Wanted: One Saviour
No experience necessary
Apply: Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador
They are out there again, searching for the a saviour who will - single-handedly and by sheer force of his magical personality - lead them back to the corridors of power just as Joe S did long, long ago.
In another world, Danny Williams would have been the Liberal Jesus-de-jour.
Would have been, that is, except his Mom wouldn’t let him.
So instead, Danny transformed the provincial Conservatives into a crowd of drooling arse-lickers the likes of which the province hasn’t seen since the 1960s.
Inside the party, Williams surrounded himself with a bunch of people who, when they were not tugging forelocks, apparently believed the Danny-love they felt as they looked out Mordor’s windows would one day be Darin-love or Dunder-love or [insert-name-of-generic-Tory-here]-love. They are getting a rude shock.
The Liberals flocked to his nether regions, too, lips primed for fish kisses just as their fathers did and their fathers before them. Decades of conditioning is hard thing to break.
You’ll still hear them on the open line shows, pining for Danny’s posterior. I am a Liberal, said one fellow on Thursday’s call-in show, but I backed Danny and I’d do it again. Lots did. Like Kevin Aylward, for example, and the people who are behind Aylward’s recent sojourn as fill-in Liberal leader.
One of the perennial saviour-wannabes of recent times - Dean MacDonald - popped up this week delivering a speech on leadership and vision to the members of the Conception Bay Area Chamber of Commerce.
The story made it to the front page of the Telegram on Thursday, right up at the top above everything else.
On cue, both NTV and CBC obliged the saviour-in-waiting with fawning, gushing interviews about his intentions, vis-a-vis the salvation thing.
And Dean, coquettishly protesting that he did not wish to be coy, was coy.
At least one of the interviewers asked about Danny and well, like he’s a Tory and like Dean’s a Liberal, so like what’s up with that?
What’s up with that was obvious from Dean’s speech and from his comments during the interviews.
Dean lambasted Kathy Dunderdale for all the things he either praised Danny for or ignored when Danny did them. Unsustainable public spending? That was Danny’s stock in trade. Dean loved Muskrat Falls and then talked about the need for everyone to put politics to one side and get down to the political job of negotiating business deals.
Sound familiar?
It should.
Dean MacDonald is fond of saying things that are absolutely correct. He did it a couple of years ago when he told a bunch of young Liberals that in politics you needed to distinguish yourself from the Other Guys.
And just as he says things that are correct, Dean likes to stand up for exactly the opposite of what he advocates. In Gander in 2009, Dean proceeded to explain - as he did in his interviews on Thursday - exactly how he supports the same political ideas and piss-poor management that got the province into the mess it’s in.
No change.
Exactly the same.
And therein lies the problem.
The province needs real change.
Dean MacDonald is just more of the same.
Dean would be so much more of the same, in fact that it is like something out of a Brian Tobin speech:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- srbp -