Why So Serious?

Good Lord, am I ever tired of being right. Yet ANOTHER poll has popped up.

It's a poll of 400 people, spread out across the whole province, done over a weekend. So, we know 144 Ontarians are voting for McGuinty. Half of Ontarians say they want change, and 2/3 say they want someone else other than Dalton as Premier. Great Success, Liberal War Room!

Now that's the end of the happy part of my post. Here's where things get real.

If we want to win this thing, then we as a party have to purge all doubt from our minds that we are going to form the next government. We need to be absolutely, furiously, bloody-mindedly serious about victory. Crap polls like this are designed for one reason and one reason only, and that is to make us worried that we're going to lose the election.

Because right now the only thing between us and a PC government is the all-too-common belief that we can't win.

This election is most certainly not "Hudak's to lose." It rests with each and every PC member. If you don't believe with 100% certainty that Dalton is dead, he will rise from the grave. Oh yeah. I went there.

You know why Harper and Ford won their respective elections? Because they made it absolutely clear to each and every one of their supporters that failure was not an option. And you know why Ignatieff and Smitherman lost? Because their own people had reservations about them. Justified reservations, but reservations nonetheless. The strength of anyone's conservative convictions has nothing to do with it because for every 1 person who says Harper and Ford won because they "stuck to conservative principles", I'll find you 5 who say they did anything but. We don't need to play the same mind games with ourselves that the Liberals do.

It's as simple as this. If McGuinty's hordes dash themselves against a rock, they and the Liberals will be broken forever. The Liberals have made it plain that they're not just fighting the PC Party of Ontario, but every municipal conservative and the CPC as well with this election. This is their last stand. We have a chance to drive the final nail into this coffin. And yet, there are still people who want to walk away because they don't like this or that policy, or this or that candidate, or some other reason.

Guess what. There is no reason that justifies walking away here. Not when we have what we always wanted- the death of the Liberal Party- within our grasp. We will never get another chance to do this. If we fail, McGuinty waltzes away, Chretien-like, from all that he's done. And we'll have nobody to blame but ourselves as we go through another four years of bloodletting.

So let's look on the happy side. Let's not go down that road. Let's win this thing.