Site Meter .comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Cameron's House of Fun

Fatherhood, politics, education, random thoughts (heavy on the random thoughts) and stuff (always stuff).

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Post Debate Thoughts

A few weeks ago a nice man called me from one of the big polling firms here in Quebec. He wanted to talk to me about the Quebec election and about the three main leaders. During this interview I felt something close to horrible despair. I hate Charest, thing Dumont is a flip flopping, pseudo- libertarian who can't decide if he's a federalist or not but is sure he hates cities. Boisclair remained a too slick by half cypher who I was pretty sure I didn't like at all.

This changed tonight.

I've watched a lot of leadership debates. Provincial, Federal, internal Party, US Presidential, US primary.. lots and lots.

Never, not once in my life, have I ever seen a person so horribly spanked, so horribly humiliated and sent home to his mommy as Mario Dumont was tonight.

At some points it was so bad that you could almost feel bad for him.

Almost.

Between the insano answers that no one outside his head could possibly understand, the outright breaking of the debate rules, the inability to answer questions (as opposed to Charest's slick refusal), the randomness (PRISONS! BRIDGES THAT FELL DOWN! LOOK OVER THERE! A REFERENDUM!) it was just awful.

At one point when he was prattling the cameras caught Boisclair shooting Charest a look like "Can you believe this idiot?". Several times both Charest and Boisclair laughed in his face. He seemed weak on figures, horrible on ideas (getting rid of the school boards and letting cities run the schools? ARE. YOU. FUCKING. HIGH? The City of Montreal can't even collect my snow without almost crushing my house, I'm going to trust them with my son?)

During the whole debate he looked like a kid who'd been promoted to the adult dinner table because Uncle Bob was off having a furtive smoke. Any minute now Bob will be back and little Mario will have to go back to defending himself from cousin Denis and his flying peas.

Radio-Canada just had their talking heads/columnists on: 1 neutral, 1 Boisclair won and 1 Boisclair lost.

Basically, if we're looking at long term strategy here, Charest had to not fuck up. Mission Accomplished. Dumont had to consolidate his voters. WHOOPS! The people he's pealed off of the PQ and the LPQ are suddenly thinking "umm...ehm...NO!" and fleeing. Boisclair had to go on the offensive. Did he get too aggressive? Perhaps at times (though not to the extent that Bernie St-Laurant would have you belive).

So, on the night, I call it a Boisclair win, with a strong (close) second by Charest with little Mario getting spanked so bad that he'll eat standing up for the rest of the campaign.

What does it all mean for the overall campaign? My guess is not a ton for who will win (the Liberals) but quite a lot for the seat count. My guess is that a 5 point drop is not at all out of the question for the ADQ...if they don't pull something out of their ass pretty damn quick I'm not sure they're going to make official party status. This will be tricky for them since they apparently have zero advertising budget for TV adverts.

Labels: , ,

1 Comments:

At 11:19 p.m., Blogger Adrian said...

I agree with you. Dumont really lost some votes tonight.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home