Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Harper

As a follow-up to this post, I took a closer look at the Cons' moves this week - and the more closely one looks, the less sense they make.

To start with, note that for all the talk about whether the Cons' latest ad campaign can be considered negative, Harper himself apparently feels that 1,000 pages of kickbacks and cover-ups, along with the Finance Minister going before the RCMP, didn't make for quite enough ammo against the Liberals for his taste. As a result, he pulled out the trusty tin-foil hat to try to drag PMPM personally into the sponsorship scandal, thereby going negative by anybody's measure:

As he has in the past, Harper accused Prime Minister Paul Martin of deliberately limiting the scope of the inquiry by Justice John Gomery.

By not looking at government polling contracts, he said the prime minister made sure that the actions of the Finance Department, while Martin was minister, were not investigated.

"I'm suggesting it's always been awfully convenient for Mr. Martin to set up a commission to investigate his political opponents in the Liberal party," Harper said, referring to supporters of former prime minister Jean Chrétien, "but not necessarily his own actions, which may have been dubious."

I'm not sure there's a more direct way of undermining the Cons' own "positive" message than that. But we're just getting started.

As noted yesterday, Harper also decided to bring up the spectre of Brian Mulroney to try to win votes. As difficult as it may be to seriously debate policy during the campaign, surely an attempt to rewrite history during a campaign has to be all the more problematic - especially when that history has been entrenched again in Canadian minds as recently as Mulroney's.

And it's not as it if had to be that way for Harper. After all, it's been well documented that the Libs never followed through on many of their promises to change the results of Mulroney's government. Surely Harper could have made up plenty of mileage pointing out the similarities between Martin and Mulroney (including the ethical difficulties within both governments), rather than by praising Mulroney and trying to slam Martin over a fine distinction between their respective reactions to ethical misdeeds.

So what of those ethics? Here's the especially fun part. By praising Mulroney and trying to blame Martin alone for failing to act swiftly enough rather than addressing the Liberal party as a whole, Harper has essentially abandoned any claim that his party will be any more ethical than the Liberals themselves, or Mulroney's Cons before them. Instead, as with most types of crime, Harper comes off as far more concerned with swift and brutal punishment than with actually preventing the crime in the first place. And surely that type of attitude is even more dangerous with respect to government than it is elsewhere.

So the Cons have wilfully ignored a party tainted by scandal in order to try to make shaky allegations stick on the PM himself, and implied that as long as a PM is angry enough, anything goes within the governing party. But could they also find a way to undermine their own policies in the process?

Of course, the answer is "yes". After all, the Cons' main policy goodie is to try to partially undo one of Mulroney's best-known acts as PM. As a result, if they succeed in rehabilitating Mulroney's image to any degree, that only raises more questions for Harper to answer as to why he's focusing on cutting the GST rather than other taxes.

While some of his party members are sticking to making the same mistake twice, Harper himself seems to be exploring radical new frontiers of senseless politics. And we'll know the Libs are truly in trouble if Harper's latest outburst doesn't attract enough attention to sink the Cons.