KRudd - a nervous spin merchant ...

... but the Liberals face tough decisions in the lead up to this year's Federal election.

Excerpt from Herald Sun:

Kevin Rudd's a nervous spin-merchant

6 June 2007
...

It's that - crudely put - Rudd is a nervous, say-anything spin-merchant, the creature of a bunch of wild-eyes who can't be trusted near expensive machinery.

He's nervous?

Yes. See Rudd's lip-licking sweatiness when he challenged for Labor's leadership.

See his trembling legs at his press conference on his links to Brian Burke; his frantic (private) abuse of reporters who criticised him; his shaky hand and shakier voice when accused by reporter Laurie Oakes on television of having a "glass jaw".

As for Rudd saying almost anything, especially in a fluster, hear him first deny all and then blame his staff after being rumbled agreeing to a fake dawn service for an Anzac Day TV show.

Hear him excuse away his taxpayer-provided four-wheel drive by falsely claiming the Government wouldn't get him a hybrid.

Hear him prove his Labor credentials by telling an exaggerated childhood story of a heartless landlord evicting the penniless Rudds almost the day after his father died.

Worse, hear him now vow to "close the gap" between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal life expectancy "within a generation" - a promise as vain and empty as Bob Hawke's boast that he'd end all child poverty by 1990.

And then there's Rudd's fabulous spinning.

Marvel as the Labor leader spins the embarrassing story of his millionaire wife stripping employees of basic conditions for just 45 cents an hour into a New Age weepie about a working couple's struggle to juggle careers.

Watch him spin a union heavy's gloating about screwing bosses into a story of how tough Rudd threw a union boof out of Labor for his bad language.

Observe Rudd the Frequent Flyer now posing as a green, with a glib promise to slash our emissions by an impossible 60 per cent by 2050 - and not a single clue as to how he'd do it without driving the country broke.

Then, of course, there are those ideologues he fronts.

Note that this friendless man of the Right was backed for the leadership by the Left.

Note that his environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, is a global-warming zealot who wanted cuts to our emissions by 2020 to be so severe the Prime Minister's Emissions Task Force estimated last week that to meet them we'd have to convert every power station to nuclear and take every car off the road.

Note that his industry spokesman, Kim Carr, is a Socialist-Left firebrand so radical that his own colleagues call him Kim il-Carr.

Note that Rudd's team already includes three former ACTU presidents, and after the election will be joined by current ACTU boss, Greg Combet, as well as senior union officials Bill Shorten, Richard Marles and Doug Cameron.

And note in particular how Rudd let his powerful deputy, the Left's Julia Gillard, write a workplace policy so ludicrously union-friendly that it's had to be toned down almost week by week.

No wonder militant union leaders now crow how they'll cut loose under a Rudd government.

Here's the Electrical Trades Union's Victorian boss, Dean Mighell: "I welcome particularly the policy that lets us put anything back in agreements that we can coerce our friendly employers to put back in. That's going to be fun."

Here's Joe McDonald, assistant state secretary of the CFMEU building union, allegedly caught on tape telling an employer: "You wait till f...ing Kevin Rudd's elected. I'll be back."
...

The hard fact remains that John Howard has about six weeks left. Six weeks more of polls as terrible as all those of the past several months - this Galaxy one excluded - and the Prime Minister may and must consider quitting.

It will be time then to hand over to Peter Costello, and never mind the risk that the Treasurer, never wildly popular, will lead the Liberals to an even worse defeat.

See - KRudd the spin merchant - but Howard faces challenges.