Okay, one more question: If the Conservatives were going to release attack ads on Michael Ignatieff, shouldn't they have done so earlier?
From reports that they're scouring old articles and videos for inconsistent or otherwise uncomfortable policy positions, the Conservatives seem to be (almost certainly coincidentally) following my advice to put more work into these attacks than the ones they launched on Stephane Dion. This, undoubtedly, takes time. But they seem to have spent a couple of months giving Ignatieff a free ride before deciding that it was time to revert to form.
That was a bad miscalculation, because it's always better to launch attack ads as quickly as possible. The sooner you do so, the better you're able to brand your opponent before he can brand himself, and the faster you'll be to get past the sense that you're mean-spirited or desperate. (The example that always comes to mind is the series of attacks the Ontario Conservatives launched on Dalton McGuinty in the year before his first election. At the time, there was much tut-tutting for the gratuitously nasty tone, and musing that he'd really put a scare in them. By the time the election rolled around, nobody was particularly worked up about the ads - but they did have it in their heads that McGuinty was the loser with the question marks floating around his head, who just wasn't up the job.)
If the Conservatives had put out attacks on Ignatieff in, say, January, they would have been accused of misreading the public mood. But now, they're going to be accused of misreading the public mood and they're going to reinforce the perception that Ignatieff has had a strong start as leader that requires them to abandon the high road they'd made a big production of taking - a strong start that was enabled, in part, because he was able to define himself before they did.
In retrospect, that first question was probably too obvious. A better one is, if the Conservatives were going to release attack ads on Michael Ignatieff, why didn't they do so earlier?
In part, they seem to have been scared off by Ignatieff's warning, in his first press conference as leader, that the public would judge them harshly if they did. It was a memorable moment - probably the most memorable one in that lengthy Q&A session - and it seems to have been taken seriously.
At the same time, the sudden shift in gears is not at all uncharacteristic for this government. As Paul Wells has chornicled, the Conservatives have operated in a weird state of chaos in which they pick fights and positions seemingly with little foresight, and then abandon them when the mood strikes. (I'd argue this predates Guy Giorno, but that's beside the point.)
In this instance, they seem to have decided the high road was the way to go in January, without giving any thought as to whether they'd be able to stick to it past the end of February.