Political Staples

Check out this piece from Susan Delacourt.

...with Martin gone and obvious successors exiting the contest daily, the party has a chance to do a more thorough overhaul of the Liberal brand — remaking itself first and then finding the leader best suited to symbolize it afterward. Beyond repackaging, the task for Liberals is to totally rethink what that brand is all about, anyway.

Call me new, but is this not the point of political parties? Have an ideology and/or platfrom and then pick a leader and candidates who best fit them? This follow the leader thing that the Liberals have done has made them the party of one idea - power. Now that they don't have power who wants to lead them?

There is just so much that is good about this column. How about this?

...Blais warns that a core rebranding task is not for the faint-hearted. It starts with the existential question of what's at the heart of the party.

"You can't make it up and pretend. The `good to great' don't make it up. You either have clear values or you don't. It comes from your heritage, from the founder's beliefs, from your successes and failures and what you've learned along the way," Blais says.

A Good to Great reference. Love it. (I just turned into Tarantino there, sorry). If you haven't read Jim Collins' book of that name or his Built to Last you really should. They are excellent books.

I found this part of the column especially intriguing.

...On the child-care issue of the last campaign, which may be a defining one of the new government too, Harper has effectively lifted some of the most hallowed tenets of Trudeau Liberalism — individualism and choice — and claimed them as his own.

Harper sold his $1,200-a-year plan to parents as a citizen-empowering measure: Moms and dads would be free to choose whether they wanted to use the money to send their children to daycare or stay at home to raise them. Liberals, meanwhile, got pushed toward defending the institutional model of daycare, far off on the left, government-knows-best side of the spectrum.

Similarly, Harper managed to raid the Liberals' long-time brand appeal to Quebec, making huge gains and clipping back the separatist strength of the Bloc Québécois. Liberals have been claiming for generations that they are the best alternative to sovereignists. But Conservatives, by electing 10 new MPs from that province, have put the lie to that brand claim, too.

So there's one big task in the rebranding exercise. Do the Liberals have to concede that they no longer have exclusive ownership of the fundamental principles of individualism, choice and federalism? Does that mean just arguing that Liberals would carry those things out better than the Conservatives? Or can the Liberals find a way to reclaim those tenets as their own, through other routes?

It seems that the last remaining part of the Liberal Party is the "Natural Governing Party" part. Stephen Harper is trying to take that one away as well.

This is all like worlds colliding for me. My hobby (politics) meets my profession (sales & marketing). If we could somehow fit physics into the equation I think my head would explode.

And do I need to repeat that I want the Liberals to go through this exercise? I want as many parties as possible with fully coherent platforms to choose from. I am not entirely sure if we have any yet but the closer each parties get the better off our democracy will be.