- Jul 31, 2011
- 5,441
- 2,016
- AFL Club
- Collingwood
- Banned
- #426
I know this goes against everything that the Liberal Party has stood for under the leadership of Tony Abbott, but unless he quickly learns to be able to get across his content and articulate an alternative vision under the blowtorch of quality journalism, rather than just lazy sloganeering, I feel the Liberal party will continue to bleed support.
From Greg Jericho:
But the real upshot in all of this is that Abbott has revealed he is worried and that he is as weak-kneed when it comes to bad polls as was the ALP under Rudd.
Abbott has shown everyone that he has been badly wounded by the ALP’s attacks. How depressing must it be for back bench Liberal Party MPs to realise that their leader is so worried about Newspoll that a year away from an election he has to get his wife to do some repair work for him? Kimberly Ramplin on Twitter nicely pointed out that back in 2003 the ALP paid for an insert in the Women’s Weeklyfeaturing Bob Carr and his wife, but that was:
a) A paid advertisement (here, News.ltd did the advertising gratis)This is purely a case of a leader shitting himself about the polls. A leader whose party is leading easily in the polls.
b) In the same month as the election. – Wives always become more prominent in elections or when a new leader takes office.
That should scare the hell out of Liberal Party members when they think of what a Tony Abbott government would be like..
It is also all a bit odd given that the last Newspoll which was 50-50 seemed a out of whack with the other polls, so was likely to go back to 53-47 or 52-48, which is where most of the other polls are sitting, without the Liberal Party doing anything.
Clearly Abbott’s more worried about his personal standing than his party’s. It means as well that if the poll does go back to where everyone expects it to go, it’ll be because he had to "break glass in case of emergency”. If the poll inexplicably doesn’t shift much, then it looks like he is terminally on the nose with voters. It also means people will now really start to focus on his negative personal numbers – every poll will need greater mention of his personal standing, and reference to his strategy to “woo women voters”
Clearly, Abbott has been rattled by Julia Gillard’s numbers going up (and as Possum pointing up, increasing the ALP’s 2PP with it). The bad news for Tony Abbott is that Possum also notes that the standing of the Opposition Leader has absolutely nothing to do with the the party’s 2 party preferred polling number. That means to keep the 2PP numbers high, the Liberal Party has to keep focus on Julia Gillard, which essentially means Tony Abbott attacking her, which obviously the Liberals have found doesn’t go down well in the electorate, and leads to Abbott looking like a bully.
Which brings us back to where Mr Abbott finds himself today.