Policy Stagnation #nlpoli

The provincial government has been on its current course since about 2007.  

There were three elements to the Conservatives agenda under Danny Williams.  They changed somewhat over time but these are the elements that dominated from 2003 to 2015.

Above all else, Williams’ goal was to build the Lower Churchill.  That was to be his one, lasting accomplishment.  Williams would build what no one else had been able to build.  While it was rationalised as a provincial project with lasting significance, the way it finally rolled out confirmed the extent to which the Lower Churchill was intensely personal.

To build the Lower Churchill, Williams would turn Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro into an energy corporation to rival Hydro-Quebec. And to help fund it, Williams would acquire so-called equity stakes in offshore projects.

Fernando 2: Liberals start Tory-style poll goosing #nlpoli

It's August and Corporate Research Associates is in the field.

On Tuesday, Ed Joyce told the people of Holyrood, Isles aux Morts, and Jackson's Arm that they would each be getting new fire trucks.

No, Ed didn't deliver a new fire truck to each community.  He held a news conference to announce that the three communities fire trucks were on order.

Hmmm.

Why would anyone hold a big announcement to say that government had put money aside for a new fire truck for three towns?

Go back and read that first sentence again.

Yes folks.  The Liberals - tanking in the polls - are going to try and goose that CRA poll with some happy news.

Flying the checklist - Government's comms problem Part II #nlpoli

The Liberals under Dwight Ball have had a steady run of problems with managing issues, policies, and positions.  The current mess they face with the 2016 budget is really nothing more than a very big version of the problems they have had continuously for the past 18 months.

Last year, some Liberals thought they had solved the problems by changing around some people who had the word "communication" in their job title. Nothing changed. That confirms that the problem isn't at the level of the people they changed around. The problem is higher up the decision-making chain and has much more to do with how the Liberals look at the world than it is with how a particular staffer does a job.

That was the point in Tuesday's post.  Today, we are going to look at another aspect of the Liberal problem, namely the organisation they have taken over in government.

Government by Committee #nlpoli

Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador (2015) – Part 5

In the fifth and final  instalment in this series on politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, SRBP looks at the latest move in continuing efforts by politicians in the province to make the House of Assembly irrelevant.
_____________________________________________

If you want to understand politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, look no further than Bill 42.  That’s the plan to cut eight seats from the House of Assembly before the next election.

Don’t look at the reasons the politicians offered for the cuts. Just look at who did it, what they did, and how they did it. After all, actions speak a lot louder than words.

10 years later #nlpoli

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the first Sir Robert Bond Papers post.

In July 2004,  I wrote and released a paper that tried to “examine offshore oil revenues and the Atlantic Accord in light of what the Accord actually provides.It was an attempt to evaluate the provincial government's proposal based on what had been made public to that point.”

Which is to be master?  was supposed to be the first of a series of papers on different public policy issues.  Each would have a different author.  They would appear from time to time in order to foster “public discussion of issues affecting Newfoundland and Labrador.”  The title of the series was going to be The Sir Robert Bond Papers.

August is polling month #nlpoli

The provincial government headquarters offices in St. John’s will be closed on Wednesday for the annual St. John’s regatta.

There won’t be any news releases most likely. 

But so far,  there have been three working days in August,  the same month when Corporate research Associates will be in the field,  and that’s been plenty of time for government’s publicity machine to get to work on its regular poll-goosing agenda

One poll to rule them all… #nlpoli

The way things go in Newfoundland and Labrador, you can sometimes think that some things only go on here. 

Not so. 

Take a short trip, if you can spare a second,  to Manitoba and the riding of Brandon-Souris.  The editor of the Brandon Sun published an e-mail last week that went from a federal Conservative political staffer out to thousands of people on a series of distribution lists.

August is Money Month #nlpoli

August is polling month for Corporate Research Associates.

In the first 15 days of the month,  the provincial government announcement machinery has been running in overdrive.  Realistically, though, there have only been 10 working days if you pluck out weekends and Regatta Day,when the provincial government head office in St. John’s shuts down.

The Transformation #nlpoli

Provincial Conservatives in Newfoundland and Labrador have a political philosophy that is equal parts Machiavelli,  Kafka, and the Three Stooges.

For the first few years they seemed to be constantly plotting and manoevring, always one step ahead of their opponents at home and abroad. 

