after: You know, I don't feel so bad after all. 135 Liberals plus 19 NDP could prove mighty frustrating for Paul Martin. And my lowballing of NDP seats looks a lot better than all those TV networks declaring they'd "won" 24, 25, 25 or Jack Layton announcing they'd doubled their ridings. Off to write it up for The Western Standard. More later.
Martin didn't plan to wake up with the Bloc in the kingmaker's role in the next House Of Commons. There's not much to crow about; his party got the plurality of seats cause most Canadians preferred sticking with the devil they know and its not exactly a national vote of confidence in the Liberals. They didn't win outright a majority of the popular vote and those Lefties repelled by their corruption and incompetence drifted either to the New Democrats or the Bloc. Sure, the Liberals kept the bulk of seats in Ontario but bottom line, there's no national mandate for the Prime Minister and his party.
Thank goodness for the Electoral College (would you like NYC and LA deciding who is president?)
Belinda Stronoch won her riding.
Should have been Belinda Stronach.
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