One of the enduring mysteries of Canadian politics is the failure of so many of our parties to realize that you don't use your leaders out to launch vicious attacks on your opponents.
If Barack Obama feels the need to go hard after John McCain, he gets a surrogate to do it; the same goes for the reverse. Meanwhile, the candidate - particularly if he or she is a frontrunner or an incumbent - tries to rise above.
Now, I don't think the Tories needed to respond at all to the already infamous ATV clip of Stephane Dion. The clip, for better or worse, speaks for itself. Maybe it makes Dion look bad. Maybe it makes the interviewer look bad. Maybe it makes CTV look bad for running it nationally in its entirety. Maybe all of the above. Whatever the case, there was very little to gain from the Tories piling on.
But if they felt compelled to pile on, why in God's name would they have Stephen Harper do it - and in such a gleeful manner at that?
Your leader's biggest problem is that voters find him unsympathetic. You've gone out of your way to cast him as warm and fuzzy, the apparent failure of which has seen your lead erode in the campaign's final week. And as your primary opponent suffers an embarrassing moment owing to a poor grasp of English and possibly a hearing impairment, you put that leader in front of a camera to make fun of him?
That the Tories responded to their opponent (arguably) self-destructing on camera by turning it into a story that may actually work to his advantage should permanently set to rest the myth of their strategic genius - or, for that matter, the myth of their strategic competence.
