On Saturday, Liberals showed the political genius for which their party was once famous, but has been recently exceedingly rare. Not 10 metres from where I sat with old political rival and personal friend John Tory, we watched it unfold. And, as pundits do, we pretended to understand what it all meant.

Surrounded by his wife and advisers sat the “conscience of the party,” having delivered the speech of his career but harvesting too few delegates to stay in the race. Under the TV lights, snooped upon by voyeurs like my pundit colleagues and under the brutal stopwatch rules of the convention, he had less than 20 minutes to make one of the most fateful decisions of his life.

Eric Hoskins had absolutely no way of knowing which choice was a disaster and which was a career-maker. If he jumped to Sandra Pupatello, many of his young supporters would be annoyed at his siding with the establishment. If he blessed Kathleen Wynne and she lost, the party machine might punish his impertinence. If he did nothing, he courted irrelevance.

We watched in stunned silence as Greg Sorbara slid gracefully into his box, seized Hoskins in a body hug, whispering so intently in his ear, a message of such power, that the candidate begin to tear up. Sorbara, genuinely the father of modern Ontario Liberals, let him go, gave him a searching gaze and retreated as quickly as he had come.

What could it mean?

Surprisingly, Sorbara had hailed Kathleen Wynne’s speech as the finest he had “ever heard in a leadership convention . . .” More surprisingly, Sorbara had been preceded in the Hoskins box, first by Deb Matthews, an early Wynne champion, and then by her brother-in-law, former premier David Peterson. Hoskins, sweating his choice until almost too late, finally donned his Wynne scarf and made his way to the floor. He set up the concessions on the next ballot by Charles Sousa and Gerard Kennedy for the victorious Wynne.

We all looked at each other in astonishment as the penny dropped — the machine was not united behind the “inevitable winner” after all!

The Pupatello inner circle, the “boys from the Centre” and the consultants, lawyers and government staffers who make up the heart of the party apparatus, had persuaded the media that their candidate was the logical, even inevitable choice. They were not being entirely truthful. They did not have the support of the ex-officio voters they claimed. But we all should have been wary about this insiders’ conventional wisdom; inflation, exaggeration and bald-face lies are the common currency of leaderships, after all.

As the delegation of Matthews, Peterson and Sorbara demonstrated, there were some in the leadership who recognized that Andrea Horwath is the strategic threat to the party, not Tim Hudak’s ’90s neo-con nostrums. They understood, as the Liberal party has also known when not blinded by arrogance, that it must “campaign from the left and govern from the centre.” Or as Premier-Designate Wynne put it, that Liberals are the party of “social justice and fiscal responsibility.”

The arrogance was, of course, also on display with too many promises to “force the opposition to their knees.” Claims that only Liberals could reveal the risk of their opponents’ “dogmas” conflicted with pledges “to reach across the aisle.” There was little evidence the party has reflected on the smack it had received from voters only a few months ago. Pupatello’s speech was long on war cries and opposition insult, light on vision or message.

Kathleen Wynne was both more subtle and more compelling. Chiding Pupatello’s seatlessness, she pledged to relaunch the legislature in less than three weeks. What moved the convention, however, was her eloquent weaving of a political tapestry combining the religious, ethnic, racial and gender rights battles with her own journey on sexual orientation. She handled it with the same deft confidence as John Kennedy on Catholicism or Barack Obama on race.

As much as it may enrage New Democrats, the party chose the most progressive candidate available — and endorsed Wynne’s activist and ambitious social agenda at the same time. However, as she said in her acceptance speech and more fully in her first news conference, “That was the easy part. The hard part starts now.”

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This week we will see whether Wynne has the coalition- and confidence-building skills the party has gambled on. Whether she succeeds or is destined to the defeat that many failed “transition” leaders suffer — having inherited too much dirty political baggage — the party made a smart and surprisingly courageous choice.

Robin V. Sears is a principal of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group. He served as Bob Rae’s chief of staff during the Peterson-Rae Accord years.

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