Sobering Reflections

Like Sir John A. Macdonald before him, Ralph Klein kept one hand firmly on the reins of power and the other firmly on a bottle. Let go of the latter, and you might lose hold of the other:

"You get a lot of free dinners but after that you get sort of tired, especially when you quit drinking, and then it's no fun at all, so I don't know why they would want to do it," Klein said with a tiny wry grin during his annual breakfast at the Calgary Stampede, speaking about his potential successors.

He also said this about the candidates who might choose to run for his job when he steps down as Tory leader and premier by the end of the year.

"There's an old saying in politics: Anyone dumb enough to run for the job is probably too stupid to have it," said the Tory leader since 1992.

Did Ralph lose his edge when he cut back on the sauce? We'll never know if there was cause and effect, but he did turn into a tax-and-spend semi-Keynesian in his last few years in office.

Source: CTV