Read 'Em And Weep

Losing Friends And Not Even Influencing His Uncles
GordCoVille


Nothing goes out of style faster than professional football coaches and political action committee playbooks.

Just ask the followers of Vince Lombardi and Karl Rove.

Unfortunately for Gordon Campbell, however, his handlers didn't get the memos from either Sports Illustrated or Bill Keller.

Because when Mr. Campbell came back from his self-imposed media-deflector-spin-in-exile trip around the country today he got up on the stump and let fly with even more of his 'Winning Isn't Everything, It's The Only Thing' rhetoric. Then he went simultaneously Rovian and vindictive when he unveiled his 'special prosecutor', whose main job appears to be bashing the teachers senseless.

All of which would have been fine and dandy if His Gordness had the people on his side.

Which, of course, was supposed to have been the job of the 'Soften 'Em Up Crew' that got down and dirty last week while Mr. Campbell was in hiding. This included the inflammatory statements of Minister of Union Busting Mike de Jong, the puffed uppery of anti-Education Minister Shirley Bond, and the insane bleatings of the BC Business Council et al. who blamed teachers for creating the labour unrest that was actually created by their fellow members in the heretofore utterly unexplicable (not to mention extremely unlikely, but nevertheless not entirely inconceivable) Double-Secret Vizzini Probation Conspiracy.

All of which would have worked out fine and dandy for Mr. Campbell if only Mr. and Ms. Everywoman had hopped aboard the Spincycle Express.

But, despite the best cheerleading efforts of a supplicant mainstream media, it hasn't quite worked out that way.

And you don't have to take our word for it.

Instead, you can take it from Ipsos-Reid, whose latest poll has members of the public supporting the BCTF position by an almost 2 to 1 margin.

You got that?

That's 2:1 public support in favor of the Teachers despite the non-stop, not-so secret, but extremely duplicitous propaganda onslaught from the government that began exactly 5 days before the provincial election last May.

"How can this possibly happening?" the high-priced waterheads barricaded deep within the Big Red PropMachine's underground bunkers must be asking themselves.

Well, we think that Dirk Meissner of the Canadian Press, speaking rationally and reasonably to an increasingly shrill Michael Smyth this evening, may have hit the nail on the head when he mentioned that the rank and file teachers he interviewed at today's big public demonstration at the Legislature were calm, articulate and well-reasoned.

In other words, what the public has been seeing are not screaming, frothing at the mouth, whacked-out, waygone lefties like me on TV. Instead, they are seeing the same wise folks who teach their kids everyday standing up for an important social principle.

And members of the public can respect such a stand, even if they don't totally agree with it, especially when they also find themselves watching an increasingly whacked-out, lunatic-fringed government unmask itself when it tries to invoke the memory of guilt by association, stained blue dresses, and special prosecutors like Kenneth Starr.

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Update: Paul Willcocks, in his story on why Mr. Campbell has already lost the battle, is on the same wavelength as Dirk Meissner with his lead.

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