Sunday, May 31, 2009

A bit too quiet

The first surprisingly silent span for Deb Higgins in the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race - covering her January entry into the race through the better part of March - was relatively easily explained at the time as a matter of her campaign taking awhile to get up and running. But it's worth pointing out that her campaign has been even further from the public eye since the end of the leadership debates - and there's little apparent explanation as to why that's happened.

Aside from a single endorsement on May 12, I'm not sure that Higgins' website has changed at all since the April 24 membership deadline - to the point where her own "calendar" has gone blank since a May 23 golf tournament. And as best I can tell, she hasn't held a single media event since the March photo op where she unveiled both her democratic reform platform and an endorsement from Andrew Thomson. (Incidentally, that press conference also seems to be the only event documented on her photo page).

Which isn't to say that Higgins has kept entirely silent: she's appeared a few times in the media since, but seemingly only where somebody else asks for her comment. Higgins was quoted several times during the course of the Lingenfelter membership controversy, but again purely as a matter of reacting to stories which were already circulating. And even in the last week, she's been quoted twice in her critic duties without being covered at all in the leadership race.

But when it comes to presenting herself as a candidate, Higgins seems to have limited her campaign to showing up where asked, rather than defining herself on her own terms. And that choice looks to be a worrisome philosophy from somebody running for the opportunity to chart the course of the NDP as a whole.

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