Those days are gone, now, replaced by a surreal landscape of bizarre shapes and hideous shadows.

The Conservatives have already admitted to their continuing financial mismanagement of the province.  They admitted in 2009 that what they spend of the public’s money every year is unsustainable. They continue to spend like that even though the public cannot afford it.

Yet these same profligates attack their political enemies with the accusations that the opponents are financially irresponsible.  These same bankrupts defend recent cuts to education by pointing to their previous spending which they have admitted is unaffordable and which is the reason for the cuts.  They censor public documents and at one and the same time, crown themselves most open government the province has ever seen.

This heady mixture now comes to slapstick comedy, courtesy of Trevor Taylor.

Influence and Manipulation #nlpoli

Public opinion changes.

Individuals don’t hold exactly the same attitudes about things throughout their entire lives.

That’s true of how the typical man or woman feels about clothing styles, cars, movies, books, politics, or just about anything else.

Not surprisingly in a society like ours, there are people who want to try and change opinions and attitudes.  They want to persuade people to buy a product, support a political decision or stop doing something like smoking.

Also not surprisingly, we have some basic ideas about how people should do that.

A Record of Manipulation #nlpoli

With a tip of the hat to Gerry Rogers and Andrew Parsons, here are some posts from the SRBP archive that all bear on the current political mess in which the provincial Conservatives find themselves.

“Playing the Numbers”  (August 2006) One element of the program involves aggressively pushing out their own message, especially when their pollster is in the field.   The first of the original three-part series that described the Conservative media strategy.  There’s a lot more to it than just online polls. Follow the links for the other two.

Freedom from Information  (Various)  Bill 29 was just the latest in a long string of efforts by the Conservatives to restrict what the public knows.  Controlling information is another key element of the government program.

“Mark Griffin:  traitor”  (February 2009)  A third element of the program involved efforts to suppress dissent.  Mark Griffin was an especially glaring example. There have been lots of others, reported and presumably unreported.  Write a letter? Get a call. 

“Everything else is advertising”  (December 2009) News is everything they want to keep you from seeing.  There’s no story here.

“Deep Throat” (February 2010) Someone inside the provincial Conservative crew leaked the messages about poll goosing. Earlier, someone (else?) dropped a quarter and ratted Danny’s secret heart surgery out to NTV.

“The Screaming of the Banshees”  (February 2010)  NTV broke the story.  The Conservatives mount an organized attack on CBC.  Some people still think that the who horde of people saying exactly the same thing arose spontaneously.  Sure it did.

“Planted Calls and Personal Threats Against Talk Show Host Revealed”  (August 2010)  Randy Simms, interviewed by Geoff Meeker, included a text-book definition of a planted caller.

“Enough of the Political Day-Care” (March 2012) As soon as you read it, you will remember the episode.  What might leap out more for someone of you now than before is the idea that calling Open Line was a threat that struck fear into Tory hearts.

-srbp-

So why did they lie? #nlpoli

CBC’s David Cochrane contacted the public works department*  Premier’s Office and asked about rumours he’d heard of renovations to the Premier’s Office.

As Cochrane reported on Twitter, the public works department Premier’s Office told him that there were no renovations currently happening.

Not exactly true, as it turned out.

Who knows the mind of a squid? #nlpoli

[Almost Immediate Update at the bottom]

Why do they do it?

People keep asking why the provincial Conservatives spend so much time and tons of public money goosing the VOCM question of the day in the way that supports whatever the Tories are supporting at the moment.

It is a mystery, gentle readers.

It is inscrutable.

Like the ways of the Lord, it passeth all understanding by those of us who have not touched the hem of Hisself’s garment or who don’t hang around churches chowing down on breakfast, lunch or dinner, like current poll goosing ring-master Paul Lane apparently does.

High-Value Delivery #nlpoli

Two cabinet ministers trekked up the Southern Shore on Wednesday to hand over a cheque for some government cash to a local group of seniors.

Of course, they dragged their political staff with them.

The value of the cheque was $2,000.

Gander at the goosing #nlpoli

Apparently, your humble e-scribbler got on Steve Kent’s nerves.

The Conservative politician and his friends have been bombarding Twitter and Open Line shows since the middle of July will all sorts of their old poll-goosing tactics.  So yours truly has been re-tweeting some of the little comments with an added remark like “Gee, you’d swear a poll was coming.”

