Sunday, June 28, 2009 7:39 PM
Hudak's clean slate (sort of)
Adam Radwanski
CalgaryGrit makes a very smart observation about Tim Hudak's victory yesterday: "Hudak pulled off the rare feat of being a front runner who was also the top second choice preference among the supporters of the defeated candidates."
He attributes it largely to a lack of frontrunner resentment when you get away from leadership conventions, which I agree with (and have been on about at great length previously). But it does say something about Hudak that the anybody-but movement was fairly muted; clearly, he's a leader most people in his party can live with.
That's a good start, given what John Tory went through trying to unite his caucus. The question now is how he casts himself before the broader electorate.
All the speculation we've heard recently about Hudak favouring a Mike Harris model of conservatism is totally valid, because that's what he built his campaign around. But since the vast majority of Ontarians haven't been paying attention, he has something resembling a clean slate.
Remember - or don't, if you had better things to do in 1996 than follow the Ontario Liberals' leadership race - that Dalton McGuinty was perceived to be the most conservative of the contenders that year. He won his support largely from small-town Ontario, with a dash of social conservatism appealing to those who didn't want the party in the hands of Gerard Kennedy.
Outside of card-carrying New Democrats, there aren't a whole lot of Ontarians who today view McGuinty as much of a conservative. That's because they only started forming impressions sometime around the 1999 provincial election, or at least leading up to it.
Of course, leadership campaigns can lock new leaders into defining themselves a certain way, if they make binding promises in order to win them. Hudak may have done just that with his promise to scrap the province's human rights tribunal - a transparent attempt to win second-choice votes from Randy Hillier supporters.
Unless he promptly breaks that promise, he may have severely impeded his ability to smoothly transition from a leadership campaign to a general election.
