It was surprising today to see how far out of touch The Star men have slipped. Their analysis of the Stéphane Dion'a victory is old and tired like the Liberal Party establishment they cite as yesterday's losers.
Jim Travers describes Dion as certain road kill in an election fought against Harper and a winner only because the delegates in Montréal let passion overcome pragmatism. Thomas Walkom wrote that the Liberals lost their chance in rejecting Bob Rae.
One explanation would be Toronto centrism - that only someone from Toronto deserves to be PM. More likely, it's that they missed the point that Liberals passed the leadership to a new generation.
Travers and Walkom identify with Rae and Ignatieff: U of T boys of the 1970s. I was almost one of those too, only at Toronto's other university of the period. But the class of 1970 will be 60 years old next year and needed less and less. Maybe the Liberals have taken a risk in passing the leadership down half a generation, but it hardly rates as letting the children run the store. But I have read enough and listened enough to Dion and Kennedy supporters to realise they think and act differently from those of us born before 1950.
The three pillars: economic prosperity, social justice and environmental sustainability, resonate with the children of the 1970s and 1980s, the men and women who will be making politics for the decade. For a start they re-made the Liberal Party this weekend. Notably, as other candidates were dropped from the race, the delegates went almost 2:1 to Dion as opposed to his challenger(s). They identified a need to reform the Liberal Party under s new generation of leadership and they acted upon the need.