Small stuff.

But apparently enough to go right up Kent’s nose in a bad way.

A sign of the problem #nlpoli

One of the reasons why the provincial Conservatives are in political trouble is that their communications are frigged up.

For those who are wondering, that is the relatively polite version of the technical term for it in the communications business.  Think of it like the B-52, one of the largest airplanes ever to fly.  The US Air Force used to say that the crews called it the BUFF:  big, ugly, fat fella.  Well, they didn't actually use the word "fella".  That's just the word the Air Force used so that prissy people wouldn't complain about hearing the word f**ker coming from someone in a light blue uniform.  For others, of another inclination, it's akin to why hippies used to refer to police as "pigs".

Anyway,  James McLeod has a thoughtful piece in his periodic blog over at the Telegram about something he and his colleagues in the Press Gallery have been having with government ministers for the past few months:  they won't talk about good news.

Basically it boils down to this:  ministers won't do media interviews until a bill hits second reading in the House.  Lately this has meant that the opposition and others are talking away about government initiatives days before the minister shows up for an obligatory, pro forma dog and pony show.

It can be a matter of days or weeks after it's been tabled before a piece of legislation makes it to the floor of the House of Assembly for second reading.
This interval is the crux of what we're talking about here today.

McLeod wanted an explanation so he went to Jerome Kennedy, the minister who is responsible for wrangling his team in the House.  Kennedy's response was that this was a time honoured practice going back before 2003.  The idea is that to talk about the bill before it was debated in the House would be an insult to the members of the House.

Well, Kennedy may think that's what is going on.  After all, that explanation is similar to what happens in court.

The truth is something far different. Your humble e-scribbler spent seven years dealing with the legislature in the early 1990s.  If that sort of thing was happening back then, your humble e-scribbler is drawing a complete blank in his old brain box about it.  You see, back in those days, sessions of the House lasted a long longer than they do these days.  Members got lots of time to prepare for debate.  They got the text of the bills well in advance and lots of people talked about one bill or another long before it got to the floor of the legislature.  Wide public debate is what everyone wanted, even when the government might have a bit of pain over things like the Lands Act in the early 1990s.

Somewhere along the line, the government party started to shorten up the time a bill got any discussion in the House.  Remember in the House of Assembly patronage scandal that some stuff went through the House in a day or two?  Yeah, well, this is part of the same thing.  What the government party used to do was try and jam the opposition up.  They'd keep a bill close to their chests until the last possible minute.  Then on the day the government decided to call second reading, they'd hold a media briefing in the morning, then have a briefing for the opposition, give them all the wording of the bill and call the thing for debate in the afternoon. 

The current crowd  - Jerome's crew after 2007 - were famous for it.  They took to the anti-democratic practice just like they loved another Tobin era practice called poll goosing.  The result was pure crap, of course.  The opposition got stampeded into going along with the government because they didn't have any information other than what they'd been fed.

If the House became dysfunctional in the process, to use Kathy and Danny's favourite word for it, it's because Kathy and Danny and some of the crowd before them made it that way.

It's also why they introduce big things like the access to information amendments in the last few days of a long session.  They want to limit discussion and get their way before anyone realises what is happening. 

Someone just said "coughexpropriationbillcough". 

Exactly.

So James does a fine job of highlighting a problem the current crowd are having.

And to go with it, there you have a bit more of the story.

The fact the current crowd are frigging themselves up apparently because of their misunderstanding just highlights why they are having basic political problems.

-srbp-

Seven Habits of Spectacularly Ineffective Politicians #nlpoli #cdnpoli

“Run government like a business” is an old line. 

Some people use it as a rallying cry for success and innovation. 

Others think of it as a recipe for disaster.

Regardless of which side of that argument you come down on, you can sometimes find value in applying ideas from one sector to the other. 

Take, for example, a list of seven habits attributed to business leaders who screw up published online at forbes.com recently.  It’s a variation on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People except you learn positive lessons from the negative experiences that illustrate the bad habits. 

Included in the forbes.com column are some warning signs as well.  Those are indicators that while your business leader might not have the full-blown bad habit, he or she is headed in that direction.

And bear in kind:  some of the companies cited in the article were successful for a period of time or appeared to be quite successful. Over the longer term, though, things weren’t quite that good.

