Choose your poison on Labor leadership Julia Gillard visits schools and even children throw sandwiches at her. Kevin Rudd visits supermarkets and gets thrown only kisses. PRIME minister Kevin Rudd helped destroy the Labor Party. Yet only backbencher Kevin Rudd can now save Labor seats. That last bit is what Rudd wanted to show in Geelong last Friday. That's what he wanted to shove into colleagues' faces - those scenes of huggy voters - shouting they wanted him back. Prime Minister Julia Gillard visits schools and even children throw sandwiches at her. Rudd visits supermarkets, and gets thrown only kisses. How cynically his Geelong coup was organised. On Tuesday Newspoll showed the Gillard Government's vote down to a devastating 42 per cent of the preferred vote, against the Coalition's 58. As Labor panicked, Rudd popped up everywhere to show he, at least, was up for the fight. He gave a press conference and interviews and, on Wednesday, the Herald Sun's Phillip Hudson reported an anonymous Labor leak that the party had given up defending three Victorian marginal seats, including Corangamite in Geelong. In that same story was another leak that Rudd, on the other hand, was not running up any white flag and would visit Geelong on Friday. What a coincidence: that was the same day Gillard met car makers in Melbourne. What a contrast for that night's TV news: a deflated Prime Minister talking blah-blah about a dying industry, while Rudd got the messiah treatment from voters down the road. True, there's a con in this contrast. Rudd as prime minister was a disaster who demonstrated the Left's worst failings, preferring seeming to doing, and spending to saving. Most of Gillard's worst problems were inherited from him - boat people, blown Budgets, a reputation for waste and the impossible expectations unleashed by hyping the warming scare. Unless Labor learns from that Rudd disaster, it cannot recover. Labor must never again decide policies by the sanctimonious posture its leader can strike rather than hard-headed assessments of facts, costs and consequences. And yet Rudd himself shows no sign of having repented his show-boating, mad spending and windy moralising. Those failings plunged Labor into this catastrophe but, when Gillard took Rudd's job, she also took his garbage, taking from him the stink of failure. She also made this notorious office bully - an arrogant and selfish man who made an RAAF stewardess cry - seem instead a victim. Watching Rudd now sell himself as a sharing, caring cleanskin is enough to make Labor MPs vomit. But they can't afford to care now about the prime minister he'd again make. Many must work out how they'll survive a September election likely to wipe out half of Labor's seats. Gillard is broken, and Rudd the campaigner is the only possible barrier between the Liberals and a landslide victory. The Liberals know it, as do most in Labor. Rudd is popular and Gillard poison, even if Rudd doesn't again booby-trap her campaign. All that stops Rudd replacing her are the union bosses who control the votes keeping Gillard in office; greedy men who'd rather have their discredited puppet lead Labor to devastation than let a politician beyond their control lead it to hope. But the Australian Workers Union (once led by Workplace Minister Bill Shorten) and Transport Workers Union can keep out Rudd only while MPs fear them more than they fear losing their job. In fact, two-thirds of the MPs likely to lose their seats are Gillard supporters, who may yet realise Rudd is their lesser evil. Still, that Rudd last week campaigned for their support proves he does not yet have it. Indeed, his antics will make some despise him even more, but so what? They know Rudd might save some seats, and that may matter more than that he killed their party.