Once Again, It's All About eMay

Elizabeth May (eMay), has written six page memo for the Green Party summarizing what went well and what went badly for the Greens in the recent election. I'll save you the trouble of hunting it down and reading it (it's remarkably hard to find the original version, rather than the edited version that eMay released on her blog, which if you want you can find here) and summarize it for you. What went well: Elizabeth May. What went badly: everything and everyone else.

Some fantastic (and wince-worthy) quotes:

Sadly the media was stuck in their old story line. Despite polls to the contrary, the media story was that Peter MacKay was unbeatable. This certainly hurt our last stretch messaging.

Uh huh. I couldn't have anything to do with the fact that you were actually running several thousand votes behind?

We accomplished a great deal. In late August, we made history when Blair Wilson became the first Green MP in Canadian history. The announcement of that coup was flawlessly executed and positioned us well for the campaign.

Oh yes, a great coup alright, bringing in a disgraced Liberal to force your way into the leaders' debates and then proceeding to lose his seat in the general election.

In relative terms, we did better than any other party.

HAH! Two other parties gained seats, four other parties elected their respective leaders, every other party finished in first place in at least one province or territory in terms of popular vote.

There are many lessons to learn, but top of my list was that our vision and aspirations were not matched by a machine on the ground to deliver the vote.

So, its the fault of your volunteers? Classy eMay.

... the media in Canada was not ready for a message for change. Our national media was working from an old script. Ironically, the media agenda and partisan bias was more fixed in Canada than in the U.S..

Media bias was clearly a major factor in this election. By this, I mean more than the usual media bias against the Green Party. There is no question that our policies were either ignored or misrepresented. Our policy announcements were often completely ignored. If not for a telegenic whistle stop tour, I do not think we would have had any major coverage once the "debate over the debates" was resolved. The times we did the more traditional major photo op media event with a big policy announcement attached, we received nearly zero coverage.

Bwa-hah-hah!! Oh, eMay, you slay me. The media was biased in their favour. Aside from the strategic voting nonsense, I can't recall a single negative story about the Greens from the last campaign. eMay got far more face time than her party's standing warrants.

What did get coverage was repeated efforts to throw us off-stride, generally originating in the blogosphere, then in major papers and to scrums and media questions. For the most part, the communications team did a great job shutting these down.

Yes, the threat to sue Buckdog for posting the clip in which she called Canadians stupid was a great piece of work. Fantastic.

I believe the Conservative Party let their favourite media mouthpieces know that they wanted the Greens marginalized by treating me as a "bizarre" or "off the wall" (both Mike Duffy and the Macleans piece last year have tried this spin). It is clear to me that CTV orchestrated the situation so that I would be informed on Mike Duffy Live that the consortium had decided to keep me out of the debates. It was a deliberate ploy to spring the news on me in hopes of having a television clip of me over-reacting, being angry or tearful. They could have used such a clip to confirm my unsuitability to participate in the debates - thus letting Harper and Layton off the hook.

Oh, that's a good one. Paranoid much?

No campaign planning document was ever prepared that I saw. No campaign discussions and strategies calls took place during the campaign. My feeling throughout the campaign was that I was flying by the seat of my pants.

So, a) it's all someone else's fault, and b) she was doing all the work. Well, doesn't it seem to anybody that, perhaps, a leader's job is to coordinate this kind of stuff? Perhaps if there were no campaign planning documents, eMay should have initiated the process to write a few. As for the phone calls, I'm pretty sure eMay's phone can make calls as well as receive them. She could have initiated campaign discussions and strategy calls herself.

The biggest problem area to sort out by the next campaign is how I can win in my riding (any riding) when I am out of the riding more than half the time. The push and pull is tough. Can we have any kind of decision that the Leader winning in her seat is a top priority? (*the* Top Priority?) If I had been in Central Nova the whole time (except for national debates), I would have won.

It's all about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

I pledged constantly, from my opening press conference seeking GPC leadership, to never say something I believed to be untrue.

Oh stop, stop, you're killing me! Explain how you could say "There’s something wrong with Jack Layton if he’d rather open up discussions with the Taliban than the Green party" if you are such a relentless truth-teller (note: a link is to a Green Party blog because it was the only source I could still find for the quote, since the original Chronicle-Herald story has disappeared behind a subscription wall. If anyone wants to help me out with a link to the original story, I'd appreciate it).

As long as I am leader, I will ensure the Green Party of Canada is a beacon of truth in a sea of spin. I will not allow partisanship to betray our children's future.

I can't say anything about this that I haven't said before, but my gawd, the hubris.

I'll just leave you with those quotes and my commentary. I think that's about all that needed saying from me on that topic.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 69