Today we see a pretty fine example of the old axiom, “those who can’t do… teach”.

A leading pollster says the Liberal Party would be “crazy” not to force an election this spring as Prime Minister Stephen Harper attempts to recover from his decision to suspend Parliament and other unpopular moves.

Thanks for that little bit of perceived wisdom, Mr. Graves.

Oh, have I ever mentioned that other old axiom, “a week is a lifetime in politics”? How about a couple of hours?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would coast to an easy victory – but not necessarily a majority – if a federal election were held today

While the numerical difference between both polling firms’ most recent national numbers is barely a margin-of-error apart, the rest of the story shows what has become a bit of a constance in Canadian politics…

The more worrying prospect for the Liberal leader is the Ipsos poll’s finding that he is considered the third most qualified national leader, trailing not only Stephen Harper, but also NDP leader Jack Layton, in every category of leadership attributes studied.

Simply put, Stephen Harper does better against his real life opponents than the mythical “Perfect Prime Minister” the media prefers to pit him against.

Even with the drop in ballot box support for the Conservatives over the past month, Harper still maintains a comfortable lead over the other federal party leaders. Also of note, Layton (52.2) has momentarily surpassed Ignatieff (40.3) on the index.

Seriously, this isn’t new…

A new poll completed by Nanos Research indicates that Stephen Harper has widened his leadership index score advantage over Michael Ignatieff. Harper leads in all regions except Quebec where Ignatieff fares better than Harper on the Leadership Index.

No, really…

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is soaring as Canadians’ top pick to lead the country, while Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has plunged to third spot behind the NDP’s Jack Layton, a new poll has found.

So, as you are probably now wondering, what’s a Liberal to do about all this?

The answer is equally simple: Pay heed to the cooler heads in the Liberal Party, now surrounding Ignatieff, who are proponents of a long-term strategy.

By waiting Ignatieff gives himself some sort of window to improve his personal numbers; god knows they can’t get much worse. Not to mention giving the Government an opportunity to mess up on an issue that Canadians actually care about and resonates.

In our system, you don’t initiate an election you aren’t mighty damn sure you can win. As things currently stand Ignatieff is as much of a drag on Liberal Party numbers as Harper is a boost to Conservative Party numbers.

Precipitating an election now with antagonist issues like prorogation and treatment of Afghan detainees as your marque policies risks a Dion-like apocalypse at the ballot box.

Now that would be “crazy”.

Despite holding a meeting to try and pretend that they have some higher altruistic motive, on this issue all The Ignatieff Liberals are attempting to do is score some cheap political points on the backs of our troops.

After all, The Ignatieff Liberals have been saying some troubling things about the conduct of our men and women fighting overseas in Afghanistan. Not the kind of things you would be expecting to hear from supposedly ardent supporters of the Canadian Forces.

But I digress.

Given the front page stories in some outlets, you’d think the Obama Administration’s tenure just came to end.

There is little doubt about who’s to blame. The special Senate election was less of a contest between two starkly different candidates – one a telegenic former Cosmo centerfold turned fiscal conservative, the other an all-too-serious but accomplished Hillary-like liberal – than it was a referendum on Mr. Obama’s first year in the White House.

And Mr. Obama lost. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described the President as “surprised and frustrated. Not pleased.”

From here on in, his presidency will reflect it. With another seat in the Senate, the Republicans have all the votes they need to veto almost any piece of Democratic legislation and they vow to do just that. Presidents normally only become lame ducks in their final year of their second term. But given the hyper-partisanship of Mr. Obama’s Washington, that could now change.

Instead of the rock star on whose coattails every Democrat wanted to campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama also risks becoming a liability for his party’s candidates in this fall’s mid-term congressional elections.

All hail the wisdom of the Canadian media elite.

Depending on what side of the aisle one falls, don’t get too excited or too sullen though.

Quite to the contrary, especially if the trend continues through the 2010 midterms, this could be the unspoken fresh start the Obama White House has needed. Even if they didn’t privately want, or publicly admit, it.

Consider the Clinton example.

After losing Congress for the first time in a couple generations to the Republicans, Clinton was free to implement mainstream policies that fit with the DLC mold and the GOP leadership couldn’t object to. And on the issues that dominate the left of the Democratic Party that he failed on, he had a handy scapegoat.

The result? Clinton romped to re-election in 1996 on an 8.5% margin.

