Tough Times

So the new Tory negative ad campaign extravaganza was recently released into the wild. It is an interesting time to be releasing expensive negative propaganda which seems to indicate there is a rather interesting thought process going on in the Tory War Room these last few days. (More surprising is that there is any thought process going on at all, really.)

I want to analyze what precipitated this and what must be behind it. First, these ads comes shortly after Ignatieff was officially knighted the new Liberal leader. Of course, their first objective is to beat his reputation into a pulp (as they managed to do to his predecessor) but maybe they didn't realize he had already won by acclamation. They couldn't have missed their timing this poorly, so the delay must have intentional. Could they have been worried a negative ad campaign on Ignatieff would have freaked the Liberal party out so much, before the convention, that the Grits would be forced to find someone else, someone possibly better, possibly impeccible, if the negative ad campaign was such an instant and undeniable success?

So they waited, but the Liberals climbed in the polls, passing the CPC nationally while also leaving them in a tough situation in Quebec. Maybe it was just an outlier, but poll after poll with the same trend: Liberals rising, Tories sinking.

The Oliphant Commission is now underway and their former leader might be getting into a lot of hot water, with no certainty of the outcome and who knows where the collateral damage will hit. The Tory War Room must be thinking: it's time to clog the airwaves and the print media with how horrible Ignatieff really is. How dare he think he can even suggest he wants to be Prime Minister? A Liberal leader become Prime Minister? He must be arrogant!

All of the above, plus the economy is not soaring back to the heights it once knew. The public is not seeing results in the promised "shovel ready" spending. The Harper Government needs to change the channel and fast.

So desperate does as desperate always has - he goes back to his prior ways of finding solace in what he knows best. So the Tories find themselves, once again, paying for negative ad campaigns, spinning tireless party rhetoric, and the underlying belief that no one, not even the Liberal party, deserves to form a government more than desperate Stephen Harper.