"Liberals are now projecting personal awkwardness as the new charisma..."

James Travers in the Toronto Star, commenting on Stephane Dion's election to the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Personal awkwardness as the new charisma. That suits me fine. Bring on the new era.

Travers seems to think that Dion is an anomaly in political leadership circles, but I'd argue the opposite. The Liberals in particular have always done best when they've had a nerd running the show.

Go back over the last century; they've spent huge amounts of time in power. Their list of leaders over the past 80 years includes the short, portly and verbally uncommanding MacKenzie King, the shy, elderly 'uncle' Louis St. Laurent, the bow-tied, lisping Lester Pearson, and the crooked-faced, pigeon English-speaking Jean Chretien.

I'm leaving out Pierre Trudeau, who was charismatic enough, but even his appeal was of the outsider freak variety; he was hardly the good-looking 'big-man-on-campus' type.

The two relatively recent Liberal leaders who most looked the part of the successful, assured winner were John Turner and Paul Martin.

How well did they do?

The Chretien example is particularly hilarous. The Liberals rejected him in 1984 (for Turner) and again in 2003 (for Martin); a nice set of loosing bookends for a three time majority winner. Maybe they went with Dion this time because they've finally learned their lesson (or maybe re-learned it).

The other thing is that political parties are brand names. One key thing the Liberal name is most associated with in Canada is as the party of national unity, of strong central governments, resisting the erosion of federal power by--among others--Quebec nationalists.

Michael Ignatieff opened up the constitutional issue during his run for the leadership, and came off as a bit of a sorcerer's apprentice. Dion, who's taken an enormous amount of flack battling separatists in his own province over the past 15 years, has earned his stripes on this issue. He shores up the national unity side of the Liberal party's image better than Ignatieff or even Bob Rae could.

Liberals sometimes worry about how to steal votes from Tories, but they usually win when they steal votes from the NDP. To this end, again, Dion is a smart choice. His pro-environment image and his questioning of the Afghanistan mission will help the Liberals gain ground on their left flank.

So from a Liberal perspective I don't think he's a bad choice at all.

Whether he can beat that other geek, Stephen Harper, is another matter.

But the fact that Harper now looks like such a tough nut to crack is an example of how the quiet guys can so often be underestimated.