Manitoba Election belongs to Doer

A weekly wrap-up story in today's Winnipeg Free Press confirms the observation made in TC's previous post:

Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen started Week 3 of the campaign with a big bang, but it wasn't the sort of jolt his party was looking for.

His promise to bring back the Winnipeg Jets -- a move meant to entice young people to stay in Manitoba and get voters thinking big again -- was the first time the race elicited any sense of noticeable energy in the electorate. Problem is, it was mostly negative.

Radio talk shows and newspaper letters to the editor overflowed with voters expressing shock, disbelief and outright contempt for McFadyen's promise, and candidates heard the same at the door. Premier Gary Doer has made it a punchline all week.

Interestingly the story characterizes Doer's promises as "a little more of the same". Another interesting point, with broader implications is the failure of the Manitoba Liberals to make Crocus a key issue. This strongly suggests to TC that the income trust tax issue is not going to be important in the next federal election, which is now off until after the Bloc Québecois selects a new leader and that probably means 2008 at the earliest.

The inevitable conclusion is that it is too late now for the Conservatives. They will be haunted by the Jets promise all the way to polling day, particularly because of when they made it.

Victory this time should have been theirs. It is difficult for parties in Canada to win third terms - they tend to accumulate too many grievances along the way. However, Gary Doer is a shrewd politician with sure political instincts, and the Jets promise has revealed McFadyen as a not ready for prime time player. No polls have been published yet but it is clear now who will win.

Promising too much

One of the strategically clever moves by Stephen Harper in the 2006 election was to make small but targeted promises to certain classes of voters, promises that symbolically said the Conservatives cared about and connected with their concerns. The examples that come to mind are the transit and sports equipment tax credits.

It is always better to underpromise and overdeliver. A promise deemed too extravagant to be credible can be an enormous mistake.

That appears to be the case with a promise by Manitoba Progressive Conservative Leader Hugh McFadyen who earlier this week promised he would bring the Jets back to Winnipeg. It is extraordinarily foolish to promise something over which you have no control. If by chance you do get elected, it can easily return to haunt you.

But before then there is the risk that not only will no one believe you, but the whole idea will be subject to ridicule. That seems to be the case in this instance. A correspondent tells TC all the letters to the editor of the Free Press were negative about the promise. The move did capture a lot of local attention. Too much it seems.

This excerpt from a column in the Free Press seems to capture the zeitgeist:

City yawns as McFadyen promises return of Jets

Thu May 10 2007

THAT thudding sound you heard Tuesday morning was Hugh McFadyen's Great Big Idea hitting the ground like an anvil dropped from on high.

The Tory leader promised to bring back the Jets.

The city yawned.

McFadyen must have thought this one was a clear winner. He kitted up in a Jets jersey, used hockey great and former Jets captain Thomas Steen as a prop and announced he'd have an NHL team back in the 'Peg by 2011.

He did not say how much public money he'd spend or how he'd ensure the team wouldn't get into financial trouble.

This was a broad stroke promise. My gosh, he seemed to imply, this is such a terrific pledge that only nitpickers, Gary Doer and the damned media would dare question me on the details.

This is a key period in any election campaign. Voters are just now making up their minds. The pledge was clearly an error. The timing means that it could be fatal.

Manitoba Election Treading Water

In most elections there comes a point where the campaign crystalizes and it appears to be about something; the zeitgeist gels, and there is a clear perspective one can get. It hasn't happened yet in Manitoba. There have also as yet been no polls.

Sometimes a campaign drifts right on into election day. This happened last year in Nova Scotia. These circumstances favour the incumbent. But there are still two weeks to go. A lot could happen.

I think the one interesting item was an absolutely dumb promise by PC leader Hugh McFadyen, that he would give every MLA a veto over hydro privatization. This is transparently protesting too much, and, if anything, lends credence to the charge by the NDP that he wants to sell the utility. The case for McFadyen as a hydro privatizer is nicely summarized by an NDP web site dedicated to doing in Hugh.

Evidence of Republican woes...

... keeps on mounting. This MyDD post summarizes two recent national polls that essentially say that the the Democratic Presidential candidates are running ahead of the Republican candidates, in some cases by huge margins.

Plagiarism in Manitoba Election

The Conservatives are running an anti-crime ad called revolving door you can see here (it's the one on the bottom) . George Bush the elder should sue. He used a similar concept in an ad in 1988 against Michael Dukakis that was also called revolving door (first column of thumbnail images third from the bottom). It has since become a legendary example of dirty politics.

Impending Republican Disaster in 2008

TC wrote a couple of months ago about the possibility of a Democratic blowout in the 2008 elections. Since then the Iraq war has gradually worsened the Republican predicament.

So here is a conservative web site quoting George Will on what 2008 holds for Republicans.

The quote from Will (from ABC's This Week program) is quite amazing:

Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven't been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited.

Stephanopoulos: Wow!

There is a link to the video clip (the Will quote is right at the end) on the site as well, plus a gloomy quote from William F. Buckley. All this leads to this comment from Real Clear Politics (a site TC likes for its updated information on U.S. polls):

Even though both Buckley and Will are careful to hedge slightly on their predictions, essentially two of the most respected and smartest minds in conservative politics just declared that the Republican Party will not only suffer greatly in 2008, but that it is in danger of becoming a minority party for generations.

An impending Republican disaster? The gloom and doom foreseen for the Republicans is from the respectable right, not from the loony left.

We may be in for a remarkable transformation. The gradual decline of the Democrats following 1968 was directly linked to Vietnam so there is no reason the same could not hold true for the Republicans over Iraq. No one says so but if a Democratic President and Congress had the nerve to implement a universal publicly administered health care plan while ending the imperial adventures overseas, there could well be a new Democratic era on the scale of the New Deal.

Decima poll seals it

It is now clear that there will be no federal election, much to TC's surprise. Today's Decima symbolically concludes the election speculation period. Harper has concluded he can't win his majority now. He was clearly headed for an election and backed off late. Some intelligence TC learned this evening suggests he was shaken by the Quebec election results. Regardless, the decision was a gift to Stéphane Dion and the Liberals who now have breathing space to organize and raise money.