Stephen Harper and the Sad State of the Con Leadership Race

It's still his party. He created it in his own image. Those who survived the Great Humiliation are still trying to keep his monstrous legacy alive. 

But Stephen Harper these days is a shrunken version of the monstrous leader he once was, and has said nothing about the Con leadership race, even as it descends into farce.

Until yesterday that is, when his faithful fluffer John Ibbitson decided to ask his readers what Harper would think of the race, and its ghastly candidates.



And concluded that he would NOT be impressed, and that the Cons should follow the stern criteria of their late lamented Great Leader. 

The Conservative Party is still Mr. Harper’s party. He initiated the union of the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties back in 2003. He has been its only permanent leader. The 100,000 or so members of the party mostly joined on his watch. In the main, their values are his values. If Stephen Harper would never vote for a candidate, that candidate shouldn’t be running.

Even if that means eliminating or culling their best known candidates like Kellie Leitch, Kevin O'Leary, Lisa Raitt, and Chris Alexander.

For these are the candidates Ibbitson thinks Great Leader would favour:

A personal guess (and that’s all it is) is that Mr. Harper’s ballot would look something like: 1. Erin O’Toole, 2. Andrew Scheer, 3. Maxime Bernier. This, however, could change in the months ahead.

Which elicited this brief comment from Harper...


And this absurd conclusion from Ibbitson:

Mr. Harper would sigh as he filled that ballot out; none of these candidates appears conspicuously able to challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

But then he would remember, with a grim smile, how contemptuously the critics dismissed his prospects. He knows how much election campaigns matter.

Who can't seem to accept that Harper was not the political genius he though he was. Or that he ran the worst and dirtiest campaign in modern Canadian history.

Or even accept that the leadership race is now a Con clown show, where a candidate Ibbitson/Harper would cull is the new star of the circus.

And according to this latest poll, the choice of the people.  



If the federal Conservatives want a shot at regaining power in 2019, their best bet would be with Kevin O’Leary as leader, a recent Ipsos poll results suggest. “Head-to-head, it’s competitive between [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and O’Leary,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, which conducted the poll on behalf of Global News.

A man so popular apparently even some NDP supporters would vote for him.

Though the vast majority of decided voters indicated they’d vote their party regardless of who’s leading the Conservatives, more than two in 10 NDP voters appeared ready to jump ship to the Conservatives if O’Leary was leader.

But thanks to his late entry in the race, has been reduced to begging for money...



And if he doesn't get it, he's out. Again.



But still Lisa Raitt is firing a cannon or a pea shooter in his general direction...



While her own campaign goes nowhere.

And although the poll is only of decided voters, not Con supporters, it suggests that Kellie Leitch's ugly campaign also isn't doing as well as she had fervently hoped.

And is now at the stage where Canadians have started laughing at her.

As 22 Minutes does here by mocking her appalling performance at the French debate....



And here's the punchline.

Rona Ambrose says the "fun is over."   



Some fun, some leadership race.

Stephen Harper was no political genius.

And he left them the party they deserve....