EDMONTON - Danielle Smith was five months old when Peter Lougheed toppled a dynasty in 1971 and created one of his own.
Thirty-eight years later, Smith, the new leader of Alberta's Wildrose Alliance, is looking ahead to 2010 as the year to lay the groundwork for a revolution of her own and take down the party that Peter built.
To do it, she plans to copy some elements of the master's breakthrough blueprint.
"We've embarked on a massive logistical undertaking in building this party from where we were a year ago," Smith said in a year-end interview from a temporary office in Calgary. Permanent digs will be ready in the new year.
"We're not going to get caught flat-footed. We're going to be ready to contest an election with a full slate of candidates by 2011."
These are heady times for the fledgling right-of-centre party, even though it has just one byelection win by the party's lone legislature member - Paul Hinman in the former Tory stronghold of Calgary-Glenmore.
But recent polls have the Wildrose surging past Premier Ed Stelmach's Progressive Conservatives as the party of choice among the majority of voters. They're also ahead of the Alberta Liberals and the New Democrats.
Stelmach's Tories have been hammered of late. Critics accuse them of mismanaging health care and the province's finances, which have sunk into the red because of falling oil and natural gas prices.
Wildrose, said Smith, has blossomed from a few hundred members a year ago to more than 13,000. There are 40 constituency associations. By next summer, the party aims to have organizations in every riding and will then begin to select candidates.
"People have been shaken loose from their traditional voting patterns," said Smith. We see it in some of the poll results, though the polls that matter are the ones heading into election day."
A vote is still two to three years away, depending on when Stelmach wants to call it. When it comes, the Conservatives will have held power for four consecutive decades.
Like the Wildrose Alliance, they had to start from scratch.
Lougheed, a lawyer trained in business at Harvard, was 36 when he took over the Tories in 1965. They were leaderless, with no legislature members, had red ink on the books and were taking on a Social Credit dynasty that had been in power for decades.
By the late 1960s, the party that had come to power in the Depression on the promise of revolutionary economic change had become a staid caretaker of a laissez-faire economy, content to ride the coattails of oil and gas revenues.
But support was slipping. In the 1967 general election, Lougheed gained a toehold - six seats, later to grow to 10 through defections and byelections.
In the run-up to the 1971 vote, popular Premier Ernest Manning quit and was replaced by the bookish, bespectacled, gentlemanly but uncharismatic Harry Strom. He was a man of the land, a rancher and municipal councillor who loved politics, family and horses.
Alberta was a growing province but one still rooted in 1950s traditions. Newspaper classifieds broke down want ads into jobs for men (managers, truck drivers) and for women (seamstresses, dicta-typists).
One female columnist urged her sisters to greet the working hubby at day's end by cooking dinner in a paper bikini. An ad urged readers to check out the latest Reader's Digest in which a "leading psychiatrist" cautioned parents not to call little Susy a tomboy or tell Timmy he wasn't good at sports, lest they become sexually confused and turn gay.
When Strom called the election for August 30, pundits predicted the Social Credit would lose seats but stay in power.
They were about to run into a buzz saw.
Just as Social Credit founder William Aberhart used radio to reach a mass audience, the telegenic Lougheed was ready to exploit television and ad-style political marketing. And TV was ripe to exploit. Almost every home had a box, but cable was slow to come. Everyone was tuned in but captive to two channels.
Lougheed looked the part: a Kennedyesque figure who, in his law school days, resembled Gene Kelly in "Singing in the Rain."
His team spent most of its meagre ad budget on TV spots to gain maximum exposure. Print and billboard ads carried the simple message that it was time for a change: "Now!" with a picture of Lougheed striding out to meet the public.
"These were the Mad Men of their day," said Keith Brownsey, who teaches political science at Calgary's Mount Royal University, referring to the cigarette-smoking Madison Avenue pitchmen of the modern-day TV series.
"They knew how to sell Lougheed. Television had been a medium that had not been exploited by the Social Credit party, or by too many political parties in Canada."
But they weren't just selling sizzle.
For years, Lougheed had built the party from the ground up. From town to town, city to city, he would go to the mayor's office, the chamber of commerce, the town hall meetings. "Who are your best and brightest?" he would ask as he looked for candidates on the so-called rubber chicken banquet circuit.
