God, the Conservatives are dumb

This might be the strangest Canadian election that I've ever seen. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party is running an almost blindingly shitty, strategy-free campaign. Worse, their main message of stopping a Liberal-NDP coalition supported by Bloc Quebecois, could potentially backfire and actually legitimize a coalition if the Tories fail to win their precious majority. Having said that, watching the fake outrage from every Tory politico and asshole blogger is going to be hilarious if and when it happens.

But the awfulness of the Harper campaign isn't reflected in the polls. The Conservatives have maintained a double-digit lead consistently throughout. Because of the concentration of their vote in western Canada and the lack of any upward movement in Quebec, I still think that they're shy of a majority and could possibly lose seats. But they really have no business doing as well as they are. Of the four elections that the Tories have run with Harper, this is far and away their worst. Oddly, it might also be their most successful.

Michael Ignatieff, as hopeless as he is, is running a far better campaign than anyone believed was possible, as close to fuck-up free as any Liberal campaign in recent memory. However, he's not getting any traction with voters. It's just as likely that he'll lose seats as gain them, regardless of how their popular vote turns out. And the Grits can't afford to lose many seats and remain a credible national force. Their seats are so heavily concentrated in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, that any erosion in those centers calls their continued political viability into serious question.

The real story of this campaign is what makes it truly bizarre. Jack Layton and the NDP are rapidly becoming the heroes of this story. This week, their polling exploded, pulling into second place nationally and actually leading in Quebec, where they've won a grand total of one seat in their entire history. If Jack's numbers hold over the next ten days - and I'm not sure that they will - this race becomes impossible to predict. Depending on where that support is concentrated, they could conceivably become the official Opposition in the next Parliament and effectively destroy the Liberals forever.

Destroying the Liberals forever is something that Stephen Harper has been thinking about his entire adult life. If you can eliminate the Grits from the political equation, the thinking goes, and reduce the influence of the separatist Bloc in Quebec, you wind up with an ideologically binary electorate. Without the Liberals as a factor, both the NDP and the Conservatives move closer to the political center, where most of the country is, to fill the void the Grits leave behind. It's a fine theory, and one that I think is ultimately going to be a reality in this country, regardless of how this election plays out.

Now, if the Tories' long-term goal is to finish off the Liberals and ensure that they never return, they need the NDP to do that. No Conservative, particularly one as personally divisive as Harper is, is going to draw away enough Grits to wipe their party out. But the NDP can. And by the looks of it, they are.

So what is Harper doing? Attacking Jack Layton is fucking what!



Whoever came up with this ad shouldn't just be fired, he or she should be killed. In front of the rest of the staff, so they'll know not to do anything this goddamn dumb in the future. If Harper has any brains at all, he'll round up everyone that had anything to do with this monstrosity, slit their bellies open and feast on their warm innards as the horrified survivors look on and worry about the fate that awaits them as Bruce Carson and his harem of comely whores laugh and cheer from the VIP section. That kind of thing worked in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and there's no reason to believe that it won't work in the Conservative Party of Canada.

The very last thing Team Harper should be doing is going negative on the NDP. First, they're knocking down the Bloc several notches and threatening the very survival of the Liberals. Second, the Dippers don't threaten as many Tory seats as they do the Grits and the Bloc. Third, the county has pretty clearly fallen in love with Jack Layton, and why shouldn't it? He started this campaign three-quarters of a goddamn corpse, both politically and physically, and he's risen to kick ass, take names and save federalism in Quebec. He's become the happy ending in every fucking Bruce Springsteen song you've ever heard.

Harper gains nothing from attacking Layton and reinforces his own negative impressions that he's an angry prick that sold his soul to some Calgary ward-heeler in 1985. This is about as far from Blue Sweater Steve as we're ever gonna get, folks.

Besides, while Harper can go negative on Layton, Ignatieff has no other choice but to. Unless Iggy starts ripping apart Jack's swollen prostate with a sharpened bamboo poles in the next week, he's dead. So for Christ's sake, let Ignatieff do the dirty work and carry the risks of blowback that come with it. As John Ibbitson and Stephen Chase point out in today's Globe, these are as follows;

But Mr. Ignatieff pays a price in three ways by taking on the NDP. First, every minute and dollar spent pointing out the contradictions embedded within the NDP platform is a minute and dollar diverted from the effort to close the yawning gap between the Liberals and the front-running Conservatives under Stephen Harper.

Second, accusing the NDP of making reckless promises that could damage the economy and wreck government finances simply echoes the criticism that the Conservatives level at the Liberals.

Finally, and most importantly, the more Mr. Ignatieff takes on Mr. Layton, the more he renders the NDP chief credible as a potential leader of the official opposition.

An Ignatieff-Layton battle royal is a contest that Iggy was born to lose. More important, it's one that he's completely unprepared for. He went into this race expecting to take on Harper from the left. Finishing the campaign by fending off Layton from the right throws whatever strategic planning the Liberal war room did right out the fucking window. I'll bet you anything that Liberal national headquarters is the very picture of panic, chaos and the scene of even more brutal than usual infighting right now.

If I was soulless and stupid enough to be working for the Conservative national campaign, I'd be telling them to make Stephen Harper Jack Layton's very best friend in the goddamned world. Each and every Harper speech would include a section about how inspiring Jack Layton's story is and how well his political and medical comeback speaks of his character. If Harper actually has functional human tear ducts, I'd see if I could talk him into getting a little misty while doing it. Maybe I can get him to remember how War of the Worlds didn't have the happy ending he was hoping for, but I'd get him to look like a reasonable facsimile of a human being when talking about his pal, Jack.

Sure, I'd let the candidates and some of the sleazier Cabinet ministers assassinate Layton at the constituency level, but nothing negative would come out of Harper's mouth and I sure as fuck wouldn't attack him by name on national television. Unlike our American cousins, Canadians have a long history of voting for vicious bastards, but that's no reason for the Tories to push their luck, particularly when they only make negligible gains for their trouble.

Michael Ignatieff is going to look like a desperate and sleazy son of a bitch going after Layton next week, but he's doing it out of necessity. Harper, on the other hand, wants to look that way because it seems to be his natural default setting.

And from a long-term strategic perspective, that's an almost mechanized form of dumb. For Harper to attack Layton only helps Ignatieff. And the sooner the Liberals get put out of everybody's misery, the sooner the Conservatives come to a long-term, sustainable political realignment in this country that benefits them more than anybody else.