The fighters are in the ring and the bell has sounded for the election bouts both north and south of the border. Although we anticipated a lot of low blows from both sides, so far that kind of approach seems to be coming mainly from one side in each election.

Despite the family man image of Harper in the sweater, his followers don’t seem to have fully accepted that look any more than the voters, and have blundered ahead into several errors in judgment as they coordinate attacks on Stephane Dion with few holds barred. The famous Puffin-Poop-Gate stumble will probably go down in the folklore of elections (link below) as just one of those things that “seemed right at the time”, blamed on an over-zealous web ad artist who got carried away. At least that’s where the blame landed, and if you can imagine an ad like that gets put on the air without someone much higher up approving it, you’re naïve indeed.

Harder to find humor in the slip-up where an important Harper staffer emailed Canada AM following the show appearance of the father of a Nova Scotia soldier lost in Afghanistan. The father decried Harper’s announcement of a 2011 pull-out, and argued that a fixed pull-out date made his son’s death in vain. The staffer responded that the father was motivated as a known Liberal supporter. I can imagine Harper’s comment when that story came out in the Conservative camp: “It could well be that his comments are politically motivated, but you just don’t say that about a father who has lost his son!”

Dion hasn’t stooped to deliver low blows at this point, relying on counter-punching the Harper attacks, feeling that Canadians will see how honorable he is and how low the Harper crew is stooping. That doesn’t seem to be working for him, as admirable as it might be, as polls just taken show the Harper attack ads are having an effect on a Canadian public that is far less discerning about the quality of the ads than Dion assumed.

Some Liberal supporters are urging Stephane to take the gloves off as well and start stronger attacks on Harper, but that doesn’t seem to be his style. An honorable man, but in politics it seems honor comes in last when the votes are counted.

In the States, a similar pattern has emerged. Supporters of Obama are urging him to deliver sharper (and lower) blows to the Republican tag-team, a technique that, like Dion, doesn’t seem natural to Obama. I’m sure Hillary would have been delivering a few elbows by now, not to mention knees to the groin.

The Republican tag-team would be interesting if I didn’t find it scary. McCain is finding that he has a crowd favorite on his hands in the person of his running mate Sarah Palin, and party followers are noting that when she is in the ring, the crowds are swelling, but they fade (for McCain) when she goes off on her own, as she is doing recently. As my brother commented after my last column, the scenes of people shouting, “Sarah! Sarah!” is rather unsettling, particularly from a Republican crowd. It’s interesting how much interest people are taking in Sarah Palin. I can’t even remember without resorting to Google who Barack Obama’s running mate is!

Not that the Republican campaign workers aren’t aware of Sarah’s shortcomings. They’ve been avoiding interviews for her like the Black Death, aware I guess that it could have similar results. She did one last week with Charles Gibson (whom she kept calling “Charlie”), and every response from her sounded rehearsed, so much so that they were not always on the question. One Canadian reporter on the US election trail was asked about her being “rehearsed”, and commented, “Rehearsed? She was stuffed to the gills!”

To Republican supporters, the match-up of McCain- Palin seems ideal: age / youth, male /female… it seems to cover most of the bases, at least for a white Republican crowd, and Palin is apparently wooing female supporters of Hillary Clinton to their side.

It’s the combo that I find scarey. Certainly at my age I want to promote “maturity” as much as possible, but I notice that the US polls have the McCain-Palin team pulling ahead of the Democrats, as shocking as that might seem to many Canadian voters for whom “conservative” is not half as far down the spectrum as Republican generally is in the US. With McCain at a relatively senior age, his odds go up for a medical problem while in office. I would be much more comfortable if he was in his 50’s. Perhaps the average Republican supporter has trouble seeing into the future, but betting people wouldn’t mind taking the odds that McCain could have medical trouble as he heads toward 76 before finishing his first term, and therefore Sarah! Sarah! will assume the leadership of the nation touted to be the most powerful on earth. Can’t they see that? This is a woman who comes across to me as a candidate for PTA Chairperson, not Supreme Commander of the US Forces (and “woman” has nothing to do with it— Hillary is more than capable by comparison). Sarah Palin has admitted that she has never met a government leader from another country, nor has she ever been in any foreign countries other than Canada and Mexico.

So the bouts continue as the bell sounds for another week. Will Stephane Dion decide to start swinging, or continue to circle the ring, mumbling “Green Shift” to a disinterested crowd? What surprises (for us and Harper) does the Conservative “War Room” staff have in store? Will the Puffins produce their own response to being used without asking in a campaign ad, as Paris Hilton did?

Will Obama start taking some solid blows at his opponents? Will Palin make the mistake of being interviewed once too often and fall on her face? Will that matter?

Stay tuned . . .

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Puffin-Gate video