But how to explain the ferocity, the single-mindedness of their scorn? Jeffrey Simpson writes that Martin is off to the worst start of any Prime Minister since Joe Clark. His government is already "out of gas," writes Chantal Hebert, and sliding towards a "debacle." Lawrence Martin wonders why the Prime Minister is spending so much time on defence, and not on offence. And Paul Wells -- well, the kindest thing he can find to say is that Martin is "trapped between a past he'd rather disown and a future whose contours elude even his handpicked experts." But then, Paul never did like Paul.

Two common themes run throughout. On the one hand, Martin has no vision, no ideas, no plan. All those years plotting to seize power, and now that they have it they don't have a clue what to do with it. My goodness, here it is, almost four months since he took office, and he hasn't reformed Parliament, repaired Canada-US relations, or solved the health care issue. In other words, he has been all talk and no action.

Except, that is, on the sponsorship file, where the consensus is that he has been altogether too active. He's either cynically distancing himself from a government whose achievements he should trumpet, or he's naively thrashing about in waters that were best left undisturbed. He has bombed the bridges to the party's past, writes Simpson, antagonizing the Chretien old guard even as he has alienated the public service. Why endlessly remind people of the scandal, scolds Lawrence Martin: Better to follow the example of that canny Chretien, and downplay it. This isn't about cleaning up the system, sniffs Wells, it's about settling scores.

It is tempting to say all this free advice is worth about what it cost, an example of the usual press gallery bipolarism: I love you! I hate you! If you have to ask what's bothering me, then you clearly don't have any kind of feeling for the country! Many of the measures Martin has enacted in his first months in office have been longstanding demands of the opposition and media for many years. Yet they are digested without pause and followed by immediate demands for more.

Well, fair enough. Moving the goalposts is what we do. But we are obliged to at least note what progress has been made, and to explain why we regard it as inadequate, rather than to pretend that nothing has been done, and from there to deduce that nothing will. We can judge his actions to date, but we are not yet in a position to judge him. It is simply too soon to say.

There is no question, likewise, that Martin deserves his share of the blame for the present divided state of the Liberal party. But the fault lies not in what he has done since he became Prime Minister, but how he got there in the first place, ie taking down a sitting prime minister with three majorities under his belt and every prospect of a fourth. He's entitled to do so, if he can, but he's also entitled to the bitterness that results.

To say, however, that what has happened since is merely a continuation of that -- that all of Mr. Martin's measures to deal with (or, depending on your point of view, to contain) the scandal have been nothing more than a vendetta against Mr. Chretien and his followers, is too simple. To be sure, Mr. Martin sees the salvation of his government in distancing it as far as possible from Mr. Chretien's. But can you blame him? Whatever its achievements, a lot of unsavoury things went on under Mr. Chretien's regime, and whatever Mr. Martin's share of the blame, he could hardly embrace that legacy: after what he did to Mr. Chretien, it would be hypocritical, and after the Auditor General's report, it would be suicidal. More creditably, how is it to be imagined that he could "change the culture in Ottawa" without changing some of the players?

The idea that Mr. Martin should have, or could have, just ridden out the storm over Adscam, a la Chretien -- the idea that he created the storm by not shrugging it off -- shows just how much memories have been telescoped. Don't any of these people remember the firestorm that greeted the Auditor General's report? I was in New York and I could feel the heat from there. Maybe Chretien could have pulled it off, although I doubt it. But as I have pointed out before, Martin is not Chretien. He could not have pretended nothing was wrong, even if he had wanted to. It was hard enough for him to pretend that he hadn't known anything about it, a claim that deservedly attracted jeers from the public.

That's my criticism of him: Not that he has done too much, but he has done too little -- that having raised expectations of a cleaner government, he has not delivered, or at least has left too much room to doubt his intentions. The current smear campaign against the chairman of the Public Accounts committee (and, sotto voce, the Auditor General herself) adds to the unease. But he has said and done enough that I like that I am prepared to withhold judgment.

Unless, of course, that assessment is forced upon me. And that's the real source of Mr. Martin's grief: not the fickleness of the press gallery, but his own needless, cynical rush to call a spring election. Suppose, instead of signalling to everyone that he intended to drop the writ just as soon as partisan calculation advised, he had given himself a year to set his own stamp upon the government: time enough to devise and set a course for the next several years, to demonstrate his honesty and competence, to lay out his vision, to earn a mandate. Suppose, further, he had declared that was his timetable.

To have accused him then of lacking vision, on the basis of three months' work -- in the middle of the biggest political firestorm in decades -- would have seemed churlish, even silly. To suspect his motives in the Adscam affair, even given his prevarication over what he knew, would likewise have seemed hasty: give him time, wiser heads would say, to show whether he means business. Give him a chance to show what he can do before you judge him.