Team Beige
Politics without direction
Vanilla is a flavour.
As much as people dismiss vanilla as something flavourless, the reality is that vanilla does taste like something.
It tastes like vanilla.
Same with colour.
Red looks like something. Blue. Black and white, which you may remember from physics is all colours absorbed or all colours reflected. Still looks like something.
What about beige?
What about it? comes the sneering voice from the cheap seats.
Well, beige is really the lack of colour or flavour as much as it is part of the punchline in the joke about ceilings and lovers.
And it’s also the colour of the Liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2015. Overall we are in a period of celebritocracy and Dannyism since 2003. The Liberals introduced us to the Politics of Beige.
They stand for nothing. They stand for everything. They wanted to cut government spending and get the finances back on track. They did it by increased spending and keeping massive deficits knowing the dangers because the other thing wasn’t popular. They promised to reduce dependence on oil, which then became doubling oil production, because they needed more money but couldn’t figure out how to do it a new way {They didn’t really look hard.} So they went with all the old ways. The Pea Seas had strategies. The Liberals had plans.
“In October 2016,” as regular readers will recall, the Liberals “herded a bunch of people together at The Rooms to unveil what they now call ‘The Way Forward.’ As some unnamed person from Premier Dwight Ball's office told CBC's Peter Cowan at the time, the good ideas - that is, the ones that people liked - would go into the spring budget. ‘The ones that go over poorly,’ as Cowan put it, ‘will be dropped.’”
People might forget now but the Liberals used to call themselves Team Dwight. Had nothing to do with not being tied up with Justin Trudeau. It was just ego and laziness and copying the sort of Big Giant Head campaigns the Pea Seas used to run with Danny and then, because the Pea Seas didn’t have any thoughts after Danny left either, kept doing with Kathy. Now there’s Team Furey. Nothing to do with Justin Trudeau. It’s what Kathy and Dwight did. Rinse Repeat.
In 2015, the Andrew Furey chaired the Liberal campaign. Their message was “vote for us because we are not them.” Muskrat Falls was not a bad idea. After all Dwight Ball loved it from the beginning and just lied about what he’d said at the time Danny announced it when people turned on the project later. Good idea. Just badly managed, like everything. The Liberals campaigned to be the same as the Pea Seas. Just not Pea Seas.
They tried to do something different because the banks and the creditors and financial reality forced them to but as soon as things quieted down, the finance minister who talked sense was out and the finance minister who just wanted to make people happy was in.
Unfortunately for the Liberals, people didn’t have any reason to like them and support them so when they shagged up, people stopped supporting them. Team Dwight without the Ball and now Team Furey without the balls either. Different avatar in the front but with no clearer a sense of direction, no idea to tie them together, no thing they stand for. Took Team Dwight days to get into serious trouble and before six months of governing was out, they’d basically lost public support. They never got it back and have struggled ever since against parties that have been at times all but dead.
Dwight was notoriously indecisive and according to some accounts, Ball complained in the transition that the incoming Image that replaced him was too indecisive. No kidding. Team Furey cannot even decide if it is angry at the federal Liberals when cash isn’t coming from Ottawa - remember the lawsuit about Equalization? - or ready to stand next to them whenever there’s federal cash coming, like in Rocky Harbour. As tempting as the metaphor is, this pushme-pullyou on everything is not something peevish or petulant or childish as much as it is just indecisive, a reflection of that lack of direction or unifying thought to define Liberals beyond hang-on-to-the-paycheque, which is very much on-brand for the post—2015 version of what used to be one of the most successful parties in Newfoundland and Labrador. The indecision is just more obvious since August 2020.
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