So what would happen if you took the seven habits of what forbes.com called unsuccessful business executives and applied them to politicians? Let’s have some fun:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment.

Think of this as the idea that they can do no wrong, that everything they think or say is genius and that they crap brilliance every minute of ever day.

Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail to realize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

The rules only apply to other people.  They don’t apply to us.

They live in a bubble.

Sound familiar?

Of course it does. 

Warning Sign  #1:  A lack of respect

You won’t even need to think too hard to come up with an example of a politician who consistently shows an utter lack of respect – and sometimes outright contempt – for other people and their ideas.

While those other links are to a couple of Danny Williams’ defining characteristics, that lack of respect thing is one Kathy Dunderdale leads in.  She loves to claim that her opponents are stupid or incompetent and usually that’s the sum total of her argument.

Habit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests.

Warning Sign #2: A question of character

House of Assembly spending scandal.

And if you want something creepy, you can always go back to the Old Man’s 2007 claim:

I think I represent in my own heart and soul the hearts and souls of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.

It’s hard to think of a statement in which someone confuses himself with the whole.

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers.

If anyone can think of a time when Danny Williams ever took advice from someone else and acknowledged it publicly, then by all means share the story with the rest of us.  Did he ever take disagreement with his pronouncements well?

If you want a Dunderdale example, consider her approach to Muskrat Falls.  She  and her team of geniuses  have all the answers. So far Dunderdale hasn’t heard a single criticism of the project that makes her doubt the wisdom of ploughing ahead with the project.

And, in any event, all the critics are picking at little things in their predictably partisan way so what would they know?

Warning Sign for #3:  A leader without followers

Habit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them.

Think about the bizarro need to call people who wrote letters to the editor just to sort them out or blast them as traitors.

Let’s not forget the periodic expressions of concern about the handful of people who didn’t love Hisself unconditionally.  In the Straits after the by-election he sniffed about how much he had done for people and yet they didn’t vote for his hand-picked candidate.

The Old Man may not have relentlessly eliminated anyone but the Yes-Men and Yes-Women but he was overly concerned with dissent.

Warning Sign #4:  Executive departures

Think Beth Marshall in Health,  Florence Delaney or the executive level churn in the public service under Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale. 

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image.

Poll goosing.

Public comments about having to spend 50% of his time dealing with counter-spinning negativity.

Micromanaging an access to information request to withhold copies of his public speeches.

Clinical example of this habit.

Warning Sign #5:  Blatant attention-seeking

This Hour Has 22 Minutes in a Hurricane

Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles.

Muskrat Falls.

Warning Sign #6:  Excessive hype

Pick an example.  There are too many to list since 2003.

Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Danny Williams:  the Ultimate One Trick Pony.. 

Prime Ministers.

Oil Companies.

A lawyer from GFW.

Randy Simms.

If Danny Williams wasn’t lacing into someone for something, he just wasn’t having a good day. 

Warning Sign #7:  Constantly referring to what worked in the past

Anybody recall that offshore oil agreement thingy?

- srbp -

CBC torques poll coverage #nlpoli #nlvotes

Think of it as another form of poll goosing.

As an example of how news media can take a piece of information and make a false statement out it, consider CBC’s online version of the story about a poll released Friday by the same company that polls for the provincial government’s energy corporation.

“Liberal support in free fall” screams the headline.

The first sentence is less dramatic:

A public opinion poll released Friday suggests that Newfoundland and Labrador's Liberals have lost even more ground leading into the last half of the Oct. 11 election campaign.

There’s even a graphic that uses the numbers from the news release.  They show a drop of five percentage points in decided Liberal support, according to the poll.

The only problem for CBC is that the headline and the lede are false.

The combined margin of error for this poll and the one before it is more than the five point drop shown in the report numbers in the two polls..  Therefore, the actual numbers for the Liberals fall within a range of 4.5 or 5 points above or below the figures given.

This is why polls with such large margins of error tend to be useless for most meaningful purposes.  And for detecting trends, you’d have to see a huge drop between polls – like more than 10 points -  in order to get something that could conceivably be called a significant change.

What would free fall look like? 

Well, certainly a hell of a lot more than what is shown.  10 points or more would be a likely candidate for such dramatic language, especially over the course of a mere 10 days or so.

