Kevin's turn

Kevin Rudd with Annabel Crabb tonight was clearly more relaxed and comfortable than "Hah.Hah.Hah" Abbott, especially in the first half of the show.   There's no doubt that, despite his terrible reputation for being a difficult boss, he is close to his family, and there is no reason to question his assessment that he considers them his closest friends.   His daughter seemed, quite frankly, smarter than the Abbott daughters. (For one thing, she doesn't dress like Sporty Spice all the time, like one of Tony's daughter does, where ever she is.*)  And he has a nice dog: seeing him interact with it was definitely a humanising touch.     

But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous.  It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership.  (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010.  Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)

I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from.  On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again.  He certainly failed to give a good impression of change  in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign.   I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls. 

But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected.  I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human.    I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench.  Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.

*  Too bitchy?  :)