Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall speaks at a news conference at the Council of Federation meeting in Regina on August 6, 2009.
It was the 1988 election and Brian Mulroney's Tories had a big problem.
John Turner had morphed into a progressive Canadian nationalist who just might rally Canada's progressive majority again Mulroney's free trade agreement.
So, as Tory pollster Allan Greg famously put it, the blue team set out to "bomb the bridge" - to destroy Turner's credibility through attack ads aimed at him personally.
It worked. They ran up Turner's negatives enough to scratch out a win. This tactic therefore entered the Conservative playbook as "Plan A." In many circumstances, federal and provincial, Tories now routinely roll out attack ads aimed at the personal credibility of opposing leaders.
Federally, against Liberals, it still seems to work. They hit gold against Michael Ignatieff for example. But then there are places where it probably won't work. Like in Saskatchewan.
As reported here, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has been cobbling together attack ads against NDP Leader Dwain Lingenfelter lately.
The high-priced Toronto advisors that the Wall government consults would go to "bomb the bridge" as the first page in their playbook in almost any circumstance.
And these days Premier Wall has particularly good reason to be worried by the experienced and wily NDP Leader across from him in the Saskatchewan Legislature. After all, Mr. Lingenfelter now has some beautiful material to work with. The Wall team, eastern-establishment darlings though they might still be, stand revealed this winter to be as fiscally incompetent as the last Saskatchewan Tory government was (I wrote about some of the details a few weeks ago).
Definitely time to try "bomb the bridge."
However, for this one-trick strategy to work, it needs to blow on a spark of truth. And it seems unlikely that citizens of Saskatchewan, who well remember the price they paid for fiscal recklessness and irresponsibility under conservative rule in the 1980s and 1990s, are going to ignore Premier Wall's inability to manage the finances of the province because - ludicrously - Mr. Wall wants voters to believe Mr. Lingelfelter isn't enthusiastic enough about the province.
It's the Wall government's enthusiasm for billion-dollar "mistakes" that are worrying the voters these days.
When the real issue is government incompetence, "bomb the bridge" doesn't seem to work.
Just ask former Ontario premier Ernie Eves, who put together a similar campaign. And just ask the target of that campaign, Dalton "not a leader" McGuinty, Premier of Ontario since 2003.
(Photo: Todd Korol/Reuters)