That doesn’t mean that Brown’s victory isn’t groundbreaking for the GOP. Or that the DNC’s agenda doesn’t face obvious hurtles with the general public. This observer does, however, think it warrants positing that the Kennedy brand relied more on a cult of personality than anything else; something that the media-at-large, for obvious reasons, couldn’t grasp.

So, as far as the future is concerned, the moral of the story?

A year or so is a couple of generations in politics. The media has an attention span that rivals that of a gnat. And having an opponent like Martha Coakley or, for that matter, Bob Dole and John McCain certainly helps.

It’s how the Obama Administration reacts to Scott Brown and the GOP’s victory in Massachusetts that will ultimately shape history. Not the victory itself.

So here we are at the anniversary of The Coalition’s forming in the Winter of 2008. Quite a time it was for our country.

Only a few weeks after the democratically elected Government of Canada was returned to office by Canadian voters, a troika of opposition parties sought to overturn the results of the 2008 election with only their own financial self-preservation as the true justification.

“CTV is reporting that the per voter public financing scheme is to be cancelled in tomorrow’s update,” he [Mr. Layton] wrote. “I believe that the Liberals could be tempted by our earlier proposition, faced with such a catastrophic proposal. Self-preservation could provoke out-of-the-box thinking. I would like to discuss having you re-open your line of communication with your contact.”

It will, no doubt, go down in the annals of Canadian political history and be taught to our sons and daughters in high school civics classes and university political science lectures for generations to come.

But that isn’t the reason for this post.

The Coalition Threat is what originally turned this interested observer into a active participant in Canadian politics. Since then I’ve been following developments much more closely than I did before. And Michael Ignatieff’s behaviour has left me wanting.

Let’s take a look at the facts.

At the immediate time, when Michael Ignatieff deposed Stéphane Dion and was poised to become Prime Minister, we saw this:

Michael Ignatieff would be PM in a Liberal-led coalition

Newly named Liberal Leader Ignatieff ready to form coalition

‘Many good reasons for a coalition’: Ignatieff

Of course, shortly thereafter public opinion soured to the idea of a Coalition government propped up by the NDP and Bloc Québécois. So Mr. Ignatieff obfuscated again and again trying to pull back from the gambit he was so ready to employ just weeks before.

So much so that it came to the point where was saw this when he was actually pressed on the issue again in the Fall of 2009:

“There are many models” of minority governments, Ignatieff told reporters.

“We have shown a willingness to work with any party in the House to get things done for Canadians,” he said during an interview with Canwest News Service and Global National

In a published interview in Le Devoir earlier this week, Michael Ignatieff once again ruled out another Liberal attempt at crafting a governing coalition with the NDP in the next Parliament. But he also left the door open to other undefined “arrangements.”

The commonality in all of this is clear: Mr. Ignatieff is open to seizing power through any means necessary; as long as it isn’t called a “Coalition”.

His intent remains the exact same as it was in the December of 2008:

Michael Ignatieff wants to be Prime Minister of our country. A country he shunned for the majority of his adult life. And he will do anything required to make that happen purely to satisfy his own ego.

That’s the reason for this post. And the reason a colleague and I put this video together: The Coalition is alive and well beacuse Michael Ignatieff will do anthing to take power.

Mr. Ignatieff is appearing tonight at the “Liberal Tribute Dinner” in Woodbridge, Ont. Not a very appropriate title for a party that has little to pay tribute to these days. Still, the party must go on.

Tonight’s dinner was originally to have taken place Oct. 1. Back in the summer when it was being planned, it was expected that this dinner would be the kick-off to a federal election campaign. Had the universe unfolded as Liberals wanted it to, they would have successfully defeated the minority government on a confidence motion at the end of September.

That strategy backfired as Canadians made it clear – especially in the national opinion polls – that they didn’t want an election any time soon. And the dinner was rescheduled until tonight.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, but Peter Donolo’s first official week as Chief of Staff to Michael Ignatieff is off to what could only be generously described as a “rocky start”:

Did the Ignatieff Liberals really plant one of their own to complain on national television about the shortage of vaccine? … The staffer in question is Mark Sakamoto, formerly a lawyer with the CBC. He is one of Mr. Ignatieff’s senior strategists and part of the so-called Toronto gang who have been with him since 2006.

