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I find it hard to disagree with this sentiment. The Topp camp has treated this entire campaign as though it is a general election between people and parties with completely different philosophies. This is the type of letter a US Republican would write in opposition to a Democratic nominee for President, not the type an NDP member should be writing against another member of his own party. I've been disillusioned with the Topp campaign since the beginning. The strategy - get all the party muckimucks to back our candidate before anyone else can get their wheels off the ground - is ethically questionable at best, and at worst harkens back to the Lingenfelter fiasco in Saskatchewan, where we chose a terrible leader and succombed to embarassment at the polls last November.
The Broadbent letter sounds desparate, and vindictive. They know they're about to lose, and so they're trying to permanently damage their main competition before the final blow is struck. It's petty and unbecoming a New Democrat.
If Mulcair loses the leadership he has noone to blame but himself. He has run a campaign which deliberately challenged the membership on a number of issues, alienating many on the left and arguably dividing the party. His tactic may hand him a large enough slice of support to be declared leader, but if not it will be a gamble that didn't pay off. The alternative would have been to have run a campaign which unified the party, not sure why he did not pursue this route.
You're not doing Tom Mulcair any favors.
When I first saw Tom at a meet and greet in the fall, my initial reaction was to reject his bid. Why? Putting aside the Libby Davies "bus" incident which I did find deplorable, I found his strategy for winning had a flaw - i.e. the Quebec strategy (and he no doubt deserves some credit for the party's success there) doesn't translate to Ontario just like that. With Quebec, many have pointed out that many BQ voters shared social democratic values and the switch to the NDP was not such a big ideological swing. Not so in Ontario where the NDP has to appeal primarilly to Liberal voters who are more of a mixed bag in a very big tent. I was also not convinced by Mulcair's assertion that he would finish off the LPC in the next election (at least in Quebec). I realize he was trying to raise some enthusiasm from the crowd but let's be realistic. The Liberal Party of Canada is not dead (at least not yet).
As a new NDP member, I've been trying to follow the race fairly carefully. I only personally knew one of the candidates (Nash) who is currently ranked at the top of my ballot with Cullen. I am very impressed with Nathan Cullen. Whatever you might think of his cooperation plan, he has a potentially workable proposal to try and win the next election AND to change the rules of the game. Right or wrong, proportional voting has been my main filter for judging the candidates. Nash also scores very high on this scale. Mulcair has not impressed me in this regard although to his credit (the Fair Vote survey) he's been said some of the right things. Nash is also someone I see regularly on the "demo trail" although to be fair, only one of the other candidates is in Toronto. That does bring back some of my fondest memories of Jack.
That said (and there are other strengths with Nash and Cullen that impress me), I can't ignore the point that is driven home time and again by Mulcair supporters - that he may be the only candidate who can hold Quebec. Now, the election is not for at least three years. This gives any of the leaders (and I would take any of them over Harper - for that matter I'd take my cat over Harper), time to get better known in Quebec so I'm not sure how valid the Mulcair argument is - but I am listening.
In addition to his being a perfectly fluent bi-lingual Quebecker, Mulcair brings some other strengths to his campaign including cabinet experience, legal background, charisma, excellent communication skills, media experience, thick skin and some enviro cred (although the bulk water sales idea didn't sit well with me and I wonder about his commitment regarding pipelines and the tarsands).
As some of you know, I've been one to consider outside of the box strategies to defeat reactionary Cons - i.e. strategic voting on the path to proportional representation. That implies a willingness to compromise when it comes to policy. So if I'm willing to consider compromise to defeat a "greater danger", why wouldn't I do the same within the NDP if it lays the clearest path to defeating Harper. That's a serious question I ask myself.
On the flip-side, I wonder whether Mulcair would be the type of insular leader who would broach no dissent and ice out the "enemies within". I know at least a couple of his endorsers would. Obviously at least one of his supporters on this board would too. That does not give me the warm fuzzies.
