Charisma and leadership

We are all asking ourselves – ‘Must we watch Canadian democracy be destroyed because Mr. Dion has no Charisma?’ Because this is what it all comes down to. If the leader of the Liberal Party was a charismatic speaker with style who imbued people with a sense of confidence and hope, the Conservatives would have no change and would be lagging badly in this election. But then maybe it does come down to leadership, because a good leader is able to take advantage of his opposition’s inadequacies, And the record of the Conservative Government is so terrible that if the opposition had any kind of leadership, everyone in the country would be talking about their awful scandals and their fundamental attacks on democracy. But no one is talking about those things because the Liberals seem to have no chutzpah. I am not a big fan of Jack Layton but at least he is running some kind of campaign and trying to remind people just how terrible Stephen Harper has been. But then maybe the Liberals don’t really want to win. After all, if Harper just got another minority, then six or seven months from now Harper will have proven just how hopeless he is in taking care of the economy and will have destroyed any chance he had of securing a majority.

But then if we Canadians are looking down the barrel at another Conservative government just because the liberal leader has no charisma, we are surely luckier than the American public who are facing another Republican president simply because the Democratic candidate is an African American. Because make no mistake, if a Democratic candidate had come along with the style, charisma, and background of Obama – and he were white: he would now be so far ahead of McCain that the election would have already been decided.