The Game Is Afoot

OK then. We have a poll trend on our hands.

Good!

The Liberals, after months and months of pathetically half hearted attacks, decided to bring out the big guns. And I couldn't be happier. I want the Liberals to throw everything they have at us just to have it fail. Just like before.

And what does this prove? It proves that the Liberals have to rely on brutal negative advertising to get anywhere in the polls. They can't rely on their record. They can't rely on the "positive things they've done for Ontarians" to get whatever momentum they may have. All they can do- all they know how to do- is poke the voters with sharp sticks. They are not the party of big ideas or forward thinking. They are the party of "vote for us or else." 

Of course people aren't going to look past the fact that McGuinty makes them sick, so it only goes so far. We're still in majority territory. Our share of the vote has not dropped. We are stable. Ditching McGuinty might help the Liberals more than any ad, but, well....they're not going to listen to me. Or their rank-and-file.

What people may not know, particularly Conservatives who read this blog, is that however devoted the Liberals may be to doing what's supposedly right for Ontarians in public, in private they conform to the most comical stereotypes of how we think Liberals act. The Toronto mayoral election, and the time I spent during that election forcing myself to be non-partisan, opened my eyes to this fact. I can't count the number of times I heard Liberals scheme about how they were going to totally trap one of Ford's people and expose the racism/sexism/homophobia. It was all they talked about. So far removed from the lofty goals of the Liberal Party, the Party of All Canadians. Sigh.

I knock this guy a lot, but I respect him for having the guts to dispense with the charade from time to time. He thinks we are a lower class of humanity and he's not afraid to say so. So: We must be willing to cross any and every line that exists, and a few that don't exist yet, if we want to win, because the Liberals are going to do an awful lot of line-crossing. This is not the John Tory era, people. We will- or at least we had better- get down and dirty with these Liberals, and take their lunch money. Playtime is over.

And as this election gets messier and messier, I want all the policy wonks, all the idealists, all the people who want to get back to ideas and evidence make politics about people, to watch closely and to bind upon their souls the knowledge that it's not about any of those things at all. Instead it's all about who kicks who in the nuts harder.