Some random thoughts on last night's Leader's Debate (which I had not planned to watch but the Roughrider massacre on the other channel gave me little option):
• Jack Layton must have spent much of his youth being bullied on school playgrounds. That chirpy smile and smart-ass attitude would have been an irresistible target at my school where young thugs ruled at recess and the diminuitive, polysyllabic Dexter had nose rubbed in the dirt on a daily basis. (This explains why Martin Prince is my favourite "Simpsons" character.)
• Gilles Duceppe was the most effective of the speakers. Having nothing to contribute nationally and having only to highlight injustices done to Quebec, he had a safe bastion from which to fire at Martin.
• Stephen Harper was the only one to attack Duceppe for his separatism. The love-fest between Layton and the BQ leader over the magnificence of Quebec's massive daycare program was cloying. Nor did anyone trouble to ask Duceppe why, with daycare so massively subsidized in Quebec, that province leads the nation in the unwillingness of its women to reproduce.
• Paul Martin gamely stuck to the attack-the-Conservatives-exclusively script except for one delicious moment when frustration with the yappy Layton got the better of him. Annoyed with yet another interruption by the mini-Marxist, Martin snapped: "Did your handlers tell you to talk ALL the time?" Layton's punctured amour-propre was priceless -- he recoiled in alarm: he was talking about weapons in space! That is no laughing matter, sir.
• The postmortems conducted by the CBC and CTV could not have been more different. The CBC pronounced Martin the winner, because Harper had not delivered a knock-out blow. CTV boldly declared Harper the winner of the election, perhaps with a majority -- even Gerry Caplan, the NDP strategist, admitted that no mud was sticking to Harper's teflon image.
• Watching the electronic applause meters at the bottom of the screen was fascinating. Two things were clear: anti-Americanism played very well with the audience and Layton inspired an automatic distaste.
Posted by Dexter at June 16, 2004 11:09 AM