On lost capacity

Last night I noted the disconnect between the Libs' layoffs and their fund-raising rhetoric over the past year. But there's another angle on the Libs' staff cuts that looks even more telling about the party's fortunes.

There doesn't seem to be much room for doubt that over the course of the fall, the Libs have fallen short of what would seem to be their goals as a party - presumably including countering the Cons' attacks on Michael Ignatieff, developing and promoting their own policy, and building electoral machinery for future elections. At best, one can give them partial marks for developing and sticking to a couple of consistent lines of attack against the Cons, but it's hard to see any payoff yet in the impressions of Canadians toward the respective parties - particularly with both polls and by-election results looking weak for the Libs.

Now, one might see those failings as reason to replace staff who haven't performed to expectations, as seems to be the case with Ignatieff's original cadre. But it strikes me as an entirely different step to be cutting exactly the staff capacity which the Libs will ultimately need to try to turn things around.

In effect, having already failed to counter the Cons' messaging machine with the extra 30 workers on hand, the Libs will now be making less of an effort to try; having done little work toward their supposed 308-riding strategy as evidenced by their mediocre by-election results, they'll now have fewer staff working on picking up the slack.

Under the circumstances, the Libs' choice only makes sense if they that they were running a larger organization than they could afford in the first place. But it hardly speaks well for the Libs' potential to reverse their decline if even an unsustainably large operation can't do any better than keep them around their lowest support levels ever. And there's reason to wonder whether the Libs will take on even more water now that they'll have less hands on deck.