Seriously.
A job you want, mind you, not one you have been forced to take a gunpoint.
Apparently, Frank Coleman has finally figured out when he wants to start being Premier.
He has settled on July.
Sort of.
“After the convention, within a very, very short span of time, I would like to be sworn in as premier,” Coleman told the Telegram’s James McLeod. “I don’t want to wait a whole lot of time after the convention, and I don’t think that the people of the province would want me to wait either.”
Coleman wasn’t debunking earlier reports about when he might take over, even though that’s what the Telegram story claims. Coleman was finally getting around to making it a bit more clear as to when he might be roughly thinking about starting.
You know.
Give or take a bit.
You may recall that VOCM based its story on what Tom Marshall told the entire province on Open Line one morning last week. Marshall said he needed Frank to tell him when he might take over. CBC had a different take on things, with Frank wanting to take over some time in July after the Conservative Party convention.
If you read again the quote the Telly gave us, you’ll see that even a week after Frank and Tom first harrumphed about when possibly Tom might go and let Frank run the place, Frank is still saying roughly what the pair have been saying all along.
“After the convention.” Okay. We know when that is.
“Within a very, very short span of time.” Minutes? Days? Weeks? Not clear.
“I would like to be sworn in.” Would like to be, but not definite. Frank would like that but it might not be possible so really we still aren’t certain.
Frank allowed that the reason for the uncertainty is that Frank and Tom haven’t been able to sort out their busy schedules to have a face-to-face. Talked on the phone a few times, as Frank told the Telly, but not face to face.
A hectic time. The pair have been very busy travelling apparently. Tom’s been off to Ottawa and Frank has been “all the way down the Port au Port Peninsula.”
Seriously?
Like a guy living in Corner Brook would find that such an amazing thing, to all the way down to Port au Port and environs. It’s like a townie saying he’d managed to get to Bay Roberts and was so consumed with the physical effort involved, by implication, that he was totally unable to do anything else.
You likely have figured out by now that there actually isn’t any news in this Telegram story. That’s not McLeod’s fault. The story itself comes out of the fact that Frank finally got around to returning a call McLeod made last week to follow on with the same issue the other news media have been chasing since Bill Barry chucked it in: when does Frank plan to start work as Premier now that there’s no question that Frank is the Conservative choice?
The answer remains this week what it was last week: Frank and Tom are no further ahead in sorting out the hand-over business. Lots of people have pointed out how foolish this is. Even two different pairs of Conservatives last week - one on the St. John’s Morning Show and another on On Point - pointed out that Frank has an enormous problem with the communications thing.
The best that Frank could offer to McLeod is the acknowledgement that “…both he [Tom Marshall] and I recognize that we need to be communicating a bit more now that the race, as such, is over.”
This is not rocket science, but apparently both Frank and his advisors have had a hard time figuring it out.
For the record, Shawn Skinner meant well but he got it wrong. He told the On Point crowd last weekend that Frank needed to define himself.
"So now he needs to define himself. He needs to start to let people know who he is, what he has been, where he is going with policy, and what his vision for the province is."Frank’s been defining himself since the campaign started. He’s been telling everyone who he is and what his vision is. The definition might not be flattering to him him, but Frank Coleman has been telling everyone in the province all about himself for months.
-srbp-