Gordon Brown was incandescent with his backroom staff before the general election for trusting him to talk to an ordinary voter without making a fool of himself. His inability to convince Rochdale Labour supporter Gillian Duffy of his government's immigration policy - and then to demean her as a bigot - did his party's re-election campaign no good at all.
Nick Clegg's arrogance may have persuaded him that he would make a better job than Brown, but he did no better in his Duffy moment today.
He didn't call her names, but he talked down to her to cover up his inability to answer the two simple questions she asked.
Duffy wanted to know why Clegg had chosen to join the Tories in a coalition and whether he was happy with the policies the government was carrying out.
Those are the questions that hordes of Liberal Democrat voters are already asking and that Lib Dem candidates are facing on the doorstep.
Liverpool Lib Dem leader Warren Bradley's call for Clegg to pull the party out of the Tory-led coalition was decried by a Liberal Democrat spokesman as not reflecting "the views of the wider Liberal Democrat membership."
If true, it illustrates that the wider Liberal Democrat membership is out of step with large sections of its voters.
When Duffy pointed out to Clegg that Liberal Democrat policies had been a lot like Labour policies in the past, she was pretty close to the mark.
It isn't just a Rochdale experience, where long-time Liberal Democrat MP Cyril Smith had previously been a Labour activist.
Liberal Democrat activists in many northern English towns and cities thrived on attacking Labour's record in many of its traditional strongholds and portraying their party as a progressive alternative.
They made sensational gains in local elections, especially when Labour was in government.
In a sense, there were always two Liberal Democrat parties - one, a left-leaning version, in Labour areas and the other, facing right, in Tory strongholds.
The two coexisted in harmony in the one party - they had no reason to come into sharp conflict, since there was no prospect of it entering government.
The long-drawn-out coup by the Orange Book neoliberal zealots, led by Clegg, against Charles Kennedy and then Menzies Campbell shattered that inner-party peace.
The party leadership is cosily ensconced in the Cabinet with Thatcher's children and, as Clegg himself noted, finds itself in difficulty discovering issues on which to disagree with the Cameron-Osborne Bullingdon Club boys.
Gillian Duffy finds it difficult to reconcile her memory of Liberal Democrat policies or even the party's general election manifesto with what the coalition government is doing now.
Warren Bradley is more blunt. He is tired of defending the indefensible and believes that the party has deserted its followers.
He anticipates Liberal Democrat losses in English local authority polling next month and the same may well apply in the Scottish parliamentary and Welsh assembly elections.
The coalition is placing all its electoral eggs in the big lie basket that there is no alternative to its bankers' agenda of jobs, services, pay and benefit cuts to trim the deficit.
Greater understanding of a real alternative, based on making big business and the rich pay for the crisis they created, can help turn those eggs into a right royal omelette of their electoral ambitions.
