Liberals at a crossroads

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/04/2016 (3484 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BRANDON — I’ve been there, many times. I have worked on several political campaigns that were unsuccessful, including one in which my name was on the ballot.

There were campaigns we hoped we would win but didn’t, and there were campaigns where we never stood a chance. The worst, however, were campaigns where we had a legitimate chance of victory but events beyond our control took the win away from us.

Those ones really hurt. The candidate and campaign team devoted their time, energy and money — and allowed themselves to sincerely believe they could win — only to lose because something bad happened elsewhere.

If you work on enough campaigns, you will inevitably experience similar dejection. In the recent federal election, for example, many NDP candidates (including several incumbent MPs) lost seats because of the dismal performance by NDP Leader Tom Mulcair throughout the campaign. The local candidates were blameless. Yet, they paid the price for Mulcair’s mistakes.

That brings us to the plight of the Manitoba Liberal Party and its candidates. It’s too soon to characterize the party’s campaign as an unmitigated disaster but it is on an accelerating trajectory toward that destination.

The Liberal platform is a hodgepodge of random commitments lacking a consistent theme and, in many cases, appearing to have not been subject to rigorous internal scrutiny before being released to the public. The party’s economic plan, released by leader Rana Bokhari earlier this week, is one example.

The scheme promised to balance the provincial budget within five or six years based on economic growth — and to do so without the need for tax increases. It sounded too good to be true, and it was. It didn’t include the cost of the Liberals’ other campaign promises totaling, at least, $629 million over the next five years, nor increased debt-service costs that come with running annual deficits.

The New Democrats condemned the plan as “either not thought through or insincere.” The Progressive Conservatives accused the Liberals of proposing “more of the same poor fiscal mismanagement Manitobans have gotten under the NDP.” Editorials in the Free Press and Brandon Sun were blunter, dismissing the Grit plan as “gibberish.”

Bokhari’s ham-handed rollout of the Liberal economic agenda is just the latest in a string of missteps by the rookie campaigner. She has been unable to either fully explain or put a price tag on a number of her commitments.

In several of her public appearances over the past month, she has exhibited a troubling lack of knowledge regarding important issues facing the province. Her inability to attract candidates for all 57 ridings is yet another embarrassment.

Her disappointing performance to date points to the risk inherent in a Liberal campaign strategy that has focused too much on the leader and very little on the party’s slate of candidates. Party strategists have put all their eggs in the Bokhari basket, only to discover she isn’t the capable and credible campaigner they thought she would be.

She has become a drag on the Liberal campaign (as many predicted would occur) and that jeopardizes the ability of otherwise viable candidates to win their respective ridings.

The Liberals find themselves at a campaign crossroads: They can stick with Bokhari as the campaign focal point, betting her performance over the next two weeks will dramatically improve with better preparation, or they can significantly reduce the emphasis on the leader and elevate the profile of those candidates with realistic chances of victory.

Each option comes with an element of risk. Keeping the campaign focus on Bokhari could cost the Liberals wins at the riding level but a sudden shift of focus to viable candidates would be instantly interpreted as an embarrassing concession by party strategists that she has become a liability.

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The Liberals can’t have it both ways. They can either protect a leader who might perform better in the next election or protect those candidates who could win now.

It is a difficult choice but, with voters going to the polls April 19, it must be made quickly.

Deveryn Ross is a political commentator living in Brandon.

deverynrossletters@gmail.com

Twitter: @deverynross