There have been many books on Newfoundland politics but none that captures all or even a flare of the grim, manic, impulsive, compulsive, erratic, exultant and heart-breaking flavour of the sport.
Newfoundland politics is emphatically not one-dimensional. True, like the politics of other provinces and places, it does, on a democratically periodic basis, concern itself with a collective assessment of the villains and scalawags in office and allows for a contest to refresh the mix. You know these events as elections.
But the real flavour of Newfoundland politics can't be picked up from some postelection scoresheet. It's in the tone and byplay of the campaigns, the anecdotes from elections past, legendary nomination battles - all the great tidal wave of political minutia that has never made it to the headlines outside the province, and not that often within.
One famous election, Joey Smallwood's last as premier, ended up in a near tie: Liberals 20, Conservatives 21, New Labrador Party 1. To add to the tangle, several individual districts were won by extremely narrow margins - the narrowest by one vote. In that district, there was a polling station in a village roughly halfway between Cow Head and Baker's Brook by the name of Sally's Cove. By the morning following this closest of elections, it was learned that all 106 Sally's Cove ballots had been burned. (Legend has it the ballots were used to start a fire. They surely did.) The fate of a whole government hung on incinerated ballots, atoms of ash swirling in the fog-choked winds over the wild coastal shoreline of the Great Northern Peninsula. Democracy cremated. The burning of the Sally's Cove ballots - an incident by turns as ludicrous as a Monty Python sketch and as sinister as a John le Carré fable - left all Newfoundland in suspense as to which party - Joey Smallwood's or the young Frank Moores's - was to rule, while a perplexity of judges and a conundrum of constitutional experts wearied their brains and souls in an attempt to sort out the mess.
All this played to a counterpoint of relentless skulduggery being practised on a number of backbenchers, through bribes, booze and bombast on a scale unknown since the days of Tammany Hall. Picture, if you will, a garage sale of backbenchers, a flea market of the fickle. Some were bought, then rebought. One was bought so often it was impossible, on any given day, to determine who owned him. One loose cannon was put "in storage" in a St. John's hotel room with enough booze to secure him for a few months and keep him away from the lures and guiles of the other side. And one of Frank Moores's successful candidates promptly quit the Conservatives because Mr. Moores wouldn't publicly offer him a cabinet post even before he - Mr. Moores - knew, or could know, he would be premier.
I cannot remember a wilder farce, and nothing I've seen on the mainland - and I've been to British Columbia - compares with it. I remember another close election in which a Liberal candidate won a tight race on the strength of a story about "losing the family rosary beads." That was, alas, ever so long ago, and it is questionable now whether there are many candidates with rosaries to lose, and certainly none with the wit to make a story of the loss.
Of the most recent campaign, that of this week, in which Danny Williams won record approval - an almost frightening popular endorse-
ment - it was so intensely focused that it was most "dry" of those splendid moments and adventures that diversified the many that preceded it.
Mr. Williams has acquired in a very short time superlative campaign skills, and those, in combination with his superbly vocal "standing up for Newfoundland" in various contests with prime ministers and oil companies, have turned him into something of an instant local hero. But it was not just the theme of standing up for the province or his theatrical repertoire that got him the landslide.
There is an undercurrent of deep apprehension about the fate of Newfoundland, over the survival of the main currents of the singular culture produced by a unique and long history. That apprehension emerges, even amidst the current so-called oil boom, from the gradual emptying out of Newfoundland's outports, the spectacular social erosion brought on by the collapse of the historic fishery.
Mr. Williams was seen as the only figure large enough to at least address this apprehension, and it was to the tender hope he could stave off so grim an outcome to Newfoundland history that he owes so much of the endorsement that he received. Newfoundlanders are far from sure that he, or anyone, can really meet this challenge, but they are quietly praying it may be so.
Maybe, in its way, this is yet another story about rosary beads after all.