Our Collective Failure

The Following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote a friend on October 15, immediately following the worst Liberal defeat in Canadian History. I was responding to his gloat of our defeat as well as reminding me that we had chosen a "weak" leader from the get go.

My response is below.

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I suppose my only regret is my overestimation of the desire of Canadians to discuss policy. There's been almost no talk of policy since Martin fell and the last 37 days has been of little exception. The last 2 years has turned into nothing but a battle of the alpha males. This is the first time in my memory that an election campaign has been waged with zero talk of health care. It didn't even get by lines in the media.

The grassroots of the party (myself included) has been smacked by this defeat. Our attempt to get a real intellectual into the PMO failed miserably. We now understand why we let the "same old, same old" run the place. All attempts at honesty backfire miserably. (Martin went down over calling an inquiry if you recall)

If you think about the message we sent an entire generation of children last night, it is that ideas and policy count for less than good looks and alpha behaviour. I realized we were in for a blood bath shortly after the election call when forums had more chatter about Dion's English than about a single piece of policy.

Our failure isn't that we had the worst defeat in history. Our failure is that we never forced this to be an election about policy. You know what leadership is. Leaders groom their team to make sure they have a replacement. If Harper were to get hit by a car, where's his team? Harper is a great one man show, but leadership is about more than one man.

Personalities should never outweigh policy. But it did... and that is our collective failure.