Now, granted, it would be unrealistic to expect Mr. Donolo to immediately impose discipline on absolutely everyone within a few short days. But Mr. Sakamoto’s indiscretion wasn’t an isolated incident:

Not only are people upset over the CBC piece but also over a note sent by Liberal Party President Alfred Apps late yesterday, comparing the H1N1 controversy to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

And, yes, it is possible for that letter from Mr. Apps to have been in the hopper before Mr. Donolo’s arrival. But, unfortunately, it didn’t end there:

New Conservative slogan–“Pork before Swine” #lpc #cdnpoli #roft

So what we have here is a pattern. Three high-ranking Ignatieff staffers; who all predate Mr. Donolo, having been with Ignatieff since his return from Harvard. With three independent outbursts, all playing politics with the same issue.

Or are they?

This is the type of thing Mr. Donolo was supposedly brought in to put a stop to. At least that is what we were led to believe…

Which raises two important questions:

1. Is the gang that has been around Ignatieff from the beginning essentially declaring Mr. Donolo a lame-duck, flaunting his new found authority and continuing with business as usual? or;
2. Was Mr. Donolo’s installation nothing more than a PR exercise designed to give cover to the same-old smear tactics we’ve come to expect from the Ignatieff Liberals?

I think it’s fair to say that we deserve an answer.

I guess I’m a little late to the party as far as discussing Michael Ignatieff’s new Chief of Staff, Peter Donolo.

It’s been hashed and rehashed several times by now, but this item today caught my eye:

In 2003, Liberals believed the messiah was Paul Martin. In 2005, they believed it was Stéphane Dion. Last year, they turned to Michael Ignatieff.

Now it’s Peter Donolo’s turn to play the role of designated saviour. The Liberals are so eager to get back into power that they keep pinning their hopes on the magic of one person to resuscitate the ailing party.

And therein lies the problem for the Liberal Party of Canada:

Mr. Ignatieff proclaims that Canada is his kind of country and Canadians are his kind of people. His big insight about our national spirit is that Canadians are “a serious people.” But he complains that we really “haven’t taken ourselves seriously enough.” He really has been away too long. What about the good-natured humour and self-effacing modesty that adorns most Canadian achievements? The stellar Canadian virtue is that Canadians don’t take themselves “too seriously,” even when they serve with heroism.

After the apologetics, Mr. Ignatieff begins to sketch his political vision of Canada. What’s new in Mr. Ignatieff’s new vision of liberalism? Not much. His liberalism is in lockstep with the older Trudeau/Chrétien tradition. Mr. Ignatieff envisages an active, robust nation-state armed with rights, money, military clout, environmental plans, and an obsession with “national unity.”

I don’t think there is any question that Peter Donolo is an improvement over Mr. Davey. But it’s still harkening back to the Liberal past; where governments were not won with unparalled policy, strategy and tactics. Those governments were won with a divided opposition; particularly on the right.

Without question, we can expect an improvement in Ignatieff’s performance with Mr. Donolo at the helm. Or at least one should be expected considering the reaction of the Ottawa media to Mr. Donolo’s arrival. However, it will not change the fact that Ignatieff returned to a country he always shunned with nothing much to say except that he wants to be Prime Minister.

As skilled as Mr. Donolo is, it will be hard to change the fact the Ignatieff is essentially an empty vessel. He only represents power and vanity for himself along with a return to Government for the Liberal Party. Canadians saw and rejected this ploy in Ignatieff’s fall election gambit; as countless polls have shown.

And it will be a tough sell for Mr. Donolo to overturn this power-hungry perception for his new employer.

Only time will tell if Mr. Donolo is up to job… or if he is just another false prophet for Liberal electoral fortunes.

Saw the Globe’s story today.

Then I also saw this:

Toronto MP Claims Harper Government Favours Tory Ridings, Smitherman Disagrees

Makes me wonder if the McGuinty Government might eventually get a little upset receiving the collateral damage of Ignatieff and the Federal Liberals’ attempt to boost their sagging polling numbers by attacking the allocation of the Harper Government’s stimulus spending.

It’s not the way I would go about endearing myself to Team McGuinty. How likely are they going to be to go out and knock on doors for you when your trashing their Premier’s judgment at the same time?

With Liberal Premiers in B.C., Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island that’s a lot of seats to be messing with.

And a lot of provincial Liberal ground organizations that aren’t going to be very happy with you.

Your welcome, Canada.

I note with much glee that Joe Volpe survived Ignatieff’s critic shuffle today.