Unfortunately for the Liberals, their strength in just sitting on the bench

There is a lot of press about and a few polls illustrating that Dion is considered to be a weak leader by a large number of Canadians.

There are three reasons for this:

• The conservative attack ads.
  

Brilliantly the Tories started attacking Dion right after the hard fought Liberal leadership race with it's surprising result.

Dion in winning the leadership was probably the third or even fourth choice amongst the pundits and the party membership.

By attacking his leadership abilities early, before he had the opportunity to actually start leading created doubt and has continued to work brilliantly.

• Dion is not leading in this campaign

Although Dion appears to be more intelligent, honest and sincere than Harper, he also seems to suffer from pride, vanity and single mindedness (actually the same traits that appear to be admired in Harper). 

Dion or his Liberal strategists seem to be determined to have Dion single handedly take on Harper and prove that he is a strong leader and that the Tory ads are wrong.

However one of the Liberal's strengths is the experience, popularity and professionalism of their candidates. 

One of the Tories weaknesses is the inexperience, and unprofessional behavior of the ministers they have placed in charge

Leadership is also about assembling a team and effectively using the skills of the team members to run the country.

• In politics as in business you sometimes win when your leader or boss fails

Quite frankly I would question whether every Liberal shown in the above picture personally wants Dion to win the election. 

Too many of them have too much to gain if he fails to get a minority and the Tories believe that too.

The picture above represents all the Liberals that I recognize by name and/or have seen on TV in action. Compare these people to Harper's arrogant team, and his incompetent ministers. 

This is the Liberal's strength.

If the Liberals want to turn their first week's performance around, they need to make the incompetence of the Tories ministers, the people Harper has placed in charge, the issue. 

Give us an alternative to Baird, Clement, Day, Flaherty, Findley, Kenney, Lunn, McKay, Prentice, and Verner.

Get your team off the bench and in front of the media, (with or without Dion) and start attacking Harper's team.

And make sure the first thing out of their mouths is praise for their leader and then attack the policies, performance and arrogance of their assigned minister. 

It should be easy, it is done everyday at the progressive web sites.

Just a thought.