After the author said this:

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The Green party, which barely existed in 1990, scored huge popular-support gains pushing the environment, an issue NDP supporters thought their party owned.

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...and this...

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Party members should be horrified that the NDP finished behind the Greens in any ridings at all, and ashamed of the series of 2,000-to- 3,000-vote finishes its candidates endured across Ontario. This is a party in crisis, no longer the default choice of those who want to protest or even change things. Voters aren't rejecting NDP ideas of public services and defending the environment, they're rejecting the NDP.

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Originally posted by Cameron W:
was this already in another thread?

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Yeah, but its closed (and stupid). A good example of a thread that could have gone somewhere useful, but didn't.

[ 20 October 2007: Message edited by: scott ]

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Originally posted by scott:

Yeah, but its closed (and stupid). A good example of a thread that could have gone somewhere useful, but didn't.

[ 20 October 2007: Message edited by: scott ]

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2. Stop whining and sell a vision of hope. Watch Mr. Smith Goes To Washington 100 times. People love dreams and dreamers. Offer more sizzle and less grimy ground beef.

3. Don't accept "career candidates," lovable losers who keep running in no-chance ridings. Try recruiting exciting new faces who might actually break through instead of repeating past defeats.

4. Create think tanks of progressives – no, screw that, throw loud parties for appropriate activists – and get like-minded people who haven't been around the party for years to give their take on why they've lost interest and how the party can again be a choice.

6. Never use the term "working families" again. Who isn't for working families? And using the word "working" so front-and-centre and so often just feels like, you know, work.

7. Remember the party's agrarian roots. Farmers and urbanites in Ontario could come together around preserving agricultural land, creating safe farming practices and providing healthy, local food for cities.

9. Reach out. Spend less time at the Labour Day march at the CNE and more at V Fest on Centre Island next Labour Day weekend. The NDP will find more potential new voters at events like rock fests than it will waging shadow-puppet battles at tired and nostalgic labour movement events.

10. Get the progressive pickle out of your ass and smile when you say that, pardner. Lighten the fuck up and sell some more dreams and less detail-drenched strategy.

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The NDP's campaign – and it's the same situation for the federal party – sounds like you've heard it before. It didn't sell then, so why would it sell now? NDP leaders drone on about the rights of "working families" and invoke other compromise-created, flat phrases to deaden the passion of their potential politics of hope.

Dalton McGuinty looked compassionate, John Tory and Frank De Jong came across as visionary and passionate, while Hampton and his NDP were dull and dreary, the good-for-you medicine nobody wanted to take.

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Dalton McGuinty looked compassionate, John Tory and Frank De Jong came across as visionary and passionate, while Hampton and his NDP were dull and dreary, the good-for-you medicine nobody wanted to take.

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I don't know where this guy was sitting, but aside from actually showing up for the leader's debate and being on the defensive for all of it, Dalton McGuinty was invisible throughout the campaign. McGuilty made a grand total of two public appearances: the "cancer guy" incident and the one where he proved he can't drive a farm tractor!

Dalton "PSYCHO" McGuilty has 22 percent of eligible voter support under him and 100% of power. There are assassinated and deposed Latin American presidents more legitimate than our invisible premier in Ontario. Democracy is dead in Ontario. God help us for the next four years.

[ 20 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Coyote:
I know some babblers don't like the "working families" line, or "ordinary families", but the fact is that on any given person's list of priorities in life "family" scores in the stratosphere. Families really are the backbone of society.

I also like rehabilitating the discussion on "family values", away from the nonsense anti-human crap bilged out by the socons.

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I think this theme is worthy of a thread on its own - and probably more than one. During the last Quebec election, I remember more than one local radio host (I live in Quebec City) saying that of the three party leaders - Charest, Boisclair and Dumont - only Mario Dumont really understood what life was like for people who were trying to raise a family.

And look at the federal scene: Harper wins the 'average family guy' vote pretty much by default - he's the only federal leader who has kids. (eta: okay, Stéphane Dion has a daughter. Memo to Stéphane Dion: more photo ops might not be a bad idea.)

This is definitely not a battlefield in which progressives should yield without a fight.

[ 20 October 2007: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

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he's the only federal leader who has kids.

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Single parents need more help than "families". That's where a lot of the poverty is in this country.

Yea, yea, I know. Single parents are "families" as well. But sometimes I think this talk of "families " is designed precisely to exclude such single parent "families", etc. If people mean "parents of children" then why not just goddam say so? Unless, of course, the intent is to exclude some by using the expression "families" ...

[ 20 October 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]