A A

If at first, you don’t succeed … goodbye.

Of course, that’s not the way the popular saying really goes — in fact, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” is a message about stick-to-it-ativeness. If you don’t reach your goals the first time you try, try again. Try harder. Learn from your mistakes. You’re not expected to win a gold medal at the Olympics the first time you run. You shouldn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize for literature for your first book of short stories.

That’s real life.

But politics, it seems, is not real life — in politics, if you don’t succeed the first time, get ready to have political opportunists in your own party painting a target on your back.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, after failing to topple a weakened and at times hapless-looking Justin Trudeau in the Oct. 21 federal election, now seems at risk if he can’t solidify his support before a leadership review next spring at his party’s annual convention in Toronto.

In fact, the knives seems to be out earlier than that — days before the vote, the Globe and Mail reported that a group of Conservatives were already arguing that Scheer should go and that Peter MacKay should be a leadership candidate. (For his part, then and now, MacKay has said he supports Scheer, but has been more circumspect about whether he would consider running for the job of Conservative leader if it was open.)

There are plenty of rumblings, from party members to pundits on down, suggesting that Scheer should leave or be removed, and that the party would be better suited to have a new, new leader.

The idea that Scheer might actually learn from campaign missteps? Not even on the table.

And perhaps that should tell us a truth about politics — that, often, it isn’t about wanting to deliver good government.

Think about all of this in light of a different political resignation, one that was announced as the election results were being counted.

Independent Senator Andre Pratte quit the Senate — giving up a lucrative position and leaving years before qualifying for a healthy pension — saying, essentially, that the Senate has too many senators who care more about party politics than they do about good governance.

It was, he said, exhausting trying to reach compromises with senators more interested in scoring points for their own parties or pigheadedly blocking the legitimate efforts of those on the other side, once again for strictly political gain.

And perhaps that’s the problem with politics.

So much of it is about personal power and gamesmanship, about the personal need to win.

Everything else — and everyone else, including, perhaps, Andrew Scheer — is just so much cannon fodder to be used when it’s convenient and then discarded.

That’s a shame.