Harper's Kim Campbell Moment?

Unable to compete on ideas alone, Harper stoops to using personal attacks in a scene reminiscent of the inhumane Kim Campbell attack on Jean Chrétien which led to 1993 conservative party wipeout.

Tom Hanson/CP

Stephen Joseph Harper should get a time out for attacking Dion over a flubbed interview (Video for those who have not seen it as yet). Its the worst sort of attack the style, not discuss the substance, politics.

Whether its attacking personal traits, misrepresenting the ideas of others (bluntly: telling lies), muzzling most of your candidates, engaging in what are probably illegal in and out campaign financing schemes, subverting democracy, Harper willingly choses the politics of attack and division over that of ideas and substance. CTV running an interview they said they would not is also rather interesting.

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The whole scenario reminds me a lot of Kim Campbell's 1993 election campaign where her team decided to run an attack ad directed at Jean Chrétien which featured the former prime minister's facial deformity prominently. The ad backfired, and while it didn't directly cause the destruction of the Progressive Conservative Party, it certainly helped.

Speaking as an anglophone who from time to time tries to ressurect his Grade 12 French, and as someone who has also spent some time in predominantly French-only parts of the country such as Chicoutimi, I immediately recognize the confusion introduced into the interview by this question:

If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about this economy and this crisis. CTV interviewer

Different tenses, present and past. This messes me up all the time when I'm thinking in English but speaking French. In the interview Dion gets a little flustered but it seems to me that he is trying to be sure of the tense so that he can reply to the question. Of course it goes from bad to worse, yet eventually a clean cut is done. CTV runs the out-takes as a story itself, a decision which one might rightly question.

Its been said that the good people of Quebec give Harper a lot of credit for speaking to them in their language, however imperfect it has been over the years. We anglos should be doing the same for Mr. Dion.

For a more humorous version of my outrage, one would be hard pressed to do better than this video: