For obvious reasons, most of the discussion about the Saskatchewan NDP leadership race has focused on where the leadership candidates stand at the moment. But it's worth keeping in mind that the goal of the leadership race will ultimately be to elect a leader of the opposition for the next two-plus years, and hopefully (depending on their success in that role) a premier for years to come beginning in 2011. So let's cast an eye to the future and ask what the campaign so far can tell us about how the candidates would perform in those roles - starting with what we might expect from Deb Higgins as the leader of the opposition.
From my standpoint, the LO's role over the next two years will involve three main tasks: rebuilding the NDP internally, developing policy for the 2011 campaign, and opposing the Sask Party publicly. So how might we expect Higgins to handle those tasks?
On party renewal, Higgins (like all of the leadership candidates) has talked up the need for further growth and outreach. But it's worth noting that her actual campaign structure has been relatively top-heavy, with lots of caucus support but few shows of strength at the grassroots level. And her apparent strategy of presenting herself as the default alternative to Dwain Lingenfelter doesn't figure to change that much over the next month - meaning that Higgins may largely have to start from scratch on the party-building front.
On the bright side, Higgins can take pride in her own strong riding as evidence of her ability to maintain support. And one would figure that at least some substantial portion of the grassroots development in the other camps would be perfectly happy to shift allegiances to Higgins.
As for policy development and opposition strategy, we may be able to take some strong hints from how Higgins has designed her leadership platform. While she's shown a broad command of policy when speaking in the debates, her actual proposals on the NDP's core social justice issues have consisted mostly of incremental shifts in existing priorities, suggesting that she wouldn't present a particularly broad or distinctive vision for the NDP. But then, that doesn't seem to have been her intention in designing her platform.
As I've noted before, some of her policy proposals and messages have been neatly tailored to include subtle jabs at both Dwain Lingenfelter and Brad Wall. Which would seem to me to hint at what we could expect from Higgins in shaping the NDP's message as a party: a relatively narrow range of issues to be highlighted, but with those carefully selected to play into a potentially winning theme.
Higgins' success as leader of the opposition would then seem to be predicated on her identifying the right pressure points to begin with - with her proposed ban on out-of-province political funding looking to be an obvious theme with some potential to resonate, along with a strong anti-nuclear position. From there, the main task would be to keep tying other issues into the selected points of attack, and making sure that Wall can't find a way to wriggle his way out of his party's vulnerabilities.
That strategy under Higgins' leadership would figure to carry at least a fairly strong chance of success, particularly since she might also have less of a learning or readjustment curve than any of the other candidates. But it would also risk falling short if Higgins were to misread the strength of either the issues involved or the NDP's ability to push them, or if Wall were to defuse any particularly strong issues at the last minute to minimize the effect of Higgins' work.
In sum, then, Higgins would seem to be ready to start identifying and challenging the Sask Party's weak points from day one. But the question is whether that strategy will be either too limited to turn the tide against a government which is still seen positively a couple of years into its term, or too predictable to win out against a government which doesn't seem shy about going along with the political winds.
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