At the time, Kent took issue with oh, pretty much every single thing I said (a tactic I'm increasingly seeing from Lingenfelter supporters not only only my blog but on other blogs, message boards and even the candidates' Wikipedia entries as well. It's like some Link supporters simply can't concede any points to any of the other candidates. In fact, I'm tossing around the idea of a blog post around some of the Lingenfelter campaign and supporters' tactics as I find that this is perhaps one of the biggest underlying philosophical differences between the Lingenfelter campaign and those of the other three candidates.)
Anyhow, as penance for making a mistake about the Google Maps mash-up on Dwain Lingenfelter's campaign web site in a post back then (I thought it was misleading on purpose, it turned out to be a fairly major usability issue instead), I wrote a list of "5 Reasons Dwain Lingenfelter Would Make A Good Leader for the NDP". I challenged Kent to do a similar list for Ryan Meili but even though he kept posting increasingly trollish comments until I finally refused to respond to him, he never did write that list.
I still feel the list of five reasons I gave for why Link would make a good leader stand. But in my opinion, the Waterhengate scandal has superseded all of these reasons and, should Lingenfelter triumph on June 6, I will have a really difficult time supporting him as leader. (I know I'm not the only person to feel this way - I've heard from new and long-term NDP members as well as supporters for each and all of the other candidates who feel similarly.)
Anyhow, with two weeks left in the leadership race I thought I would do a companion series to my "Five Reasons Link Would Make A Good Leader" post. Over the next couple weeks, I'll write a series of posts listing "Ten Reasons I'm Supporting Ryan Meili for NDP Leader" (and using some of the Link supporters' logic, this will obviously mean that Meili is twice the candidate that Link is!
)Reason #10 - He's Soft-Spoken
In one of my first posts about Ryan Meili, I wrote about the many parallels I saw between Ryan and Barack Obama. (See the comments in that thread for the type of reaches and equivocations that the Lingenfelter campaign and its supporters are increasingly targetting at Ryan as they see him as more and more of a threat.) Now obviously, this isn't a perfect analogy but just as Obama never resisted too strongly when anyone compared him to JFK or Abraham Lincoln, a comparison like this can be a useful shorthand for the type of candidate someone is, what they stand for and/or how they're attempting to go about achieving their goals.
One of the most obvious differences between Obama and Meili is their respective techniques as orators. Obama is pretty much unparalleled in modern politics with his ability to connect with and inspire a crowd. Meili is not nearly as accomplished as a speaker and I admit that, as someone who was hoping to find an Obama-esque figure in this leadership race, this was a disappointment for me the first couple times I heard Ryan speak. But as I began to realise that the person I chose to support didn't need to be (and really, shouldn't be) an exact clone of Obama, I began to see that Meili's style of speaking - quiet, thoughtful, but with a healthy dose of humour - had the potential to be as much of a benefit to his campaign as anything else he had to offer. Why? Simple. Because when Ryan speaks, you have to lean forward to listen to him.
Can you imagine a Legislative session where, instead of having the Sask Party and the NDP leaders shouting at each other like kids in the sandbox, you have someone like Ryan leading the debate - where there is a focus on nuance and logic instead of hectoring and scoring cheap political points? (Well, Ryan's campaign theme is "Dream Big" after all!
)The other thing that's brought his soft-spokenness home as an advantage is seeing how Ryan interacts with people at events - he doesn't intimidate people, he draws them in. It's a silly, insignificant detail but when he met my eighteen month old son at an event, Ryan took a moment to get down on Pace's level and spoke to him quietly for a moment, eliciting a big smile from my son. Everything else I'd learned and heard about Ryan up to that point made me want to support him. But with that small gesture, I was sold that Ryan was the candidate I was going to support as fully as possible for the rest of this campaign.
Next #9 - He Has Very Little Baggage
