I didn't watch all of it, oddly enough, but I did catch snippets of the Global TV (CITV) coverage Monday night during the election.
Ralph Klein was a bit of a bust: his only real "insight" I caught was that the negative ads Nancy MacBeth used against him in '01 backfired similarly to the anti-Ed campaigning that had been going on. The next best thing he had: well, Ed Stelmach was quiet during cabinet meetings. Quite the dropoff.
I don't know who the East Indian was from GMCC who was also there: my father switched to CFRN's coverage halfway through the night, he said, because Global seriously needed an analyst whose English was understandable. I was tempted to because he had absolutely no valuable analysis whatsoever. Look, lots of pundits were wrong in failing to catch Stelmach's win of 72+ seats. But on election night its best not to surmise that the reason the Liberals and NDP didn't fare well in rural Alberta was because "they didn't do a good enough job getting the message out".
Getting the message out? Was he serious?
The NDP are used for target practise in vast stretches of rural Alberta (ie. Peace, Cardston-Taber, Rocky Mountain House). Liberals are routinely threatened with death for merely putting up signs around Stettler. One year at the Innisfail Rodeo a friend and I had hours of fun with stolen NDP signs from the '93 election: putting them on trucks parked around the Ag grounds and coming back later to see the vehicles vandalized. And getting the message out is the problem the sodomist/socialist hordes on the left have when it comes to their low vote counts in rural Alberta?
Finally, the highlight of the night was around 9:30, when Jae-Lynn Nye (who referred to the Liberals as "we", so I'm guessing she's one of them) was interviewing the Alberta Liberal Party president, or some high ranking executive holding down the fort while Taft was unavailable. With some 45-55% of the polls reporting in, the Tories were leading in 70 or 71 ridings, and the landslide results were all but official. Jae-Lynn asked the Liberal Toady how the mood was at Liberal Campaign Headquarters: namely, was there a bit of disappointment and saddness that an election that the previous week was whispered as being possibly half-winnable (ie. minority gov't) was a total rout. The dude's (paraphrased) response?
No, we aren't disappointed at all. We're confident that we're going to form the next government in the Province of Alberta.Um, are you fucking insane? Jae-Lynn even had to call him on that, asking how he could possibly look at the numbers and even remotely believe that the Liberals were even going to keep their existing seats, let alone gain half the province.
Those are very misleading numbers. We're confident, we are going to win this election.I was on the ground in tears at this point: I couldn't believe the total devotion and complete idiocy of this guy! It was priceless.
Another highlight had to be Ed Stelmach's (Edmonton) acceptance speech: you would not believe how many times the dude threw the word "Albertan" or "Alberta" in there. Stelmach, you may be an Albertan by birth. You may identify yourself as an Albertan, and have a dignified respect for the province. But you aren't a Ted Morton or a Feynman and Coulter's Love Child: you don't at the end of the day love Alberta more than Canada, or your own family, or the sight of a Liberal buried six feet under. In short, you aren't in the Alberta Wildrose Alliance, and you shouldn't pretend that you are...its very embarassing.
