By ABC's Jonathan Green

Photo: Kevin Rudd is swamped by crowds during a visit to the electorate of McMahon in Sydney. (Tracey Nearmy: AAP)

We seem to be watching a great national forgetting, in which everything that happened over the past three years, all its plots, gender-positionings and quaint hand-crafted kangaroos, has been swept under the rug. What a piece of politics, says Jonathan Green.

It's not quite hubris. But it certainly seems like something close.

The federal coalition's brains trust must have factored in this broad contingency: the return of Rudd. It might not have been inevitable but it was better than a fighting chance for the past three years, and it was an event that would certainly make fundamental changes to the political game.

You then have to wonder what those same senior figures, political operators of considerable cunning and experience, might have imagined that Rudd effect to be.

Did they imagine that Rudd Redux would be a carbon copy of Kevin 2010? Would he be a rephrasing of the same increasingly gun shy creature who ducked and prevaricated to his doom; a man burrowing deeper and deeper into self-created chaos, a leader lost in the crowded isolation of power?

Would new Kevin be the same guy who fumbled his opportunity on climate change, the greatest moral challenge of his and our time, and then, even stranger to report, walked away from that great political opportunity of forcing the issue to a double dissolution?

Or the reluctant reformer who fiddled with the Henry Tax review for months of apparent indecision then opted for one, just one, recommendation, the mining tax and left his government open to an inevitably ferocious attack from people with millions to spend protecting their billions.

Would it be the rerun of Kevin the failed messiah, a politician tumbling in popularity, leading a party divided against him?

What was the Coalition calculation? That a Rudd reborn would simply be all these things again: a great sum of failure?

That would have been a mistake, for Rudd 2.0 seems none of these things. And his transformation seems to have blind-sided the Coalition. Rudd has chipped away at the central pillars of conservative attack, one slogan at a time. There will be no carbon tax under a government that he leads.

Through determined Howard-class toughness, some would argue cruelty, he has an even or better chance of stopping the boats. He may end the week with an all but complete package of school funding reform.

He's even restructuring his own party, creating the possibility that a vote for Rudd might also serve as a rebuke for the ALP.

Quite a trick of the light.

This is not the Kevin of 2010. But this does contain elements of the Kevin we saw in 2011. And 2012. And for the better part of 2013.

Had the Coalition reckoned that it would face a guy who could so effectively plot and destabilise? The man who had so deep a well of bitter determination that he could willfully sabotage his own party's cause at the election brought on by his removal.

Did they not note the actions of the post-2010 Kevin Rudd, a man who could white ant for three years, stealing the wind from Gillard's sails at every even faintly positive turn and in synch with the polling cycle?

The Kevin who bided his time in a long game, running a media strategy of extraordinary finesse and to great effect, maintaining presence and momentum without the caucus numbers; a constantly menacing figure when all he had was unshakeable conviction and the threat of shadows.

Maybe missing all these things would explain the current sense of a flat-footed and suddenly reactive opposition, a team used to setting an agenda framed entirely in its own terms and having a beleaguered government obligingly follow.

Suddenly Tony Abbott faces a purposeful incumbent, a skin that Julia Gillard never filled, and there seems a new hesitation in the way Abbott accordingly approaches his foe. The engagement seems unequal now, the pace set for the first time in three years by the government.

But perhaps the Opposition did watch all this and came to an informed conclusion.

Did they bet, not unreasonably, that Australian voters, having been witness to that same three-year saga of Rudd's moral abandon could never warm to him again?

Here was a man after all who would eat his own rather than let them triumph over him, who seemed to place his own success above every other guiding principle. How could such a creature of pure political will ever prove popular?

It's hard to explain.

We seem to be watching a great national forgetting, in which everything that happened over the past three years, all its plots, gender-positionings and quaint hand-crafted kangaroos, has been swept under the rug: a time the country – perhaps sensing it was taking it nowhere - has been quick to move beyond.

Will it be Abbott's tragedy that he was a political character formed in that period, that term of bitterly contested minority government and the protracted backroom power play of two party organisations waging war; a sequence of ugly events watched by a public that seemed either bemused or appalled?

In the end, it may not say that much about us that is flattering if in our eagerness to forget three years of ugliness, we turn instead to a man whose influence lay malevolently beneath it all.

And maybe that potentially fatal Coalition self-confidence, once so certain, now looking just a little parlous, was all factored in, like everything else that has happened, all of it predicted in some great masterwork of long-plotted Kevin cunning.

What a piece of politics.

Jonathan Green presents Sunday Extra on ABC Radio National and is a former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.

The mysterious popularity of Rudd Redux - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)