I lost interest in Broadbent a long time ago. He may be an elder statesman in the party, but I think he's doing more damage than good with the Topp campaign.
Are you sure it's Mulcair whose run a campaign "deliberately challenging the membership"? Or has the Topp campaign just successfully convinced you that Mulcair has done so?
I don't think the race as a whole had been that nasty. On Babble it has, but that tends to happen alot on the internet with any given topic. With politics, people's passions can run high, and I think on internet forums like this, some people tend to forget that their's an actual human being we're talking with, not just a computer screen. And because you can't actually see the other person, it might lead to people saying things here they wouldn't say if they were talking face-to-face. That's why it's best to remain respectful to other's and treat them with dignity. You can still be critical of a person's chosen candidate without be critical of that person, just like you can be critical of a person's politic's without being critical the actual person.
As Nathan Cullen would say, "we can disagree without being disagreeable".
THIS JUST IN
I'm now seriously considering the vote "ballot by ballot" option from home on e-day rather than submitting a ranked ballot. I think it would give more flexibility. I do worry a bit about the technology and not being able to "get through" in time though.
Are you saying that springgarden has been brainwashed? Perhaps he/she is capable of reading a statement of someone saying he is not "beholden to unions," and want to "renew" and "modernize" the party even after it had its most successful election, and drawing the appropriate conclusions.
Springgarden may well have done that, I just wanted to raise the question to be sure. It's possible, of course, that renewal and modernization are what accounted for that historic success in the last election, and spreading that renewal and modernization to other parts of the country might be of benefit overall.
John Doyle, TV critic for the Globe and Mail, has written a review of the Vancouver debate. Interestingly, he was most taken by Nash, and was very negative toward Mulcair. Here's an excerpt:
Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/television/john-doyle/i-watched...
Those are the enenies Gaian, not the people who don't agree with your choice of leadership candidate.
Very sorry about your loss.
Surprise, surprise, the MSP is concerned bout Mulcair winning the leadership. Does anyone here give a tinker's damn bout what is written in the Globe and Mail, that bastion of NDP support?
Anyways Doyle is way too late to the party as most folks have already voted.
----------------------------
John Doyle wrote:
The impressions I gained were, like those of most people in such circumstances, instant but probably lingering. Nathan Cullen seemed sullen. Young Niki Ashton was a bit muddled, all pluck and no luck in scoring points. Paul Dewar seemed to get a lot of his info from cab drivers. That kind of thing. Unfair, yes, but that’s television for you.
The turning point was when moderator Yaffe was compelled to exclaim, “I want to remind you all to differentiate yourselves.” This was a fair point. In policy proposals and ideas, the candidates all seemed to be singing in harmony from the same kneedipper hymn book.
So I concentrated too. In truth, differences in policy details were difficult to discern. Green economy. Sustainable economy. Smart economy. Mind you, Brian Topp gave the impression – somewhat novel – that he thinks all young people should get jobs in the arts and have television careers.
The meat of the event, though, is about leadership and the way forward for the New Democratic Party. On these matters, and in particular the TV presence and smarts of the candidates, the impressions were stark. Thomas Mulcair, the alleged front-runner, is a bit of an alpha-male politician, cut from the same cloth as so many others. The hint of a short temper emerges in his statements and answers. On TV, affable he ain’t. He’s good with the stinging remark in the House of Commons but that’s meaningless in the glare of a general election campaign. He has the humourless force of a man whose ego has never been pricked. Topp’s strength, on the other hand, is affability. Too much of it, perhaps, to the point where he seems nice and very smart, but a bit flat-footed on TV.
Peggy Nash’s presence, measured tone and nuanced answers had the strongest resonance. There’s a fortitude and pragmatism projected in her onscreen persona that’s vivid and, memorably, she uses wit, not put-downs. There’s the air of a woman who has seen and heard plenty of male bluster but knows that bluster doesn’t get the job done. Interestingly, there were seven candidates speaking and debating, and some barely registered at all.
