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“I could have stayed on, there might have been sparks for me but frankly I am in this for a reason,” Kennedy told reporters after walking over to Dion’s camp.  ctv

Smart.

Kennedy only picked up 64 votes from the first ballot. Dion picked up 220. Combined they have 1858 votes which would put Dion within 500 of a win. Dion owes Kennedy big. And it preserves the Liberal Francophone/Anglophone rule which has worked so well for so long. Kennedy takes a crash course in French, a safe seat in the next election, a serious Cabinet post in a Dion government and a promise of Dion’s support in, say, six years.
The big news is that neither Rae nor Iggy picked up much support. Eyeballing it, Iggy is up a hundred, Rae 200. In the big mo sweepstakes this means Dion actually grew more than Rae or Iggy.

So now the third ballot question is whether or not enough of Kennedy’s delegates will follow him to Dion to put him ahead of Rae.

With only Rae, Dion and Iggy on the third ballot one is going to come last and be forced off. My sense is that Iggy has enough of a lead over Rae that he will survive to the next ballot. But I can’t see where Rae’s growth is going to come from.

And then? Well, then the question becomes whether the Liberal party wants Iggy or not Iggy. In a sense it is a question of whether the party wants a hard or a soft edge. Last night the speeches were as much about style as substance. Iggy promising victory, Rae promising to share and listen, Dion and Kennedy promising reform and renewal and a new generation.

The activists who go to political conventions want to win. But they also have a conception of the sort of political party they want to belong to. After Chretien and Martin - two old school politicos - there is a seriously question as to whether the activists want a guy like Iggy who went to the same political boot camp.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with 1 comment.
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Rae Faze

Over at Tradesports, where the current session is closed:

The money, smart or dumb is swinging in behind Rae.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Credit for all

When Bob Rae complimented Jean Chrétien on not joining the Iraq war, he achieved something rather special. He got a standing ovation for something someone else didn’t do. chris shelly macleans

Indeed.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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We’ve got ourselves a ballgame

cbc

Total ballots cast: 4815 To Win 2407

So Iggy hits just under 30% and needs 1000 new votes to win. Did the speeches matter? Not for this first ballot. But the relative performances of the candidates and the buzz about that performance is going to have a significant impact on the second and - likely - third ballots.

It is not at all obvious where Iggy is going to pick up 1000 votes. If he had delivered a great speech the idea that there would be movement from the various camps would make sense. But with his relatively lackluster speech that logic goes out the window.

If there is a surprise here it is that Kennedy and Dion ended in a dead heat. Either have nearly enough delegates to push Iggy over the top. neither has much incentive. One might be able to walk up the middle if the other throws support early.

And what of Rae? Basically Rae has to pick up a few hundred delegates on the first ballot and then cut a deal with one of Dion or Kennedy (or both). Here is where a good speech may have made the difference. Rae has to be betting that there will be enough delegate movement to keep him in sight of Iggy.

Volpe has gone to Rae, his organizers may have gone to Iggy. MHF will be off the ballot and it is not clear where she is sending her delegates if anywhere.

Dryden is widely seen as having made a genuinely excellent speech. One good enough to ensure that he will be able to stay on the ballot for a couple of rounds without losing any respect.

The buzz in Liberal blogland seems to go back to the ex officios - the hacks. They were supposed to go significantly Iggy’s way. Apparently they haven’t. As one commentor at Livin’ it up in Gritland puts it,

The blood-letting for Iggy begins on the second ballot, though in the loss of anticipated ex-officio votes one can see more than a trickle of of the red stuff.

UPDATE: I took the table above directly from the CBC…and it’s wrong. Dion was in third place, Kennedy in fourth rather than the placing in the chart. Sorry!

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Speeches

About a nano second after Iggy shambled off the stage my phone rang. KMG. To my not very great surprise Kevin thought Iggy won the beauty contest. I thought Rae smoked him.

In a sense all leadership conventions are about the style of the moment. Despite rather cooler music, Iggy was all about doing Paul Martin or Jean Chretien or, for that matter, Lester Pearson, better. He tried the audience response routine. (But failed to remember that tout ensemble is not quite as easy to remember as Canada.) He tried stentorian. He tried using quite small words said very slowly. he tried and he tried and, in the end, he managed to deliver a speech about the proverbial “better yesterday tomorrow”.

