Must-reads: None. Okay, maybe James Travers.

Did somebody order a hero?
It will take more than bellyfire to lead the Liberal party.

Stéphane Dion's decision to stay on pending a leadership convention is "a gobsmackingly bad move," Don Martin declares in the Calgary Herald, predicting he'll make an easy target for "gloating Conservatives across the Commons aisle while economic issues, which are hardly his forte, dominate parliamentary debate." Dion may finally realize that "federal politics makes mincemeat of honest, high-road sincerity," but he doesn't yet seem to accept his own culpability in the Liberal collapse, says Martin. Given two years to "invigorate the Liberal fundraising operation," "gel with his caucus and install a solid staff organization," and "frame the Liberals in the centre with rational mainstream policies," he did none of those things. The idea that he could help them do so as a "lameduck loser" is, therefore, laughable.

The Montreal Gazette's Don Macpherson speculates that Dion may be hanging on in anticipation of pulling a Trudeau—i.e., announcing his impending departure, engineering the defeat of the government and then marching to an improbable victory in the 41st general election. If that is indeed his intention, Macpherson advises he be disavowed of it at the party's earliest convenience. His caucus has neither the money nor the patience to brook such shenanigans, and the various contenders for the crown—Macpherson has Michael Ignatieff as the favourite—would surely lead their troops in revolt.

The Vancouver Sun's Barbara Yaffe makes a very important point—that choosing a new leader isn't an expression of the collective party will but a democratic process, and as such just as likely to install a "compromise candidate" as leader as either of the frontrunners. We happen to believe that installing either Rae or Ignatieff would quickly make up a good deal of the open water between the Grits and Tories—and, as such, it must be frustrating to have to beg outsiders like Frank McKenna or John Manley for help. But the faction that believes "it best to pursue stars beyond the caucus" may well be right, says Yaffe.

The National Post's Jonathan Kay suggests Dion's fate may point at an inherent Liberal flaw. "The sort of candidate who inspires kudos from the party faithful and high-minded observers at convention time" is useless in the heat of an election, while "the centrist, corporate-minded alpha male bereft of any electorate-scaring hobby horses" that they need on the hustings "is incapable of whipping up convention-floor fervour." The party is, he suggests, "caught between members' desire for ideological purity"—Ideological purity? He's talking about the Canadian Liberal party?—"and grandees' fixation on power for its own sake." Perhaps what they really need is a leader who can distract everyone from all this with "good looks, youth, bilingual fluency and, oh I don't know, some kind of impressive family pedigree." It's too bad—well, it's fantastic actually, but it's too bad for Kay's argument—that the fellow in question has already declined to run.

If McKenna opted to run for the leadership, Sun Media's Greg Weston believes the "odds are [it] would quickly become a coronation." Other than "flawlessly bilingual," the former New Brunswick premier invites all the important adjectives: "intelligent, affable, accomplished, energetic and politically savvy." Also "philanthropic"—he recently took time away from his cushy job at TD Bank Financial to slog "through muddy hell in Haiti" with Matt Damon, delivering emergency supplies to a village destroyed by a hurricane. (Visiting a hurricane zone with Matt Damon is our idea of hell too.) But his comfortable, fulfilling life is precisely what might disqualify, Weston warns. "A friend says McKenna is being tugged between those who are saying the country needs him, and his experience in the grind of politics saying: Who needs it?"

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