In the wake of the NDP's disastrous showing in the Ontario election, many are asking how it happened.
The leadership has blamed strategic voting as the reason why votes went to the Liberals, causing the NDP to lose party status.
Certainly strategic voting was a disaster and should be condemned.
But it was only because the NDP were so similar to the Liberals that vote swapping even made sense. If the NDP had run on a strong left platform the Liberals could not have competed with them for votes.
But Hampton and the rest of the ONDP leadership were unwilling to break with either the politics or the legacy of Bob Rae.
Hampton would also not openly break with some of the most appalling Tory policies.
He refused to commit to reversing the 21.6% cut to welfare payments.
Nor would he commit to eliminating workfare.
Attacks on welfare recipients were in fact part of the Bob Rae legacy. Under Rae welfare payments were frozen even as inflation reduced their value.
It was Rae who first mused about the possibility of bringing in workfare before even Mike Harris. And it was the NDP government that hired welfare cops to harass the poor.
Hampton also wouldn't commit to reopening a single hospital. Instead he praised the Saskatchewan model of "converting" hospitals into community health centres.
However "converting" is just code for closing them down and eliminating services.
But perhaps worst of all, the NDP had actively discouraged extra-parliamentary resistance to the Tories.
During the Days of Action movement which drew some of the largest demonstrations in Canadian history, the NDP leadership and closely allied "Pink Paper" unions maneuvered to shut them down.
They saw them as a distraction from building electoral support for the NDP.
In the lead up to the second series of teachers' strikes in 1998, Hampton begged them to not go on strike. He feared that the Tories would use a strike to call an election on "who runs the province the government or the unions."
Even Dalton McGuinty didn't go as far as opposing a strike outright. He simply stated that he knew "teachers will do the right thing."
Is it any wonder that so many teachers worked on Liberal election campaigns?
The result was terrible confusion among working people.
Both the NDP and the Liberals accepted so many of the premises laid out by Mike Harris, that many workers drew the logical conclusion that it made sense to vote for the real thing.
Those workers who were conscious of what the Tories represented saw little difference between the Liberals and the NDP. They drew what seemed the logical conclusion and voted -- or worse, worked for -- the Liberals.
Sadly, the party leadership has not broken from this approach in the weeks since the election. NDP House Leader Tony Silipo, echoing Bob Rae, has called for some form of formal coalition with the Liberals.
Even the NDP's director of strategic planning, Gerald Caplan, accepted the logic of the need to move right, supposedly because workers had been bought off.
"Workers and the middle class identify their interests with those of the orporate world ... When the NDP champions the poor and the vulnerable ... it marginalizes itself, driving its working-class constituency ever further."
Caplan followed this view to its logical conclusion:
"The left has always talked of entitlements and rights. Now it must add responsibilities and obligations ... People who can work must work -- if there is work. A social democratic party that is afraid to say so is forever doomed."
In other words implement workfare and move to the right.
But then what is left to distinguish the NDP from any other party?