Bob Rae, with little to lose, tried Bill Clinton. Intimate, self deprecating, personal. It was not just stepping out beyond the platform; rather it was saying to the audience, “I don’t need to learn this job. I know this job.”

As anyone who follows politics knows there is nothing the least bit spontaneous about the hoopla and demos on the floor of a convention. If you watched carefully there was a guy in the Dion demo wearing sunglasses and urging the kids on. The other campaigns had the same guy with different shades.

Iggy played to his peeps. He hit the applause lines hard. He hit the vision thing and the enviro thing and the education thing. Bang, bang, bang. If this had been 1982 he’d have won in a walk. Now, well, he has better organization and may well have snatched several hundred alternates in the alternate promotion scam.

Rae had the room.

He understood he was outgunned organizationally. He understood that he stood no serious chance going head to head so he didn’t. Instead, by every move and gesture, Rae offered a different vision of what politics is and what it should be.

He told a rather complicated rabbi joke in case anyone forgot he was a Jew. He told a story about fiscal responsibility in case anybody forgot about his Premiership. He told stories and he looked relaxed. He was far more Oprah than Bill O’Reilly.

Iggy looked wolfish. The ambition which has propelled him so far in the world shone through with shocking intensity. Rae, well Rae has already run a government. He knows just how hard it is. While I suspect he is just as ambitious as Iggy, somehow he manages to draw the delicate veil.

The Liberals have been out of power for nearly - OMG - a year. They want to win. The question they have to answer is whether they want a leader as greedy as they are or one who is willing to take a step back to take three forward.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Boring….

Regular readers will know I cannot stand Warren Kinsella; but he is awfully good at getting things Liberal right,

CTV NewsNet cut away from Iggys speech.

Were they bored too? kinsella

(The good news is that I don’t have to link directly to the pathetic little man.)

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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But where are the spiders?

Iggy. 200k video. Own theme song? I think so. (Yup, en francais.)

Apparently Marc Lalonde is still alive.

And, apparently, Iggy is the smartest guy in the room….no, really.

Much hipper music as he stands at the podium.

This is a very set piece kind of speech.

Knowledge is good….”You get the grades you get to go” Faber College would be proud.

Now AIDS, Peace, Democracy….

Flat.

There is a lots of noise; but nothing like the attentive silence which Rae commanded.

Now he is doing crowd response. Sigh. Tous ensemble indeed.

“Let’s win some seats in Alberta”…Indeed.

At this point I would say Iggy has pretty much lost it on the speech. Which would not matter if the only vote was the one occurring tonight.

Weirdly, I am getting the sense that Iggy is actually the Grinch.

Now he is doing the response routine with “Canada”. Dear God.

“Party of hope in the land of hope…”

Out of time…

Rae killed him.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Rae Daze II

Bob unplugged. Notes? No need, hey, I’m a pro.

He looks great but I can’t help but be reminded of a cross between Jon Stewart and Phil Donohue.

Someday a male Liberal candidate will wear a green or a grey or a silver tie.

He is much better without notes than any of the others have been with a teleprompter. Which is, of course, the message.

He has this hall in his hand.

“How we take the vision and turn it into politics.”

Iraq bit in French…rather good French though I am no expert.

Fiscal Responsibility: we had to learn that lesson. I’ve learned that lesson, perhaps more than any other person in Canada.

Kyoto - climate change critical issue of our time.

“NDP only knows the politics of protest.”

“I think we need slick” says my entirely apolitical partner.

If that is what we need that is what Bob’s offering. He was Clintonesque in his delivery.

No home runs but lots of doubles and triples.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Rae Daze

Grand video…Must have cost his brother a fortune.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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The Old Flag

Watching Kennedy exit the room I was amused to see the Red Ensign being waved by an eager Kennedy supporter. (Which somewhat sets off the fact that GK signage looks as if it is a barcode.) Not at all a bad speech. Well delivered and on time.

He mentioned his kids and as he exits has one in his arms. In one of the more natural moves I’ve seen a politician make in years, Kennedy wetted a finger and wiped a bit of grot from his son’s upper lip. That was real.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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First Vote, Then Listen

Is it just me or is there something really weird about the Liberals voting while the candidates are speaking?