It’s also interesting that while CBC mentioned a relationship between MQO and advertising company M5, they didn’t mention that MQO is also Nalcor’s pollster because it is owned by M5. The advertising company is Nalcor’s agency of record.

CBC also said MQO was “affiliated” with M5.  That’s not even close to correct either. 

According to the provincial registry of companies, the same three men are the only directors of M5 (above), MQO (right)and all the companies within the M5 Group.

MQO is owned by M5. 

That’s factually correct.

“Affiliated”? 

That would be misleading bordering on deceptive.

- srbp -

Related:

• cbcnl using Nalcor lobbyist as election commentator
• Taking your brain out of neutral

What you can see at the horse race…

Horse race polls are the heights of political journalism* in some circles despite the fact they tell very little about what is happening in voters’ heads.

But since this is all there is, let’s look at the latest Corporate Research Associates poll and see what it tells us.

The provincial Conservatives are at 40% of respondents down from 44% in May.  The New Democrats are at 18%, up from 15% and the Liberals remain at 16%.  Undecideds are up to 26% from 23% in May.

The Liberals and NDP have swapped places but all of the changes are well within the polls horrendous margin of error of plus or minus 4.9%.

For those unfamiliar with the numbers, what you just got was the CRA numbers adjusted as a percentage of poll respondents, not as the very misleading percentage of decideds that CRA uses.

Let’s try some observations:

• All that Tory poll goosing – unprecedented in volume and timed to match CRA’s polling exactly – was a complete waste of time.
• You can also put the jack boots to any suggestion that the NDP had a Jack Boost and are on their way to replacing the Liberals as the official opposition. The Dipper torque machine will be in hyper drive but this is really nothing to write home about…yet.  The local NDP still have not produced the kinds of polling numbers you’d need to see in order to confirm any switching to the Orange as the leading opposition party.
• The Liberals experienced no change despite having a new leader for the entire polling period and attracting consistent news coverage for a week or so beforehand.  This poll should be a massive wake-up call for them. The only question at this point is whether or not they will hit the snooze button.

Now let’s try something a bit more complicated.

Even if you accept CRA polls, we know that there’s been a fairly steady slide away from the Tories for most of past 18 months.  Since Danny left, the slide stopped, reversed course and carried on downward again. 

We also know that CRA polling seems to pick up about 15 to 20 percentage points for the Tories that doesn’t show up at the polls.  Their Liberal and NDP numbers seem to be spot on or close enough for government work.

So here’s where the fun can start.  Shave 15 to 20 points off the stated Conservative number in the adjusted CRA poll results and you start to see Tory support down around 25% in May and 20% in August.

You can tell the Conservatives are edgy because of the orgy of politicking with public money they’ve all been doing.  Kathy Dunderdale has been campaigning already in areas where the Tories are perceived as being weak, namely the Burin Peninsula and central Newfoundland.  The Tories don’t have a lock on things in several places in the province and they know it.

So just for the heck of it, let’s imagine what might happen if the CRA results we see in August are pretty much what turns out in October.

Here’s one scenario run through an amazing, colossal supercomputing vote-a-tron machine kept hidden at a secret location, and offered here purely for entertainment purposes.

Using these most recent, corrected CRA results, you could still have the Tories forming a comfortable majority of more than 34 seats and as many as 37.  The Liberals would pick up seven or eight and the NDP could win as many as three or four.

Bay of Islands, Humber Valley, Isles of Notre Dame and Torngat Mountains would swing Liberal in that scenario.  The NDP could pick up Burin-Placentia West and Labrador West.

There could be close races in Grand Falls/Windsor-Buchans, Lake Melville, Placentia and St. Mary’s, St. Barbe and St. John’s East.

There’s still a long way to go before polling day and lots can change between now and then.  Voters appear to be ripe for a significant change.  Too bad none of the parties are offering one.

Just remember:  in the scenario we just walked through, the number of people staying home rather than voting would be at a historic high level.  No political party in Newfoundland and Labrador could crow about that.

Horse race polls - as they are normally used -  are no fun.

But if you look beyond the normal, all sorts of amusing things suddenly appear.

- srbp -

Ya gotta chuckle update: CBC’s lede is classic:

The governing Tories are holding a strong lead heading into October's election, while the NDP is challenging the Liberals for second place, a new poll shows.

