Same old campaign

I'm going to describe to you the campaign advertising strategy of a particular party. See if you can identify it:
While some of the party's campaign ads and releases were about the party itself and what it planned to do, a great deal was about the opposing party and its leader, who had never been prime minister before. The extremely negative ads demonized the opposing leader in an attempt to paint him as being unfit to be prime minister and scare voters away from supporting him and giving him a shot at 24 Sussex Drive.
Sounds familiar? I'm sure it does.
I'm talking about the 2004 and 2006 Liberal campaign ads demonizing Stephen Harper.
Not the answer you were expecting was it?
No, it sounds like I was describing the current Conservative party campaign demonizing Stephane Dion, including the repeated mantra declaring that Dion is "not a leader."
A scroll through Youtube will make this parallel very clear. The Tories are currently using the same campaign the Liberals used in 2004 and 2006. The only real difference is that the Liberals tried to paint Harper as an evil man with a hidden agenda and the Tories are trying to paint Dion as a bumbling, incompetent fool.
But the overall message is the same. In both cases, the ruling party is trying to paint the official Opposition leader as unfit to be prime minister and scare voters away from even considering putting in the untried leader.
And while we're at it, 2004 was not the first time this happened. In 1993, the Tories tried to slam Jean Chretien in ads and it backfired on the party.
Five years earlier, as the Liberals, under John Turner, started to surge in the polls, the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney fired back with attack ads in a campaign known as "bombing the bridge." The phrase, coined by pollster Allan Gregg, referred to Turner's credibility being the bridge between the Liberals and anti-free trade voters. That time, the negative campaigning work. (While Turner had been prime minister before, it had only been for a couple months during the 1984 campaign and he'd never actually been elected as prime minister himself).
So, these attacks on Dion, which are an attempt to scare people into sticking with the devil they know are nothing new. And if history is any indicator, at least recent history, then it will probably work this time.
However, next election, if Dion is still around, history indicates it might be harder for the Conservatives to sell the anti-Dion attack. But we'll cross (or bomb) that bridge when we come to it.