It’s over and I’m exhausted.

So many thoughts about the convention and the race… but I’m too tired to think coherently, so here, scattered, are some of them:

1. Best convention floor tactic: Dion’s neo-green shirts and scarves. In a party where everybody wants to be in red, Dion went neon-green. The genius of this was that in a sea of divergent red loyalties the green sashes stood out. Dion’s delegates became extremely visible, which made them look more numerous.
2. A nervous NDP?: Somewhere between the surging green movement in the Liberal Party and the emerging Green Party sit a good chunk of vulnerable NDP voters. Forget about driving left, the NDP may be most vulnerable if the Liberals drive green.
3. Losing Candidates: Some of you have written and asked if Ignatieff and Rae will run in the next election. I’m confident they will, especially after Ignatieff’s speech to his volunteers after the vote. Leadership races are, in essence, about serving as the standard bearer of the party’s ideals and vision. Your volunteers and supporters expect you to reflect your interpretation of that ideal as best you can, be it as the leader or a leader. To walk away now would reflect very, very badly on any of the former candidates. Moreover their supporters would be left holding the bag, having to account for why they backed a man or women who left the party high and dry.
4. The kids don’t care?: One image that struck me was the number of young delegates crying as their chosen candidate lost. In a day and age when the press keeps talking about how young people don’t care or aren’t active enough it was an interesting site.
5. Wither LiBlog?: The real loser of the campaign may have been liblogs. A lot of people enjoy liblogs because they make public the party’s internal debates and enable us to participate in them. During the leadership race however, many blogs became specific campaign mouthpieces – closed to real debate where the participants (and the bloggers themselves) remain open to persuasion. I suspect this left many readers bored, and more importantly, asking: why go to a liblog when I can get the same talking points from newspapers or the candidate’s webpage? I have it from a reliable source that many liblogs experienced a decline in hits and pageviews. In time, maybe they’ll recover, maybe they won’t, but one can’t help but ask, did the blogs lose credibility?

I gotta get to bed.

Update: For those particularly interested in point #2 it seems you are not alone… Chiara B. sent me this article from today’s Toronto Star which elaborates on it significantly.