Gal-o-war is way out in front and Townie Pride is nose and nose with Western Boy for second.

Total crap, of course.

Like this line later on that adds more turds to the total crap offered up front:

The fact that the NDP, not the Liberals, are in second place appears to set the stage for a competition for the Opposition.

That would be true if it wasn’t for the fact that it is false.  The only way such a proposition floats is if having the second biggest number of decided respondents to a CRA poll question actually translates into seats.

It doesn’t, but that obviously isn’t important.  Twenty-four is bigger than 22 so the NDP must be in second and challenging for official opposition status.

To make matters much worse, CBC misrepresents CRA’s quarterly advertising poll as a tracking poll.  It isn’t. Tracking polls are repeated much more frequently than once every three months.  They are averaged over time to give a moving picture of trends.  As that 1998 link to a CNN piece notes, a daily tracker will show fluctuations for specific events on a daily basis.  A weekly tracking poll will wipe out some of those daily blips to show longer trending.

CRA’s poll once every three months, with only three questions and with a margin of error that borders on the laughable tells you very little worthwhile. In 2007, CRA missed the vote result for the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points.

- srbp -

Looking beyond normal

labradore wasted no time in converting the numbers from Friday’s editorial in the Telegram into a chart to show the number of money announcements issued by the provincial government in each week in August for the past four years.

The Telegram editorial uses these numbers to refute Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s claim that:

“There’s nothing going on here now that hasn’t gone on every year since we’ve brought down a budget, no matter who formed the government,..”

She made the comment.  They counted the news releases.  Way more, finds the Telegram, so therefore “liar, liar pants on fire.”

Or words to that effect.

In defence of Kathy Dunderdale, there is nothing that her provincial Conservatives did in August 2011 that is different in kind from anything the provincial Conservatives did in any other one of the four polling months each year since 2004..

The fact that there are more money announcements in 2011 is really much ado about nothing.  Sure the whole thing is so outrageous in August 2011 that the local media couldn’t ignore it any more, but other than that this is just another Tory poll-goosing month.

And the fact this is an election year doesn’t really make the Dunderdale version stand out.  Scroll back through the archives list of these e-scribblers for the summer of 2007.

Summer of Love.  On August 18, your humble e-scribbler note that the Tories seemed to be inventing excuses to issue happy-news releases.  25 additional campsites at a provincial park, for example.

Toward the end of July 2007, you’ll find a post about the spate of announcements comparing July to previous Julys:

Note, however, that cash announcement in the 25 days of July 2007 already done are already at the same level of 2004 and they are double those of 2005 and almost quadruple those of 2006.

The post starts off with a quote from Danny Williams that will look awfully familiar:

Flanked by two Progressive Conservative candidates in Bay Roberts, Premier Danny Williams told reporters on Wednesday that what government has been doing over the past couple of weeks is just government "carrying on business."

What really stands out in the Telegram figures is the big jump in 2010 and the larger jump in 2011. Poll goosing and the pre-election impetus – the Telegram’s point – are just penetrating insights into the stunningly obvious. Something else is going on.

It’s the trending that shows up when you look beyond the polls as most people misinterpret them. In May this year, your humble e-scribbler pointed out that the Tory polling numbers have been slipping pretty significantly.

This chart shows CRA polling as a percentage of actual respondents not of “decideds”.  That second hard point from the right shows the results of last August’s jump in cash announcements.  And the reason for it is the slide the quarter before.

But then look what happened over the next three months before Danny Williams left abruptly.

Big slide.

And in the months since then, the Tories have continued to slide downward.

They were at a point in May where losing a raft of seats in October looked like a very real possibility.  As noted around these parts last May, if the trends continued the Tories would be even weaker in August.  The leader numbers could also continue their downward trend to the point where all three party leaders shared the same distinct lack of interest from voters.

So if you were the incumbent party headed into an election with public support apparently weakening,  you’d pretty much be guaranteed to do the only political thing you know how to do:  take as many spending announcements as you can type up and e-mail them out to try desperately to stop the spiral in the polls.

As far as Kathy Dunderdale and her crowd are concerned this is normal.  For the rest of us, though, you have to look a little beyond the obvious to figure out why their “normal”  is even more “normal” than usual.

- srbp -