In December 1990, fronting up to the lectern at the National Press Club's annual Christmas dinner, Treasurer Paul Keating compared himself to Placido Domingo.

"When I walk out on that stage, some performances will be better than others," he said. "But I'll always be trying to spring the economics and the politics together. Out there on the stage doing the Placido Domingo."

The effect of the speech on the political landscape was electric and immediate. For obvious reasons, it came to be known as the Placido Domingo speech, and it kicked off Keating's year-long campaign to undermine Pavarotti, Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and to usurp his much-coveted throne.

Far from an attempt to outline his policies, economic or otherwise, Keating's speech was simply an attempt to get the already sympathetic Press Gallery onside. No leadership challenge could ever be successful without the implicit support of the Gallery's Mandarins.

Given that Keating was and remains a veritable font of elegant copy, this was never going to be too much of a problem. Indeed, the Gallery was all too willing to throw the match into the tinderbox for him.

Like Keating's speech before them, Kevin Rudd's two essays for The Monthly, 'Faith in Politics' and 'Howard's Brutopia', published in October and November last year, were written with the intention of getting certain groups and factions onside.

However, where Keating was already well-known to the electorate, having been its charismatic Treasurer for nigh on seven years, Rudd was (and arguably still remains) an essentially unknown quantity. His essays were therefore designed to serve two interpenetrative functions: to outline a potential policy agenda and, by doing so, put himself forward as possible leadership material.

The first essay, 'Faith in Politics', evoked the little-known figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, theologian and participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, as a means of critiquing the increasingly perverse role of religion in politics.

At the same time, the piece outlined Rudd's own policy agenda: climate change, asylum seekers, capital punishment abroad. It showed that Rudd was well-read and highly intelligent, and perhaps even a little sassy, though his religious views sat uncomfortably with some left-leaning commentators like Phillip Adams.

The second and more important piece, 'Howard's Brutopia', added industrial relations, social welfare and the economy to Rudd's repertoire of concerns, while attacking the philosophical and practical shortcomings of Howard's neo-liberal project.

It was a fiery little salvo and it got the true believers excited: Rudd was talking about a new kind of Labor Party, a modern ALP that could reclaim the centre ground and push the Coalition so far to the right it would topple over the edge of the earth.

Rudd was suddenly in the ascendant.

Of course, Bomber was at the helm at the time, and with him the unruly albatross of his two previous electoral losses. There was the looming probability of a third, just waiting to ring itself around his neck. The Press Gallery, the Left, and all manner of Labor loyalists, were champing at the bit for some new blood on the benches. Six months earlier, Rudd had hardly been the obvious choice to take Labor to the 2007 election, white bread as he was, all starchy and crusts removed.

But his essays had changed all that, at least in the eyes of the political commentariat. Now he was out there on the stage doing the Placido Domingo. For all their intellectual rigour, the essays were ultimately written to serve a political purpose, just as Keating's speech had done over a decade earlier. Even when he was playing the philosopher, Rudd the politician was the man with the plan.

This is important to remember now, in these heady days of beige-coloured me-too-ism. There has been consternation since Rudd won the leadership that the positions outlined in his essays have been forgotten, sacrificed at the altar of political expediency.

We can highlight the brouhaha surrounding Robert McClelland's comments on capital punishment in South-East Asia, which saw Rudd rewriting Labor policy—and, apparently, his own comments in 'Faith in Politics'—in a furious attempt to offset any backlash the otherwise rather minor incident might have caused.

In the end, the politics came first. This is hardly surprising. Those who wonder what happened to Kevin 06 when Kevin 07 came to town need only remember that philosophical worldviews, like everything else in an election campaign, are liable to be dropped if there are votes to be picked up (or held on to) in their place.

What they everyone seems to be forgetting is that the articulation of these positions was the result of political expediency in the first place. Rudd is very good at playing who he needs to play when he needs to play them. He might not have the literary quality of Keating, but he lacks none of the dexterity at manipulation.

The real question is not what happened to the Kevin Rudd who wrote 'Faith in Politics' and 'Howard's Brutopia'. The answer to that question is fairly obvious. He had to go out with the other children to play politics in the rain.

The real question is far more concerning. If Rudd gets elected, which looks increasingly likely, will he come back in again or keep on playing politics? After a year-long campaign in which he has done little else, I have a sneaking suspicion I know what the answer is.

ElectionTracker, 7 November 2007