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Slipping in the Fix

That’s where it starts to get tricky, at least for anyone not intimately familiar with the minutiae of Liberal party rules. The maybe-sortas on the list weren’t officially listed as supporters for a particular candidate. But organizers for those candidates would - or should - have been aware of where each was likely to go, since they would have been tagged during the delegate selection process. Thus a well-organized campaign with ties to the provincial council would have been able to tweak the list in order to give “their” alternates an edge over the rest when promotion time came around.

According to the party insider who explained all this to Macleans.ca, the only well-organized team in this regard was Michael Ignatieff’s. His people made sure that those delegates leaning toward joining the Iggy Nation had a better shot at making it into the voting booth. macleans/chris shelly

As I suggested below (credentialing irregularities at Liberal Convention) this is not a big deal unless and until there is a systemic bias in favour of one candidate.

Chris suggests that the process favours the organized: well, yes. In chaos, the organized make out like bandits. The more interesting question is who set the chaos up?

In essence, by closing the door at 11:00AM the organizers of the convention chose an option which would systematically discriminate against the less organized campaigns. They had other options which they decided not to take.

Where there is a clear front runner his organization wants to get the credentialing and the voting done as quickly as possible so as to reduce the chance of delegate slippage and outright defection. Closing the doors as early as possible is part of the strategy. So is holding the voting while the candidates are speaking (and how weird is that?).

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Untitled

“That this House call on the government to introduce legislation to restore the traditional definition of marriage without affecting civil unions and while respecting existing same-sex marriages.” (reported at paul wells)

This is a sleeping dog which should be allowed to slumber on. But the Conservatives had to toss a bone (to mix the metaphor) to the socons and this is what it was.

As a resolution of the House - assuming it passes on a free vote which is unlikely - it commits the government to exactly nothing. And as such a motion it has no constitutional significance.

However, were it to pass the government would be rather stuck as it is pretty clear that any “legislation” passed to restore the traditional definition of marriage would not be constitutional. And Harper has stated he would not use the notwithstanding clause.
Just how silly the socon position is on the gay marriage issue is underscored rather nicely by the fact that there have now been hundreds of gay marriages in Canada - and nothing at all has happened. The institution of heterosexual marriage has survived unscathed. The churches have remained standing.  Children continue to be born.

All of the socons’ dire warnings about the destruction of the very fabric of the family and the society have been proved false by experience.

Well past time to move on.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Showing up

From a Iggy Press Release:

Number of Delegates
Registered Percentage of Delegates Elected

Michael Ignatieff
1059
77%

Gerard Kennedy
619
76%

Stephane Dion
550
73%

Martha Hall-Findlay
33
73%

Bob Rae
689
73%

Scott Brison
125
69%

Ken Dryden
161
68%

Joe Volpe
105
47%

————

Kinsella says this means Iggy will probably win.

I would say it suggests that Bob Rae will almost certainly lose. But adding Dion and Kennedy’s delegates I get 1169. I also get a delegate total of 3341. This makes the winning delegate count 1671.

Two things to watch for on the first ballot: first, does Iggy beat his 1059 number on the first ballot. What this will suggest is that the fix was very much in down in the alternate delegate room. Second, do the first ballot votes add up to 3341? I would anticipate some slippage.

This is shaping up to be a pretty hardcore fight and one in which the tactics are getting fairly nasty. They will get nastier especially if there is a credentials fight occasioned by the alternate promotion procedure.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Credentialling Irregularities at the LibCon

Kinsella has a picture of the registration chaos at the LibCon,

“This photo, taken a minute ago on my cell camera, shows very, very many Liberals - who are very, very upset - waiting to “bump up” for the vacant delegate spots. This is where the leadership may now be won.

It is like the fabled helicopter lifting off the rooftop in Saigon, totally chaotic, and no other media is paying attention. They should.”

In that room the fix goes in - a no show Kennedy supporter is replaced with an Iggy supporter. If that happens once it is no big deal, a couple of hundred times and the entire process becomes tainted.

I’ve done a far from scientific scan of the blogs and there is nothing up on this. Laura over at The Tyee is on the story though. And here she has her man, Peyman Nazer, who arrived an alternate, was left outside the promotion room but, somehow, managed to get delegate credentials.

This has the potential to be a real scandal. Under normal rules a challenge to the voting procedure from the floor this evening is not at all out of the question; especially if there seems to be any evidence of systemic bias in favour of one candidate or another.

Written by jay on December 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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