Yes, Virginia, This IS an Election Campaign

A week or so ago, Harper was hollering that the Liberals were going to force an election Canadians didn't want. Meanwhile, the Tory election campaign was beginning in earnest: personal attack ads, money flying out of federal coffers, popular-issue policy announcements galore, cabinet shuffle, campaign boot camp for Tory campaign organizations, desperate attempts to reinvigorate old scandals... they even got a military commander to slag the Liberals. This is full-blown, serious campaigning. We are in an election campaign. The gloves are off. The fighter is fighting hard, and he's fighting dirty.

But wait. There's only one guy in the ring.

Where's our Red Book? Our bold new policy initiatives? What is our new leader doing to show the country that he's The Man? (Step 1: Create an ad showing Stephane Dion speaking perfect English.) What are we doing? Ignatieff is talking about pharmaceutical uses of Afghanistan's opium... a worthy initiative, but hardly the right stuff to win an election. We won a vote on Kyoto, which I think confuses most Canadians. (It confuses me.) We're up in arms that PMSH slagged Goodale. We're expending a pile of energy on the NDP, who are like a gnat in this fight. Why aren't the party heavyweights out there undermining all the crap the Tories claim to be doing? Where's Bob Rae?

At the moment, both Ignatieff and Dion have an image problem: their voices sound whiny. They need to go to an image consultant, as Joe Clark and Maureen McTeer finally did, and pick up their act. Campaigns aren't about brainiac ideas; they're about effective PR.

We need to pick an issue that we can use to beat the Tories, and we need to decimate them. They're vulnerable. They're laughably, incompetently vulnerable. We expressed all this lofty idealism that we didn't want old Liberal baggage and so we picked a leader who wasn't affiliated with the good old boys who were so successful at winning elections. Bring 'em back, or bring on a new winning strategy, but let's not just sit here being outclassed by the American-style steamroller Conservative PR machine.

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