From the e-mails I'm getting, the early sense is that Stephen Harper will be widely criticized for being too sunny in today's speech in Brampton. That's not the part of his text, though, that I find problematic.
It's true that the Prime Minister probably could have offered a little more empathy to Canadians suffering the effects of the recession, particularly given that he was speaking in shouting distance of a Chrysler plant.
It's also true that the rah-rah boosterism rings a little hollow. (Yes, Canada is in good shape relative to everyone else, but that doesn't mean we're in good shape relative to our own expectations and our own standards.)
And when you read through his itemized list of what the government is doing, it doesn't exactly fill you with confidence that the scattershot measures it's taking really constitute seeing the crisis as an opportunity, as he insists.
Still, being too positive has been the least of our problems of late, as government and opposition have outdone each other in their efforts to warn of the apocalypse. Those of us who've been complaining for months that politicians are recklessly driving consumer confidence down even further than it should be can hardly complain when the PM dares to deliver a message that we will indeed come out of this.
In recent weeks, Harper has appeared more interested in gaining the confidence of an international audience than a domestic one. The gambit may have worked; I suspect his bump in the polls (outside Quebec) has less to do with having met Barack Obama than having appeared, that day alongside the President and in various U.S. media hits, like something of a statesman. But at some point, you have to actually sell your economic plan - such as it is - to your own country.
If the effect of a stimulus package is supposed to be at least partly psychological, it doesn't do much good to follow it up with excessive doom and gloom. His economic plan is infinitely less ambitious than Barack Obama's, but there's no good reason for him to be infinitely less aggressive in selling it - which, considering this was his first major public speech since the budget was delivered six weeks ago, he certainly hasn't been.
There's aggression, though, and then there's antagonism. For 90 per cent of today's speech, Harper managed to stick to the former. Then, out of nowhere, he proceeded to announce that he's "been very frustrated with the opposition since the election," took a trip down memory lane to attack the coalition and encouraged his audience to tell the dastardly Liberals that it's time to "stop the political games."
This was possibly the sincerest part of Harper's speech; he absolutely loves this stuff. But it also undermined everything else he was trying to accomplish.
Set aside that his attacks weren't all that grounded in reality (without the coalition, this vaunted economic plan would not have been produced), since every leader takes liberties in bashing his or her opponents. The real problem here is that when these broadsides land like a lead balloon at the end of his text, they serve to cast the entire thing in a different light.
Suddenly, it's no longer about rallying Canadians around a common purpose; it's about positioning himself against his opponents, about scoring points that nobody should be tallying right now.
Of course, every political speech serves that purpose, at least to an extent. But there's a healthy appetite right now for efforts, however superficial, at setting aside partisanship in favour of collectively addressing enormous challenges. Even if we know deep down that politicians - yes, even this one - are partisan animals, the least we expect is that they nod to the severity of the current situation by at least paying lip service to the notion that their party's prospects aren't the most important thing in the country right now.
What's baffling is why Harper felt the need to include the opposition stuff at the end. That message can be just as effectively delivered by, say, Jim Flaherty, and it's highly unlikely anyone who's not a card-carrying Conservative came away from that speech in Brampton today seething at the Liberals' unwillingness to hop on board with the government's amazing plan. Probably, they just came away - at least from that part of the speech - wishing a plague on the houses of all our parties, since even now they can't stop behaving like children.
Clearly, there's still nobody around the Prime Minister who's both willing and able to curb his partisan instincts. As today's speech showed, he's poorer for it.