Lochlin Cross's comments about Wildrose prove the need for a leadership review

With yesterday's Progressive Conservative sweep of all four byelections, news comes today that Wildrose leader Danielle Smith has requested a leadership review after numerous people online (and a couple at my work) expressed concern that the failure to win one of the seats was her fault.

In a way, it is. While it's probably a silly idea at this point to replace Danielle with another leader (especially with no heir apparent waiting in the wings, and the high-profile outsider being the guy who won his byelection), the results are a pretty strong indicator that the "mildrose" shift that Danielle pushed for so hard almost exactly one year ago was an abject failure. For more on that, Leigh Patrick Sullivan covered it today (and, also, predicted this result months back.

But for my money, ignorant off-the-cuff comments today by Lochlin Cross on 100.3 The Bear is a better indication of why the Danielle Smith method is a failure.

Around 5:30 during one of those segments where a local TV news anchor goes on the radio station owned by his media conglomerate to discuss the news of the day came on. The Danielle Smith leadership review was one of the topics they promised to cover. When the segment was over, Cross declared "God help us if the Wildrose ever get in". The problem with the default cultural positions feeble minded DJs adopt (far-left extremism is 'normal', slightly right-of-centre conservatism is 'extremist') is that they are the lazy stereotypes that I warned you about during the Fringe Festival. People like that are going to keep using their soapbox to spew such nonsense. You can't escape it by trying to change into what you think they like. Wildrose already did that, Cross ran his mouth anyways.

Instead, the only possible option is to stick to your principles. Don't cavort with the faggots: fight them. Don't implicitly provide the notion that your ideas are wrong any traction. They aren't, that's the facts that are on your side when you're a principled ideological conservative. Far-left extremist liberals like Lochlin Cross are the problem: don't cozy up to them, attack them back. You can't do that when you're "tweaking" policies and "pruning" parts of your policy which do the right thing, just because the people whose entire lives are made up of doing the wrong thing disagree. Mark Steyn has been talking about "moving the centre" this past week, Danielle Smith and the Wildrose party need to listen to him.

As Leigh put it, when the choice is between PC and PC-lite, what's the point of the choice? The Wildrose Party hasn't been in government, Prentice has. Given the choice, why not stick to the people with experience doing the job. Yes yes, Wildrose asked to "send the PCs a message" (which I disagreed with from the get-go), but the person people wanted to send a message to already got it: Red Redford resigned (twice) in disgrace. Prentice hit a reset switch upon his election so fast Hilary Clinton blushed, and like it or not it worked. Slogans only work if people are in the mindset behind it. During the Redford era they might have "sent a message". Now they're stuck with two parties who are basically identical, no message to send, so they decide to throw their support behind people who (and this cannot be said enough) didn't even attend candidates forums. Rob Ford attended candidates forums, for crying out loud.

PC-lite don't grab voters attentions, they just attract lazy stupid comments from the likes of Lochlin Cross. If he and his ilk are going to trash the party no matter what they do, maybe they can try going back to doing the right thing, and standing up for the right people? For that kind of a course correction, the grassroots need to make their voices heard, and communicate how Wildrose's failures to stick to their guns means you'll be casting a very jaundiced vote at that leadership review