A series of TV debates is a darn good idea when choosing a new leader for a party. TV is the vehicle that takes a leader to power or oblivion, in the end. In this NDP leadership race, too little attention has been paid to TV presence. What the race needs is more sass. Fewer banjo songs about woe, more hula hoop, if you know what I mean. Those who vote in this thing should exhibit some caution – we’ll be stuck with the winner on TV for a very long time.
Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/television/john-doyle/i-watched...
Actually, I originally liked Mulcair for his retail political skills (he was my #1 choice for a time) until I was repeatedly offended by his right wing positioning in relation to the membership. What's that all about, daft strategy if you ask me.
The deadline for voting by mail is now March 22nd. We must receive your ballot by then for it to be counted.
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That's fair. I just get the sense that this notion of Mulcair as right-wing visa vie the base is largely an illusion propogated by his opponents (one, really) in this race, rather than a function of his actual positioning, philosophically and on the issues.
Not that it matters, but the party grandees decided who should win the race before any candidate other than Topp could announce. So all the other candidates are the dividers and petty squabblers then. There really was no need for a race when Ed Broadbent told the media that Brian Topp was "the only one" that could lead the party. National party officials told the media within 24 hours of Jack Layton's death that Brian Topp, largely unheard of before this race, was the frontrunner. The United Steelworkers proposed re-instating the 25% vote carve-out for the union leadership that the NDP membership had voted to remove at convention. Shortly thereafter, the United Steelworker leadership endorsed Topp. Had the carve-out been re-instated over the vote of the membership, over the one-member-one-vote election of Jack Layton, then the union leadership's vote would have been equal to that of 40,000 rank and file NDP members (given current membership numbers and assuming all members vote). This is more NDP members as exist in the province of British Columbia (or any other province for that matter). Topp had so much money at the beginning of the race that he made sure to spend a big chunk of it before the official start of the race so that he wouldn't be subject to campaign finance restrictions. Romanow endorsed Topp. What more evidence did we need to make our "choice," when there were those who would make our choice for us.
1springgarden, you may be right. Mulcair should not have run and neither should Saganash, Nash, Ashton, Chisholm, Singh, Dewar, and Cullen. They were just guaranteed to divide an already decided party.
I think Howard pretty much nailed it here. This is the same strategy that was taken in Saskatchewan when Lingenfelter was shoe-horned into the party leadership. It worked here, and so Topp and Co. decided it might work for them as well. The result of the strategy was horrific in Saskatchewan - an absolute drubbing at the polls, largely due to Lingenfelter's failed 1980s campaign strategy. Luckily, the federal membership seems prepared to ignore the inner sanctum's choice this go-round.
I like this quote. This is what I was feeling when I wrote after the debate that Peggy Nash's performance had been at times "reassuring."
I assume it's the same reason why Jack didn't do any interviews in the last week of the 2011 federal election, after years and years of taking every media interview on offer. When you're doing well, you don't want to rock the boat.
I don't like it, but it's good strategy.
It amazes me to see Mulcair supporters continuing to deny that there's any reason for concern about Mulcair.
If Ed Broadbent didn't think there were serious reasons for concern, he wouldn't have made these comments. While the fact Ed isn't a fan of Mulcair shouldn't rule Mulcair out in this contest, I don't think there can be any question that Ed has the party's best interests at heart, and he wouldn't make such harsh comments about someone who might well be elected leader of the party in less than ten days if he didn't believe strongly that a Mulcair leadership would be very dangerous to the party.
So, Mulcair supporters, let me ask the question: If Ed doesn't have a reason to think Mulcair would do harm to the party, then why is he saying what he's saying?
Is Ed a dictator? Does Ed get to make up my mind for me? Sorry, Ed is a great guy and he gets one vote. Just like me.