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Monday, August 01, 2011

Forgive me Father Trotter, for I have committed the cardinal pundit sin

Forgive me Father Trotter, for I have committed the cardinal pundit sin.

Seeing as this is my first confessional, I'd like to skip the early decades of fashion crime and move to my current political guilt as I have committed that most cardinal of NZ punditry sins - I wrote Winston Peters off.

Just as I had turned my back on Winston ever coming back, he does something that manages to capture the ideas of the proper Government role of yore and make it so tangible for an apathetic electorate that you can bloody taste it.

Attacking child abusers is so politically popular you can see 2% lift in that idea alone and none of it from Labour. Key shut Winston down because he knew older moderate National Party voters who remember privatization as a mistake would flock to NZ First, appealing to the hard law and order brigade on child abusers is a raid on National Party voters already wavering. Winston will run foul of liberals if it's just castration mentality solutions, the policy has to be innovative enough to surprise rather than offend. If he wants to bring back the death penalty he'd have managed to make ACT look moderate, and with the dirt he says he has on the ACT coup, one wants to be as far away from that implosion as humanly possible.

The follow up offer to Gen Y who voted National in 2008 is the offer to pay their student loans off dollar for dollar Hello another 1% from those grandparents seeing their grandchildren leave to pay off their student loan, hello 6% NZ First, hello Winston.

In the utter vacuum of Gen X leadership, it will be the baby boomer politicians of old that will shape the future by appealing to a sense of State alien to most under 35, now that's irony.

While we may bitch about Winston endlessly, his crime was being caught with his hand in the cookie jar after a lifetime of denouncing those corporate influences in politics. That doesn't mean he wasn't his own man, but the media fiasco and hysteria made this perception a hanging offense which isn't fair as NZ First has made strong contributions to economic sovereignty against those very same corporate influences.

Maybe Uncle Winston knows how to dance with the Devil without the Devil counting the beat, but if he can manage this it will be a game changer at this years election.

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2 Comments:

At 1/8/11 1:15 pm, Blogger Lily said...

Confession is good for the soul - go forth and sin no more.

 
At 1/8/11 3:41 pm, Blogger Chris Trotter said...

Pax vobiscum, my son.

 

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