Dion must stay on

He must, if willing, stay on to fight again.

Tom Flanagan has laid out the Conservative strategy: Force Dion out and make the Liberals have an expensive and divisive leadership campaign. Once a leader is in place, attack him non-stop. Do this to keep the Liberals off balance, disrupt and mis-direct their fund-raising efforts. Do this again and again until the Liberals are bankrupt. This strategy was a key component in calling Tuesday's election. Once the Liberals are gone the Conservatives would only have to deal with the all hat and no cattle NDP lap dogs.

The thing is that the Conservatives have done their worst. They called him "not a leader" for 2 years. By the end of the campaign, when people saw who Dion really was his leadership polling was competitive with Harper's. They can't throw this at him again. That boat has left dock.

There will be other low blows but they will be less effective. Given time Dion would have recovered from the Doofusy sandbagging as well. That is why the conspiracy with the ConTV was set for so late in the campaign.

Other leaders might have performed better than Dion given the cards he had to play with. But I doubt it. He must be given the opportunity to build on his success.

As an anecdote, my wife has told me she thinks that Dion was a mistake due to a lack of charisma. But I noticed that a smile crept up on her while listening to Dion while he was on Cross Country Check-up. I think this is due to his eminent like-ability. This connection to voters is something that takes time to build.Recommend this Post