Don Martin thinks that MP Harper is on the losing side of the SSM debate.
...While Harper insists this is a win-win — he believes he’s on the right side of the issue and has the public with him — the party’s hostility to same-sex marriage remains a political puzzler with little upside potential, in my view. Focus groups have allegedly shown middle-of-the-road voters are convinced the Conservatives are merely the Reform Party with a new coat of paint. A hard campaign against same-sex marriages merely cements the stereotype. And I doubt it’s the election winner Harper believes. It was up for political debate prior to the last election, yet barely registered on the doorstep or on the leader tours during the June campaign. Even if it became The Hot Issue, there’s little proof it would deliver enough of a vote-switching punch to knock out the Liberals in voterich Ontario, and would certainly kill any Tory hopes of winning symbolic seat or two in Quebec.
As I analyzed previously, the Liberals have such a strong lead in "voterich" urban Ontario, this issue is not likely to make a dent for the Conservatives, but:
...the Conservatives are not alone struggling in this political quicksand. While the Tories gather here in Victoria, where they’re already advertising for daffodil pickers, Liberal MPs are hosting their own same-sex summit in stormstomped Frederiction, trying to wallpaper over same-sex divisions in their caucus while deciphering precisely what their jetlagged leader was talking about during his world tour of communications confusion. At least Harper appears forceful by comparison to this Prime Minister, whose same-sex election threat could be characterized as sabre-rattling one day, running for cover the next. That, says Harper, is why Paul Martin is dangerous enough to call a snap election and why his party must shift into a heightened state of election readiness.
“The Prime Minister is becoming unpredictable in terms of his attitudes toward an election. You get the sense he doesn’t really know what he wants to do, so he campaigns in lieu of doing anything,” Harper says. “His substitute
for an agenda is activity. The less he has to do or the less he has to say, the more frantic the activity becomes and the longer his speeches get.” That’s Paul Martin in a nutshell, all right. But Harper surely knows Martin’s going to do a nutshell-defining number on him over same-sex marriages.
The lack of leadership that PM Martin displays on this and other issues may tell a different story.
