Masterful?

Everyone agrees the Tories have run a masterful campaign, notably in Stephen Harper's efforts to assuage voters' fears by moving to the "centre," which is to say by promising very little that would distinguish his party from the Liberals. Everyone also agrees this has been -- so far -- a relatively civil, policy-based campaign, with sharply defined differences between the parties. These can't both be true. In fact neither is. Far from being the candidate of "change," Harper is doing everything he can to reassure people nothing much would change under a Tory government. Those aren't policies he's announcing -- they're policiettes, dainty little morsels of cash targeted at strategic interest groups, in much the same style one associates with a traditional Liberal. I mean, honestly: tax-free bus passes? The two clearest policy differences between the parties, over the GST and daycare, on closer inspection turn out to be less significant than they might seem. The GST cut is exactly the sort of crowdpleaser you could imagine the Grits running on in different circumstances, had the issue not become permanently radioactive for the party thanks to their previous GST pledge. And the daycare debate, while real, is nevertheless about the design of a new and costly social program, on whose virtues the two parties are agreed. Well, all right: still, masterful, innit? Look at all those admiring press notices: from Lawrence Martin, Jim Travers, Susan Riley ... Er, hang on. They're all fine writers, but they're not exactly ... conservative, are they? The reason they're singing his praises is that he's giving them what they want, which is a Liberal government minus the corruption. It's a funny way to "win" an election -- by conceding virtually every one of your opponents' arguments. And. Even as a matter of pure realpolitik, it hasn't proved all that successful. Compare the Tories' actual performance this time out with last time. We are now five weeks into the campaign -- four, if you leave out the Christmas break -- and they are still trailing the Liberals, albeit by less than they were. The most recent poll -- Decima -- has it 32-30 for the Grits. This, after the Liberals' worst week of the campaign, culminating in the unprecedented announcement that the RCMP were investigating the government on suspicion of a criminal breach of the securities laws. When the next batch of polls come out, we may find the Tories have pulled ahead (UPDATE: Monday's Ipsos/Global is the first to show this.) -- again, that's in week five of the election. In 2004, they did the trick inside of two weeks: 13 points back on May 20, the Tories first took the lead on June 4, and held it until as late as the 18th (the date of the infamous "Paul Martin supports child pornography?" press release that began the Tory collapse). That was before Gomery, before Jean Brault, before Belinda, before the Murphy-Grewal affair, before the serial policy disasters of the last 18 months, before the image of Paul Martin as a weak-kneed, unprincipled windbag had really set in. Moreover, it was just weeks after the Tories' founding convention, with a new leader most people had barely heard of and a platform that had been cobbled together in great haste, and looked it. TODAY THE Tories have all the advantages. Then they had none. Sure, they had the benefit of the McGuinty budget, shortly before the election. But by June 4 they had also gone through the Scott Reid (bilingualism) and Rob Merrifield (abortion) flaps. Yet the "scary" Tories of 2004 outperformed the "masterful" Libservative smoothies they have become -- at least until the last ten days of the campaign, when they threw it all away. Could that superior early campaign performance have had something to do with the fact that, in 2004, the Tories still had something to say? Take a look at that 2004 platform. At the time, I thought it was overly cautious. Today it looks positively radical. The "scary" Tories would have eliminated the 22 per cent middle tax rate on those earning less than $70,000, effectively cutting the marginal tax rate for the majority of tax filers to the bottom rate of 16 per cent (now 15 per cent). They promised to "eliminate $4-billion per year in subsidies to business ... in order to reduce taxes for all businesses." Spending was to be held to 3 per cent growth annually, with a legislated requirement to pay down debt every year. A Registered Lifetime Savings Plan would allow contributions of up to $5000 annually, with no tax on withdrawals. The CRTC's mandate would have been sharply reduced (okay, that one was in the candidates' handbook). And so on. Now it's true that the Tories did not release their full platform until June 5. Nevertheless, a reasonably well-informed voter would have known from the start that the Tories planned deep tax cuts, not least because the Liberals kept telling them so. And the Tory climb continued: the peak came on June 9, when SES Research reported they led the Grits by 5 points, 37-32. Had they aggressively promoted the platform -- had they run ads, for example, telling voters they would cut the middle-class family's tax bill by $1000 a year -- who knows where they might have ended up? Instead, they barely mentioned it, leaving a void for the Liberal attack ads to fill. The first of those ads -- the one with the gun pointed at the viewers -- hit the airwaves June 9. The current election shows some of the same trends. The big move for the Tories, as I've noted elsewhere, came in the week after they unveiled their daycare plan. They were going nowhere before then, and they haven't done much since -- it's more been a matter of Liberal mistakes than anything else. Now we enter the most dangerous phase of the campaign, when the Grits haul out their heavy artillery, and the Tories better be prepared to go positive in response. Yes, positive: The lesson in both elections is that when the Tories offer a genuine alternative to the Liberals, they bring voters over. When they don't, voters stay put. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Those wishing to relive those thrilling days of Election 2004 can start here. Wikipedia has an excellent timeline here, and comprehensive polling data is here.