Who The Hell is David Herle?

If you didn't know the answer to this one, I'll tell you. David Herle is the man who ran Paul Martin's leadership campaign. By the way, that was the last campaign Herle ever won. In his first try running a national campaign, Paul Martin and the Liberal party hemorrhaged enough seats to be reduced to a minority. Somehow, even though Liberals got mauled that election, Herle & Co. thought they had won. So what does Herle do for an encore? Oh, that's right, to remove all doubt about how we did in the 2004 election, Herle helped the Liberals cruise to defeat in 2006.

So why am I blogging about David Herle? Well, Mr. Herle talked to the press after last night's defeat. Herle suggested that Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion ought to be held responsible for last night's "crushing defeat". In Herle's words, "We are now again, virtually irrelevant in Western Canada and have lost the beachhead we had in British Columbia. The problems in Quebec remain widespread and deep. The NDP and Greens are encroaching on the Liberal party's territory from the left." Now, I suppose if anybody is an expert on crushing electoral defeat, it's David Herle. What most people don't recognize is that he's still trying to cover for his own failings when he was running the LPC strategy shop. Herle's failures led to every single evil he identified, except for BC, which was the only place where Liberals picked up seats last time around. Herle missed most of the story, especially part about the massive role that campaign strategists play in the victory or defeat of their candidates.

So here's my point: David Herle needs to shut his mouth and let Stéphane Dion make a decision on his future as leader, by himself. M. Dion did something that Herle never had the guts to do: namely to put himself up for election by members of his own Party, and then his fellow citizens at large. Win or lose, M. Dion has earned the right to take a bit of time to take stock of the past two years, and of course the past few weeks. Calls by people like Mr. Herle, who haven't stood for election to anything, need to take their rightful place on the sidelines, and shut their mouths for the next little while. It's October; the review is in May. There is plenty of time.