Follow up on "Harper Has No Plan"

This article is a follow up to Jason Cherniak's Harper Has No Plan article and subsequent comments made by other readers.

Bart: ...is it really fair to attack Harper for having no real plan and simply redistributing wealth, after the Liberal free for all of spending in the days leading up to the election?

My take on that is the economic update had been on the books for months, and Goodale had told Parliament that it was going to be more than your average update. So I have to think he at least had an outline of what it was going to be. The opposition parties complained that it was nothing but an election document; and true as that may be it doesn't mean it was thrown together at the last minute.

Also, as you can see by watching The Video of the announcement everything fit together in a targeted plan, unlike Harper's "Oooh we should do this, and tomorrow we'll announce we're going to do that!"

Now maybe he does have an overall plan, but all I'm saying is it doesn't look like it so far. This is the ultimate weakness of his strategy. It is almost always a daily headline grabber, but in the end he's going to have to put it all together or it's going to look like a bad bowl of gumbo.

Jason: As for the spending announcements, I think it was an example of bad salesmanship and not necessarily bad policies.

I agree, the Liberal plan's failure to resonate was more about bad salesmanship. As Bert elluded to it was way too much for the average voter to digest in one sitting. The reason I think this happened was under normal circumstances the way to do it would be to leak a bit at a time and then on the day of the announcement put it all together. But with the election looming I'm sure they wanted to keep the opposition in the dark for as long as possible. However this can be fixed, all they need to do is go back to the economic update and do it the right way now. Now would be the best time to do it, it wouldn't interfere too much with their strategy of waiting until January to unload the big guns. Just have Goodale go somewhere or be on a TV show to emphasize a paticular plank every day or two until Christmas.