It’s no surprise that this Toronto Star pundit would play up the idea of Stephen Harper having a good year. Mainly because, even with this detainees issue, it’s perfectly true.

What is a bit of a surprise, though, is her suggesting that Liberals should be smiling at Harper’s year:

They should be inspired by it as there are two seminal lessons in the Conservative comeback that should provide them with solace.

The first is that there are actually other potentially more effective ways to reverse a party’s fortunes than a leadership change.

The second is that, in politics as in life in general, what does not kill you stands to make you stronger.

There are, however, a couple of problems in treating the Harper year as “seminal lessons.”

The first is that the idea assumes that Michael Ignatieff has the same political skills — and the same level of luck — as Harper. Even if we give Iffy the benefit of the doubt on the former, we know it’s a fact that he’s not going to have the latter.

The second is that I don’t know of any big-L Liberals, politician or otherwise, who are willing to explore the depths of political disaster in order to find out which level doesn’t actually kill them. It always seems that, just as they think they’ve finally hit bottom, the floor gives way again and the Libranos find themselves screaming out curses against the Harper government as the abyss of obscurity beckons them further.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 20:01 and is filed under Harping, Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.