Leadership 2012: Notable By Omission

After two posts outlining possible candidates for the NDP's impending leadership race, I've thus far avoided mentioning the prospective candidate who's been on the receiving end of both media adulation and a blogger's plea to stay far, far away. So I'll take a moment to explain why Gary Doer doesn't currently rank among my possible contenders for the position.

While I don't entirely agree with Matt's take on Doer, I would see the concerns mentioned in his post resonating a fair bit among much of the party's progressive base - while Doer's apparently minimal French skills would leave him little prospect of winning much support in the province which offers the NDP's most obvious source of potential new members. And that combination excludes an awful lot of potential leadership voters from his list of possible targets.

Meanwhile, I don't see a lot of plausible areas of strength for Doer in the context of either the NDP's current membership, or the reasonable prospects for growth by next year. Yes, he has some union connections and could serve as a labour candidate, but he doesn't have much of an advantage on that front over plenty of other contenders. And while a Manitoba support base isn't a bad place to start in building a national coalition, I have serious doubts that Doer's name carries quite the same recognition and reputation that media insiders may think.

Granted, it is worth mentioning the "stalking horse" theory as the one possibility which might vault Doer to the leadership. If the talk of Brian Topp, Anne McGrath, Karl Belanger and others in Jack Layton's inner circle is indeed a cover for somebody who doesn't want to declare any intentions just yet but wants to keep some space open to declare a run later, then Doer is as plausible a beneficiary of that treatment as anybody. And the combination of Layton's machine with Doer's other sources of support might be enough to put the leadership within reach.

But even that scenario seems to me to fall far short of assuring Doer that he'd be more than one of several contenders for the title of NDP leader. Which means that he doesn't seem to have much reason to walk away from his current position - and that anybody looking for an outside knight in shining armor is probably best served looking elsewhere.