There were policy forums in small centres and large ones. In the legislature, Lougheed was determined to make his fellow Tories a government in waiting, having them propose policy as well as criticize it.
When the election began, he hit every riding, his car preceded by a clown on stilts who would rev up the local folk, let them know someone big was arriving close behind. He worked main street, shook hands and handed out roses.
He was selling a new message of spending to improve education and diversify the province. He also wanted to let Pierre Trudeau's federal Liberal government know Alberta would no longer be a genuflecting junior partner in Confederation.
"This (win) was no fluke. This was no great sea change in the Alberta electorate. This was Peter Lougheed going out and selling himself and selling the Conservative party," said Brownsey.
His opponents didn't know what hit them. Belatedly, they tried to get Strom out to as many ridings as possible. But the 57-year-old rancher was weak for TV, so they used radio and tried newspaper ads to pillory the Tories as free-spending, pie-eyed dreamers.
In the final week, with internal poll results flatlining, they brought out the big gun - Manning. In a rally at Edmonton's Jubilee Auditorium, 2,700 diehards in straw hats waved signs and danced as Dixieland bands played "When the Saints go Marching In" under billowy clouds of balloons. They cheered as their leaders took turns lipping off the upstart Lougheed.
Don't allow Albertans to vote in "a Madison Avenue glamour guy with an Ultra-Brite TV toothpaste smile" and "Avon Lady Charm!" thundered Manning.
A vote for Lougheed, commanded Strom, "would be the first step in the takeover of Alberta by the socialists!"
Manning was left breathless by the Jubilee spectacle. "I'd say Social Credit is just getting its second breath for another 30 years," he said.
Five days later, the party was on a slab. At election headquarters, they stopped marking returns on the big boards as the Tories racked up 49 seats to 25 for the Socreds. The NDP's Grant Notley also won.
Strom made a quick concession speech, received a golden horse statue and was packed off on a plane back to his hometown of Medicine Hat. He left the horse behind.
Lougheed was like a rock star, swarmed by supporters in Calgary. Hours later, when his plane touched down in Edmonton, hundreds of cheering supporters rocked the fuselage.
Strom couldn't pin down a definitive reason for the loss. Defeated candidate Don Hamilton said it wasn't just one thing. "The people," he sighed, "wanted change."
Thirty-eight years later, looking for parallels can be a mug's game.
Like Lougheed, Smith is young, photogenic and telegenic and has built up a TV profile as a television journalist and as the former Alberta head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
And like Strom, Stelmach, 59, is viewed as a bookish man of the land who rambles when he talks, and who may be able to manage but doesn't have the electrifying, galvanizing qualities to lead.
"That is a parallel," said Doreen Barrie, political scientist at the University of Calgary. "I suppose you could also argue the Conservatives now seem to be a party out of touch with contemporary Alberta, and that was true of Social Credit in 1971."
But unlike Strom, she noted, Stelmach delivered the Tories a massive majority in the 2008 election. And, unlike Strom, Stelmach is determined to master the new media of Web TV and Twitter.
Brownsey said comparisons to 1971 are folly because it's like looking at apples and oranges.
Lougheed, he said, had built a big-tent party, close to the political centre, appealing to a growing, more-urbanized Alberta.
But Wildrose, he noted, is further to the right of the Tories as fiscal and social conservatives. Christian groups looking to exert greater influence on the political process played a major role at the party's leadership convention last fall, backing defeated Smith rival Mark Dyrholm.
"Danielle Smith's brand is tainted," said Brownsey. "Once they announce their policies, their donors and membership will take off and run in the other direction."
Barrie agreed. "I don't see how they could appeal to Albertans by being more right wing (than the Tories). Could they lower taxes more? Could there be more deregulation? There's very little room to manoeuvre."
Smith said she didn't sign up to lead a fringe protest party, but one that appeals to Albertans' core values.
"(Voters) want us to focus on good governance and a climate that encourages free enterprise and regulation that is as least intrusive as possible. I don't think that those values are out of step with the average Albertan."
Smith said the key message from Lougheed is the importance of shoe leather. There is no substitute for walking down main streets and through coffee shops, talking to Albertans, the ones former premier Ralph Klein called "Henry and Martha."
"I think that is the way politics is done successfully in this province," she said. "That will be the bulk of what I do over the next couple of years."
The rubber hits the road in 2010.
Or, more accurately, the rubber chicken.