In the end, it was no contest.

The race to replace Alexa McDonough as leader of the federal New Democrats began well before the Winnipeg Convention, November, 2001, where Jack Layton and Bill Blaikie were already tipped as the likely front-runners in a soon-to-happen leadership race. The campaign officially started in June, 2002, when McDonough announced her resignation and lasted until this past weekend. There were two dozen candidates’ debates, and what seemed on Saturday to be an endless four-hour wait for the results of the first and only ballot.

But all the candidates’ bluster, the pundits’ prognostications and finely-spun scenarios melted away as Layton won the leadership race with a stunning first-ballot majority of 53.5 per cent, more than double the tally of Blaikie, his closest rival. Layton won a majority in the votes of both party members and labour affiliates. Only Layton campaign insiders, closely guarding internal polling numbers and publicly low-balling their first-ballot expectations at thirty-eight per cent, expected such a strong showing. Everyone else had planned on a two-or-three ballot drama in which the labour vote at convention could play a decisive role.

The new one-member, one-vote selection process rid the convention of its drama, as 40,000 of 44,000 votes had been cast before convention started. With a wide margin between Layton and Blaikie, labour’s influence dwindled. Blaikie polled a respectable twenty-five per cent, representing the core of true believers for whom nothing needs to change about the NDP — everyone else needs to smarten up, join the party, and vote for it.

The Nystrom and Comartin campaigns came in at a disappointing nine per cent and seven per cent respectively. Lorne Nystrom’s campaign, starved of resources and plagued by miscues, never took off. Nystrom’s core Saskatchewan vote did not materialize. Saskatchewan had a poor voter turnout, and many of those who did vote voted for Layton, who spent more time campaigning in Saskatchewan than in Ontario.

Expected numbers for Joe Comartin, who signed up 4100 new members and had been pledged almost a quarter of labour’s first ballot support, did not materialize either. Shortly after Comartin finished his last speech to convention, Comartin supporter and CAW President Buzz Hargrove expressed his disapproval on national TV. It was unclear how many votes this lost Comartin.

Among the losing candidates, only Pierre Ducasse had something to be happy about — he was universally praised as the unofficial winner of the leadership race, having charmed the party throughout, never more than during his final speech to convention.

The convincing margin of Layton’s victory will prevent federal caucus from undermining Layton for the foreseeable future. The vote is a rebuke to most of the caucus and to the federal party establishment. But the solid margin may be a double-edged sword. After all, it removes the pressure for Layton to organize within the party in order to consolidate his position. In the short run, though, Layton has won a strong mandate — but to do what?

The first key decision that will reveal the likely direction of Layton’s leadership will be the staffing choices for the leader’s office. On the weekend, Layton campaign staff said these choices were still to be made.

Another test will be to see how Layton handles media pressure. Panicunder pressure is a risk with Layton, who is sometimes emotionallyincontinent. During much of the campaign, Layton seemed to be governedby insecurity and an intense need for validation; when these werequenched by victory on Saturday, the public transformation wasremarkable, even turning insecurity into cockiness when talking toreporters Sunday morning.

A senior figure in Layton’s campaign, commenting on the NDP’s reversal of the decision not to break down the leadership vote into the member and labour votes, said, “Finally the party is learning — we reversed after four days of bad media, instead of six.” If this represents Layton’s attitude to the media, it is exactly wrong — the decision should have been reversed because it was a bad decision, not because of media pressure. Caving under media pressure is not new, but a bad old habit of the NDP that wins it neither respect nor power. The media is like a bully, or a dog — it needs to be dominated, and Layton should establish dominance as soon as he can.

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During one of the convention floor shows, when supporters of one of the candidates were chanting, I was talking to a top campaign organizer just outside the convention floor. I said, “I really can’t get into this kind of cheerleading.” He said, “You need to have it so people can feel involved in some way.” He himself was not cheering, or cheerleading. He was part of the parallel convention that took place in and around the other convention, amidst the delegates, seemingly without many delegates noticing or seeing the dynamics of power at work.

Party key players spent much of their time circulating about the convention building, on the convention floor, talking to each other, deal-making, fixing, building social and political capital. Identifying these players and observing their movements was like a window onto the inner workings of politics and onto the workings of power. There were two conventions this weekend — one for those on the inside, making things happen, and the other, primarily a show.

Any effort to democratize the party must start with an education in how power operates in the party; just as any attempt to democratize the state must expose the inner workings of the state to the people. Without this, the party is doomed to repeat the failures of the past.

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One democratic space where party officials, campaign staff, and party members met during the campaign, often under cover of anonymity, was rabble’s own babble online discussion forum.

