A Confederacy Of Smugness.

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I noticed it Tuesday afternoon over at Bob Mackin's place.

Essentially, Uncle Bob suggested that the BC Liberal braintrust, who ignored the election act earlier in the day when they instructed their horses to campaign pretty much all morning long on the Twittmachine, was worried that they and theirs were really and truly doomed four hours before the polls closed.

And, never one to leave things incomplete, Mr. Mackin followed this up on Thursday with the following:

Media and scholars will study for years to come (to see) how the BC Liberals defied the odds (and the polls) and won British Columbia's 40th provincial election on May 14.

Liberal sources told me they were truly surprised at what happened. They would've been overjoyed with a minority government for Christy Clark, but were already resigned to hearing the words "Premier-designate, Adrian Dix."...


But....

Then came the following, from an un-bylined story that was posted on the CBC website Thursday evening (although it was something you would have heard about if you were listening to Mr. Quinn's little radio show Thursday afternoon):

While the rest of British Columbia was shocked by the B.C. Liberal party's majority victory in Tuesday's election, the man in charge of the party's internal polling was not.

Dimitri Pantazopoulos, strategist and internal poll runner for the B.C. Liberals, said he predicted his party would win 48 seats, only two off the actual result. That, in spite of the fact, that nearly every other pollster was calling for an NDP landslide...

{snippety doo-dah}

...The B.C. Liberal pollster says the pre-election results were shared with about eight party insiders, but political candidates would not have been aware of them...


Now.

I have no idea if this is pure revisionist codswallop or if it's for real.

(Update Sunday May 19th...MSmyth of The Province says he has seen the numbers/correspondence, properly date-stamped I'm sure, that says they did have numbers, and it came down to a rise for them among old folks and a total collapse of the gender split...Women broke for Christy....Really?)

But you may wish to consider the source.

And you might also wish to consider the thin, but very opaque and stinky, cloak of obfuscatory fertilizer that is the claim that only 'about 8 (unidentified/unidentifiable) party insiders' were told the super-secret good news before the fact.

Regardless....

Perhaps you've forgotten that the good Ms. Pantazopoulos was not always an internal 'BC Liberal' pollster. In fact, awhile back he once worked for the Fed-Cons before he more recently worked it, hard, on the 'swing riding' strategy inside the 'all oral all the time' office of Premier Christy Clark.*

And when he is not generating super-secret poll results and/or trying to subvert democracy by helping to run schemes that funnel government-collected information on private citizens into the databases of whatever political party he is selling himself to on any given day of the week, Mr. Pantazopoulos is also the 'Director of the Municipal Governance Project' at the very finest of the fine 'Manning Center for Democracy'.

Anyway....

Once Mr. Pantazopoulos let the cat out of the proverbial bag on the people's broadcaster (that is still not quite being run by David Frum), well....

The real chortling of the smug, one of whom is also a big, big part of the Manning Center  (as is 'retired businessman' Gwynn Morgan), began in earnest:

****

So, recapping...

The folks that brought the Rovian Rules to federal politics in this country were, apparently, the real secret weapon of the Marissenites here in Lotusland.

Which is really, really bizarre if you think about it (especially if you recall what  The New Rovian Riders of The Purple Manning Swiftboat Sage did to a guy named Stephan Dion five years or so ago).

All of which is bad enough.

But at least with the New Rovians it's clear who and (if you've been paying attention) what it is you are up against.

But when it comes to which Wizards are actually standing behind the innermost gilt-edged political party curtains here in British Columbia?

Well, as she so often does, Alison has that story and much more:

On Ken Boessenkool's twitter account at Kool, Topp, & Guy Public Affairs - the political consultancy firm formed in February - Christy's former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool and Christy's election advisor Don Guy are busy congratulating Nick Kouvalis of Campaign Research on Christy Clark's federal ConservaLiberal campaign win. 

The third partner in the firm is BC NDP campaign director Brian Topp.

Now.

You may (or may not) remember that I noted, with interest, that the wild Progressive Boys backed two horses (i.e. both Christy Clark and George Abbott) in the last BC Liberal Party leadership race awhile back.

But that was different, I think, because it would appear that the strategy there was designed to ensure that the Progressive Boys would have a hand in running the BC Liberal Party's Griftopia Division no matter what.

But this new thing...

This thing where a single PR firm does a good chunk of the wurlitzer cranking for both sides during a general election campaign...

I mean, why would a tight little cluster of political operatives/spinners do something like that?

Well?

How do political operatives/spinners make sure that they can get their snouts as deeply into the big money PR trough as possible between elections no matter what?

Are you getting my drift now?

_______
* I've said it before, and I'm pretty sure I'll be saying it again....Regarding all the dirty trickery which was shown, in the public prints, to be going on inside the Premier's office....Woodward and Bernstein most definitely did not back off and stop digging entirely when they got inside the Nixon Whitehouse...If you get my drift.
And...They keep using that word 'Democracy'....I do not think it means what they say it means.


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