Your point about Chretien and Harper is well taken, but it’s not enough to say: those guys had bad first year and later got better, ergo Dion will too. All it means is he could. Of course, I’d argue the sorts of problems that have plagued Dion are more similar to Chretien than to Harper - and Chretien’s success as a leader is exaggerated, since he had the luxury of competing against a divided right, with which he coasted to multiple victories with scant more support than the current minority Tories do. Stephane Dion doesn’t have that luxury.

I still can’t understand why Dion has behaved in such a partisan way. Isn’t the argument supposed to be that the public is sick of partisanship? When he was elected leader, I was concerned - concerned because here was a guy who seemed like an unorthodox choice for the Liberals, very well respected, never overly partisan. Then he gets elected leader and suddenly he’s talking about extreme-right wing ideologies and George Bush! What gives?

I suppose anything could happen. But Dion is going to need a Harper faceplant if he’s ever going to become Prime Minister. His communication skills are not just bad, they’re remarkably bad for a leader of a major political party, and unlike Chretien, it isn’t "charming" in that street-fighter-who-overcame-adversity kind of way. If I were Stephane Dion I’d stop worrying about the earliest available date to pull the plug - as he has for months now - and instead make sure all my ducks are lined up first. Six months or a year isn’t the end of the world in the grand scheme of things, so what’s the hurry? It just revives one of the worst stereotypes about Liberals: that they’re so desperate to get into power, they’ll do anything.

Of course, he’s already had a year. The die is pretty much cast. Stephen Harper got two shots at the title. Dion gets only one.