For most of the campaign, babble was a far richer source of information, views and debate on the campaign than reporting in the mainstream media. And it was one to which anyone could contribute. Several MPs, candidates, campaign staff, most convention delegates under forty, and many above forty, lurked or posted to babble’s NDP leadership forum, which became an important place to share gossip, untangle spin, and keep a finger on the pulse of party activists.

Many campaigners admitted to reading babble but seemed embarrassed about it or downplayed its usefulness. “I don’t have time, but I can’t help it,” a prominent New Democrat said. “There’s really nothing worth reading there,” said another. Why read it, if it’s so useless? Flimsy excuses were made.

Others found it useful. Olivia Chow read it because it “speaks to youth” and has a “range of views, from new party members to long-time activists.” Jeff Ferrier, who worked on the Comartin campaign, read it “two or three times a day” because the “gloves came off” in babble in a way that they didn’t in the public campaigns. He also thinks that, to some extent, campaigns took their cues from babble on issues like Iraq and peace, where babblers demanded a strong stand. Another highly-placed person in the Layton campaign read it to see “how fast information got into the circle” — generally, not very fast, he said.

Other campaign staffers and supporters in each of the campaigns posted profusely to the boards in an effort to spin for their candidates or to persuade others to join them. I myself found it an efficient way to influence campaigns, because I knew it had a large readership among the party’s activist cadre. I also thought it could be a forum to broaden general knowledge of the inner workings of the party. But what often ended up happening is that a dialogue of the in-the-know excluded those out of the loop.

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The convoluted attempt by the party to massage away a divisive vote on the presidency collapsed on Saturday night in a meeting of the key players, as it became clear that the party’s ad-hoc “co-presidency” solution was unconstitutional. The vote went ahead on Sunday and young Toronto incumbent Adam Giambrone soundly defeated the federal party establishment’s choice, Elizabeth Weir, leader of the New Brunswick New Democrats.

A campaign finance reform resolution introduced by NDProgress, a reform tendency within the party, and the New Politics Initiative (NPI), was adopted after convention by the party’s Federal Council, with modifications introduced by the Canadian Labour Congress. The policy calls on the NDP to actively advocate in Parliament and elsewhere for campaign finance reform, and when in government, to ban corporate and union donations, and to institute public financing of parties, caps on donations, strict controls on third party spending, and strict transparency requirements.

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Layton, like Comartin and even McDonough, has adopted some of the rhetoric of the NPI about the need for the party to work with the social movements. It was picked up in the media as Layton’s signature message; it’s a message that appeals to many of the new members Layton has signed up, but the party faithful who gathered at the Toronto convention responded coldly to the message. For too many at convention, it seemed that “working with the social movements” meant getting social movement activists to join the party.

At a meeting of the New Politics Initiative on Sunday morning, Judy Rebick suggested by phone from the World Social Forum in Brazil that it would be a mistake if the party thought, now that Layton has won, that it should only sign up as many social movement people into the party as possible. The suggestion provoked loud guffaws of indignation from a table of Ontario party establishment figures.

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Leadership candidates and party members still speak of social democracy as if the failures of social democracy in Europe and Canada had never taken place; as if the lessons of the broad left’s failures in government, from Ontario to the Soviet Union, have not been processed: taking state power, whether by election or insurrection, is not enough to have the power to govern from the left: a leftist party must have the power of autonomous social movements behind it, if it is to achieve lasting social change. Layton is making a good start on this road by devoting his attention to helping build the anti-war protests coming up on February 15. A strong anti-war movement will, in turn, help build the party.

But successfully pursuing these politics in the long run requires a deliberate, slow, strategic approach to accumulating experience, capacity and vision, like the twenty-year approach taken by the Workers’ Party in Brazil. Changing the political culture of the party requires changing more than the leader.

How difficult this could be became clear when Josh Matlow, coordinator of the Canadian Peace Alliance and a key organizer of the national anti-war demonstrations on January 18, was invited to speak to the convention. At 8 a.m. Saturday, just before he was to speak, he was told by convention organizers that he was uninvited due to time constraints. But at convention itself, he was told that the real reason for the party executive’s decision was that Matlow had run as a Liberal candidate against Ernie Eves. Ironically, Matlow had been planning to shower praise on the NDP for its outspoken position against the war.

Already the signs are that the NDP may fixate on the short-term goal of success in the next election, without a long-term plan for government. There is tremendous momentum in this cycle, and there will be tremendous pressure on Layton to go along with it. Here’s hoping Layton resists.