"The button and the button hole drew closer. Tantalizingly close. It was a Sistine Chapel ceiling-like scene."

It's funny to think that it's been over a year now since I first hopped aboard the Liberal leadership train. I try not to write about matters partisan too often on the blog--in my experience for every good political blog out there there are five dreadful ones, and however witty I might think my thoughts on Natural Resources minister Gary Lunn are, I don't fancy my odds.

Anyway, part and parcel of being on a national leadership campaign is hearing the same lines over and over. Stump speeches are by their nature rehearsed and repeated, and not particularly focused on winning the hearts and minds of the full-time campaign jockeys. Gerard, for his part, was pretty good about juggling at least the order of some of the lines and rotating some of the hoarier old chestnuts into and out of the lineup. I can't imagine this was done for the benefit of the glazed-eye staffer, standing off and behind the crowd of appreciative Liberals, clipboard in hand. But I can dream.

If it was just your candidate's stump over and over, it would be an understandable imposition. But the other ten candidates also found a way to get into your head. There was the media monitoring, the watching panels on Mike Duffy, the candidate debates, the attendance at other candidates' events. You wound up hearing Michael Ignatieff more times than is considered healthy for a person of your age and weight. It built a sort of brotherhood (and sisterhood) that ran across all the campaigns: that one unifying characteristic to us all was that we'd all heard speeches a thousand times that were supposed to be heard once. And it inevitably came up over inter-campaign drinks; one thing I remember clearly is that we were united in pity for the Dion people, who it was universally agreed had to deal with the least variation from their candidate. For them, it was "dree peelirs" morning, noon and night for eight hard months. We were deathly sick of it and we only caught a fraction of the stumpage that they had to absorb.

Which isn't to say your own guy got off scot-free. However fond you were of the guy, after a while you get a little tired of hearing how Canada is "the Prince Edward Island of the world" (and waiting for the appreciative chuckle which, oddly, the line never failed to get), or that "Stephen Harper doesn't have five priorities; he has one priority--his re-election," or the particularly Gerardian zeal which "Je suis très fier..." rolled off his tongue.

A fixture of these conversations, however, was the inevitable imitate-Ken-Dryden contest.

I have decided that Ken Dryden does not, strictly speaking, talk. He expounds. He invites us into his dreams. He directs a rhetorical drizzle into each and every square on the waffle, systematically filling rows like a focussed nine-year-old at the breakfast table.

It is the mark of an amateur Dryden impersonator to simply talk slowly. While delivery is a core component of building a realistic Drydenism, it is nothing without the underlying content. Back when Dryden was Minister of Social Development, Paul Wells coined the nickname "Treebeard" for him, which married Dryden's arboreal scale and his then-present beard with his deep-voiced, leisurely-delivered pronouncements. Treebeard, however, failed to speak using a patois built out of references to playoff victories over the Philadelphia Flyers and almost mystical-sounding exhortations of patriotism, and for that it will always be a flawed comparison.

It is to my considerable disappointment that I cannot recall someone taking on a thoroughly daring tack with a Dryden impersonation; I think we played it fairly conservatively and just stuck to repeating turns of phrase from his stump-speech bag of tricks. There would have been real potential for getting people to snort beer through their noses had someone tried to do Ken Dryden ordering a cheeseburger at a drive-thru. Alas.

This, however, comes close: the man himself describing the process of, wait for it, putting on a pair of jeans. To the average Canadian, this might seem merely offbeat. To we, the embattled minority that had to listen to these guys for half a lifetime, it is like a new album from a favorite old artist.