You know your campaign is in trouble when...
... one of your biggest boosters in the press is calling you mean-spirited. Don Martin in the National Post has called Harper's take on Dion's misstep in an interview mean spirited and desperate. The big deal here is that Don Martin and the National Post rarely, if ever say anything against the Tories. My take on this is that the whole Dion misstep won't gain the Tories any traction with the voter, after all if their own media supporters are calling them on it, most non Tory True Believers(T.M. Pat. Pend) will see the same thing too. Martin does hit the nail on the head though. It shows just how mean spirited the Tories really are. This one act of desperation has pretty much destroyed the softer, we care image the Tories were trying to present with Fireside Steve and his performing sweater. This puts the Tories back to square one with respect to their image of being a bunch of angry white men. Not somewhere you want to be only 4 days before the election.
It is, of course, easy to see why Harper would try to capitalize on any Dion misstep. Harper's own lackluster campaign and wooden style just haven't been brining in the votes in truckloads. The strategy behind the election is almost an example of how not to win a majority. I suspect that Harper's intent at calling the snap election, in contravention of his own fixed election date law, was to get the voters into the ballot box before the wheels came off the US economy. The problem being, the wheels had already came off back before the writ was even dropped. This left Harper looking at a stock market crash in the final weeks of an election campaign. The even worse problem for Harper is that not only did it look like he was doing nothing about it, but his statements to the press showed a level of insensitivity that just turned Canadians off.
Which leads to Harper's problems here at the end of the campaign. Any personal attack Harper does at this late stage is likely to backfire on him, making him look less prime ministerial and more and more desperate. His steadfast refusal to say anything but "stay the course" first made him look like he'd been broadsided by economic conditions the rest of us could see coming and now make any action he takes look like last minute desperation for votes, not to mention making him look like a waffler. Further adding to Harper's woes is that he and his party have been personally attacking Dion for over a year. What does this mean? Like the boy who cried wolf, it means that no one's listening to the attacks any more. We've become numb to the whole not a leader shtick and any further attacks will accomplish little than to firm up the 45% of Tory voters who wouldn't vote for anyone else anyways.
Does this mean a Harper defeat at the polls? It's hard to say at this point. Though the Tories have used this attack to try to distract the voter from the fact that the stock market has lost nearly 30% of it's value in the past month (for comparison, in the crash of 1929 the NYSE lost about 43% of it's value over the same time frame). The magnitude of the stock market collapse is way stronger than any desperate attack Harper can toss out in the next couple of days. Harper's only saving grace in all this is that the markets will be closed for the next three days so headlines of further market loss will have to wait till voting day. Though if the markets open sharply down again, things could look much different at 24 Sussex on Wednesday.