Called It

..and have been calling it (that is, Stephane Dion winning the Canadian Liberal leadership race) for a little while now. (My biggest mistake, I have to admit, was thinking that everything would be sorted out before the convention. It happened on the floor.)

I still believe now what I did then: that Canadians (like Americans) rejected Ignatieff becaused they "want a candidate who represents progressive, non-Americanized foreign policy- Ignatieff's other policies simply don't differ enough from his counterparts to explain it." Dion could not have won if Ignatieff hadn't had weaknesses... and Ignatieff's weaknesses were all about his foreign policy. Dion's focus on green issues was a nice touch and probably helped vault him over Rae, but it wasn't Dion who had Harper shake his hand over Afghanistan.

It's funny that the coverage is largely about Quebec issues and the environment, considering the salience of foreign policy, but c'est la vie, as the new leader would probably say.

As for the campaign, I'll actually throw it over to Warren, who seems pretty happy about the whole thing, and also called it for Dion:

That all said, Dion clearly knows how to catch his opponents off guard: After all, he has just beaten the entire Liberal party establishment on a shoestring budget, and with a tiny band of fearless advisors.

He may be wrongheaded about pseudonymity-newcomer pundits to these here Internets often are-but he's nailed this as a rebuke to the "backroom boys" backing the Ignatieff and Rae camps. There are a lot of smoke-filled rooms with a lot of worried faces right now. They'll have to rethink a few things.

Maybe that's the "renewal" that the Liberals keep talking about?