My Gut Says I Can Win

John Howard, originally uploaded by Sydney Weasel.

As Andrew Bolt points out, Rudd doesn't have any guts ..
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The leader from Market Research
Andrew Bolt
The ABC’s Chris Uhlmann again demonstrates why he’s now one of radio’s best political interviewers. And Kevin Rudd again demonstrates why many journalists now realise he really is a flim-flam man:

CHRIS UHLMANN: Leadership means making tough decisions doesn’t it? Can you name one thing in your plan that’s a hard sell, something that you have to cajole the Australian people to get?

KEVIN RUDD: Well on climate change, Mr Howard has been out there running a fear campaign all year, that if we were to prosecute our proposals on climate change, which is one, ratifying Kyoto; two, a carbon target of 60 per cent by 2050; and three, boosting the Renewable Energy Target, the sky would fall in…

CHRIS UHLMANN: Sure, but it’s not a hard sell, is it? I mean, most of the people agree with you on that.

KEVIN RUDD: Mr Howard, his rolling attack against Labor is that - and this has been carried right across the country, extensively by him all year, and it’s an argument I’ve had to engage in and engaged in forcefully - is that if you implemented these policies to deal with climate change, then Mr Howard has constantly said, the sky would fall in. I say Mr Howard is being economically irresponsible for not prosecuting -

CHRIS UHLMANN: But is that a hard sell? Is that really a difficult thing to talk to the Australian people about, to sign Kyoto Protocol? Most of them agree with you.

KEVIN RUDD: Well, the core proposition from Mr Howard, and he continues to say this is about the sky falling in if you implement these policies on the part of Labor as an alternative plan for government…

CHRIS UHLMANN: Let’s try and find out a little bit more about you. What have you done that’s hard?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, the climate change agenda is one…

CHRIS UHLMANN: Well, let’s pick something. Mohamed Haneef, where was the voice of the Labor Party when that was going on? When the courts freed him and the State decided to detain him, where was the Labor Party’s voice? Where was the hard work there?

KEVIN RUDD: What we did then was responsibly respond to the information provided to us by the security authorities at the time…

CHRIS UHLMANN: Did you act with courage?

KEVIN RUDD: Sorry?

CHRIS UHLMANN: Did you act with courage?

KEVIN RUDD: We acted entirely responsibly Chris, when it came to the information provided to us.

Natrually, Uhlmann didn’t feel it necessary to ask the same question of John Howard in the interview that followed.

Some Labor boosters are going to get awfully disappointed with Kevin Rudd.

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Lacking even the courage of Rudd’s non-convictions
Andrew Bolt
In a long piece about the choice at this election, Age political editor Michelle Grattan at long last discusses the key question about a Rudd Labor Government - as in: will it really be as conservative as Rudd glibly claims?

Here are Grattan’s entire musings on that subject:

The party has given him free rein for the sake of trying to get to power; once the intoxication of the honeymoon has worn off, competing interests would reassert themselves.

That’s it. Grattan doesn’t even care to mention that the “competing interests” is actually a reference to the Left - which will not let stand Rudd’s all-by-himself rebadging of Labor as a party not of the Left.

This is the fundamental question about Rudd and Labor: Whether he really is what he claims, and his party as conservative as he paints.

Grattan herself seems not to believe it. So why does the Age‘s political editor skate right over that critical issue?

But I fear Grattan simply reflects the overwhelming culture of The Age - timid to declare a leaning all too obvious from its coverage. Take the paper’s extraordinarily long and extraordinarily vacuous editorial today, which mounts the case against Howard that its prosecuted so savagely for years, only to then delicately declare it cannot decide between him and Rudd.