The Empire Strikes Back
The moral of the story is likely that dynasties do not crumble overnight. The decline of Rome lasted hundreds of years. The Oilers won a cup after dealing Gretzky. The Empire was good for two more movies, even after the Death Star blew up. …
The situation in this election is eerily similar to the 2004 federal campaign, when 2012 Wildrose campaign manager Tom Flanagan — then working for the federal Conservatives – tried to lead an upstart right wing band of misfits to victory against the natural governing party. In both instances, the incumbent dynasties had knifed successful leaders, and had unrealistic expectations for their new leaders. Just as anonymous PC strategists lamented about winning “too many seats” in February, in 2004 Liberal strategists mused about 200 seats for Paul Martin (which in fairness, Martin got – it just took him two elections to do it).
In both instances, the incumbent badly mismanaged a scandal (Adscam for Paul, the “no meet committee” for Redford), and threw caution to the wind by calling an election in the midst of it. In both instances, Flanagan’s great right hope rose in the polls, pulled into the lead, won the debate…and then blew it in the bottom of the 9th. Both times voters stared change in the face, and decided they weren’t ready for it – yet.
We all know how things turned out federally, and therein lies the cautionary tale for all the players in Alberta. The Wildrose Party now has a base of 35% of the Alberta electorate. They have an impressive, albeit inexperienced, leader in Danielle Smith who now has four years to refine her skills and weed out the thornier candidates from her party’s ranks. If Stephen Harper could make the federal Conservatives look “non-scary”, then surely the photogenic and charismatic Smith can pull off the same trick in Alberta.
I’ll say now that I saw those tendencies, too, but where I differed is that I thought that Wildrose had a large enough lead that they’d win a narrow majority anyway.
We’ll see how it goes. Smith looks like a more charismatic version of Harper, but Harper has a ruthless streak that every successful leader needs. His 2004-05 experience made the current PM ruthlessly pragmatic. Maybe Smith has that streak, maybe not. In any event, the next four years will be interesting.
Update: Checking myself — how much of this is hindsight analysis?
No, I wrote it:
About threshold arguments — you can see that Warren Kinsella’s blog is full of them re Danielle Smith, this week.
Will they work? In the long run, no — they didn’t work for Paul Martin, ultimately, against Stephen Harper. But they may work for Redford’s party the way they did for Martin’s — they can stave off defeat for one more election, in a campaign that looked lost a week before E-day.
Okay, I can show that I did see it.
I don’t understand with the 2004 language. Wildrose was embarrassed and rejected. Martin won a tenuous minority in 2004.
What’s not to understand? You can disagree with it (and obviously do), but there’s a pretty clear comparison to be made.
I don’t really agree either. Wildrose could only manage 2 seats in Calgary and was shut out of Edmonton and every other city of significance apart from Medicine Hat. I don’t think that dominating places like Drumheller or Vulcan bodes well for the party.
It looked even more bleak for the Reform/Alliance/Conservatives when they won only one seat in the mostly rural part of west Ottawa. One could have easily dismissed them then. And again when they failed to make major inroads into urban centers – for a while they looked like a rural party, except in Alberta. Then they made inroads into the 905 region, and further into Ottawa, and now are a credible threat in many (if not most) urban ridings across the country.
Josh, the comparison actually stands up pretty well, if you take urban areas into account. After all, the CPC was shut out of the GTA (Whitby & Oshawa aside, if you cast the net that far) in ’04 (and ’06, for that matter). They had a couple of GTA-seats in ’08, followed by a significant breakthrough in ’11. If Danielle Smith learns her lessons, *and* if the PCs don’t learn theirs, she may be able to follow Harper’s path after all.
Well, what you say applies to the CPC’s slow progress in Ontario, but not elsewhere in the country. The CPC continued to win in the same areas in the West and in previously PC-held ridings in the Maritimes and NL. And in Quebec, they were shut out in 2004, and their 10-seat success in 2006 was halved to 5 in 2011. I think it’s quite illusory to think that Wildrose can necessarily form a sufficiently broad coalition to win – improve on 17 seats, yes, but then even the Liberals won 30-odd seats in 1993. If the ALP is further marginalized in the next election, it certainly won’t help Wildrose.
The simple fact is that Alberta is not some bastion of monolithic conservatism that happily embraces firewalls and leaders unwilling to turf candidates who proclaim that homosexuals will burn in hell. Wildrose will have to offer something better than a neo-Socred opposition that indulges in wasteful and transparent vote-buying (re: “Dani bucks”).
While the story of the Wildrose party up until now may mirror that of the federal Conservatives in 2004, could you also not say that it also mirrors that of the ADQ in 2005? The question to ask is whether Ms. Smith will be more like Stephen Harper or more like Mario Dumont.
In 2007, you mean?
Yes, that’s true. Harper had a caucus with some experienced MPs, and some more experienced ones on the way in 2006. Smith, like Dumont, is a one-man (one-woman) show, just now.
Tough question. Unlike Dumont (or Harper!), she has four full years to prepare for the next showdown.
Yes, 2007. I must have been typing faster than I was thinking (or I wasn’t thinking, take your pick).