Roughly a year ago I toured what was a Liberal war room in dress rehearsal, a labyrinth of offices above an Ottawa bar where clusters of true believers worked long hours developing policy positions for the upcoming campaign.
It was mostly a hypothetical exercise because the Liberals were stagnating in a distant third position while Tom Mulcair was telling the Stornoway media garden party to get ready for an NDP whoop-up at 24 Sussex Drive after his imminent election victory.
Never dreaming they鈥檇 have to keep these promises as a majority government, these Liberal partisans had the luxury of drafting popular but not necessarily practical positions.
So now they鈥檙e finding out, as former cabinet minister Lisa Raitt noted on Power Play this week, 鈥済overning is hard.鈥�
The sudden kerfuffle over buying new fighter jets is a classic case in point.
The Liberals vowed they鈥檇 never sole-source a fighter jet purchase and ruled out any F-35 buy because to go anti-Conservative on both positions fit their campaign theme of Real Change.
Yet they鈥檙e about to break both promises by buying the Super Hornet without a competition so the military鈥檚 beloved F35 can become part of any future bidding. And there is a third promise that鈥檚 being broken: Transparency.
What has emerged by way of a fighter jet procurement explanation so far is a jumbled torrent of nouns, verbs and adjectives which in no way resemble a coherent communications strategy.
They鈥檙e attempting to confuse by stealth, advancing a vague concept called a 鈥榗apability gap鈥� while pretending they haven鈥檛 figured out a way to fill it.
It鈥檚 an obvious exercise in manipulating the timeline for political purposes, delaying inevitable F-35 consideration until after the next election by whipping out some Super Hornets as a stopgap solution.
The obvious solution is to stop pretending there鈥檚 a dire shortage of airworthy jets all of a sudden and stage an open competition which includes the F35s.
Until that happens, the Liberals are right to claim there鈥檚 a growing gap in the jet fighter file.
Unfortunately, the credibility gap in their poorly-explained behavior is bigger than any capability gap in Canada鈥檚 air force.
And that鈥檚 the Last Word鈥�
