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.