John Tory blows another one

By now most Ontarians and likely most Canadians will know that the Liberals won the 2007 Ontario election. A great deal has been made of the failure of the Conservatives to make their anticipated breakthrough in Toronto and other areas of Ontario. The failure of the Conservatives, however, was not hanging their hats on a divisive and unpopular issue of private school funding. The real blooper was making John Tory their leader.

I am not talking about Blue Tories versus Red Tories. It is easy to say that the radical right wanted a Harris-clone as a leader and that they refused to follow a less foaming-at-the-mouth leader such as John Tory.

The blunder was to run an American-style election in Canada. Attack ads seems to work in the US. I'm guessing because the Civil War is really not over in the US. But in Canada, we have respect for other Canadians, even if we disagree with their views. To run an ad over and over calling McGuinty a liar in everything but name was fine for about a week but when the tactic wasn't seen to be working, it was time to change the tactic. All the attack ads did was turn people off.

Where were the positive platform ads? They were there but they got lost in the attack ads. The Conservative brand was lost in the fog of war.

But what did the Conservatives expect? You can argue that the yellow-ties in the back rooms of the Conservative campaign were inexperienced but, hey, the leader had all the election organizing experience in the world. John Tory had run the federal campaign for Kim Campbell. Remember Kim? No? That's OK, she wasn't around long enough to leave an impression. While she had the ignominious task of running as Conservative leader following the less-than-popular Brian Mulroney, her campaign finally crashed when John Tory authorized the ultimate attack ad mocking the result facial disfiguration from a medical affliction against Jean Chretien.

I wonder what would have happen if the Conservatives and John Tory had decided to run a positive campaign instead a negative one. I guess we will never know.