The big picture

MIchael Ignatieff looks to have taken a bit more of Robert Silver's counterproductive advice than would have been ideal. But due credit for him for not biting on all of Stephen Harper's bait (at least based on a couple of tweets from his press conference this morning):

DanGoodchild @M_Ignatieff: "The BQ are my adversaries, but they're not my enemies."
...
JeffJedras @m_ignatieff: I don't think there's been a socialist in the NDP for 30 years, so let's all relax here.

The common thread between those two comments is that rather than echoing Harper's message that Canadians should be scared of the NDP or the Bloc, Ignatieff is focusing on a contrast with Harper while showing basic respect for his other competitors. Which looks to make for a necessary first step in avoiding an obvious trap set by the Cons.

If Ignatieff had taken the bait and echoed Harper's rhetoric, the results would operate almost entirely to the Cons' benefit. The most obvious effect would be to take Ignatieff's time and focus away from criticizing the Cons to attack the other parties in Parliament: every time the Cons raised the coalition possibility, he'd effectively have to respond with a reflexive bashing of the other opposition parties, and they'd of course end up having to respond in kind. The result would be to help out the Cons by bolstering their dichotomy of "scary-Bloc/NDP-supported government" and "Con majority government": with the Libs busy doing the Cons' legwork in taking potshots at the other parties, the Cons would be free to work on polishing up their own image just enough to sneak into majority territory.

And as for the Libs' hopes of escaping any prospect of a coalition with a sufficient degree of Bloc- and NDP-bashing? After Dion's ill-advised declaration that he wouldn't seek a coalition in the last campaign, the Libs probably won't and can't be taken seriously in claiming that they'd never consider the possibility. And that leads in turn to the area where Ignatieff still has some room for improvement.

I'll grant that it might not be a bad idea to try to portray Ignatieff's decision to nix the most recent coalition as an example to counteract the Cons' "he wants power at all costs" criticism. But I'd think for the future, Ignatieff is better off portraying himself as open to a coalition under the right circumstances. After all, what better example could there be of the difference between a "big", nationally-interested philosophy and a "small", narrowly-partisan one than a Prime Minister who considers the possibility of cross-party cooperation to be a scare tactic rather than a goal to be pursued?

Update: Greg (twice) and pogge have more based on today's more explicit anti-coalition message from Ignatieff.

(Edit: fixed wording.)