Ottawa — At the start of this long winter campaign, Liberals hoped voters would go to the polls with at least one of two unflattering images of Stephen Harper in their heads.
Think first of the goofy guy in the ten-gallon cowboy hat and the too-tight western vest. Obviously not prime ministerial material.
Or think of the scary, slightly out-of-focus Orwellian Big Brother image that the Liberals used in their TV attack ads in the second half of the campaign.
But the Conservative Leader didn't allow the Liberals to define him.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper learned the hard lessons from his loss in 2004. (Ryan Remiorz/CP)
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Instead, Mr. Harper successfully portrayed himself and his party as the folks down the block, hockey dads, soccer moms, moderate small-c conservatives, middle class, slightly bland, definitely not scary.
The makeover was so successful that many voters decided to trust the Conservatives to form a government.
Mr. Harper is a private person. Nevertheless, he learned during the 2004 election that it is a mistake to allow your opponents to define you. In politics, image matters.
Running the first national campaign of an amalgam Conservative Party, a new political creation that barely had a policy platform, Mr. Harper also learned in 2004 just how vulnerable the Liberals were.
By contrast, Liberal Leader Paul Martin seems not to have learned much of anything from that campaign.
He had blown a solid Liberal majority in 2004. Yet he went into this winter's campaign with the same strategists and managers. Bizarrely, he convinced himself that 2004 had been some kind of triumph.
Mr. Harper and his strategists reached out to unite elements of the old Reform and Progressive Conservative parties even before the 2004 campaign.
Mr. Martin's loyalists never saw the need to close the rift with the Jean Chrétien faction even after the 2004 campaign.
Mr. Martin's team did not anticipate that in the 18 months from the 2004 election Mr. Harper's Conservatives would learn discipline and how to remain focused, on message and on track.
The Martin team expected the Tories to react to events unevenly, clumsily, and in an ad hoc fashion. It turned out, the Martin team was looking in a mirror.
The Conservatives honed tactical skills in the House in opposition. But for an electoral campaign they needed strategy.
The work began in earnest at the party's first national policy convention last March.
Delegates used the event to knock the hard edges off some of positions held by the social conservative elements from the old Reform faction.
Mr. Harper, for example, managed to get a resolution through that effectively put the abortion issue on a back burner, if not the deep freeze.
The convention also became a feel-good bonding exercise among old stock Tories from Ontario and Atlantic Canada and the Westerners. They all had seen how, without much organization, they had reduced the Liberals to a minority in the previous general election. They expected they would have an opportunity to finish the job before the year was out. They were pumped.
When the Martin government fell on a confidence vote Nov. 28, the Liberals and the Conservatives made fundamentally different calculations about the nature of the campaign.
The Liberals figured that the campaign would be so long and voters would be so preoccupied with the holidays that they could hold back their big policy announcements and advertising blitzes until January.
The Conservatives decided they wanted to create momentum from the start, and grab headlines early in the daily news cycle with eye-catching policy announcements.
Suddenly, Mr. Harper was everywhere. In a consumer electronics store, to announce a Conservative plan to cut the hated Goods and Services Tax to 5 per cent. At a hockey rink lacing up a young boy's skates, to showcase tax breaks for parents with kids in organized sports. Meeting with stay-at-home parents, to highlight a proposed $1,200 a year child care allowance.
The Liberals could say they were bad policies, even cheap "beer and popcorn" policies. But the man announcing them didn't look scary or like a goofy cowboy.
By the time the Liberals rolled out their own policies they seemed reactive.
The Conservative campaign suffered in 2004 from an epidemic of foot-in-mouth disease. A number of Tory MPs and prominent supporters made stupid and politically incorrect remarks. Mr. Harper inoculated his troops this time.
Mr. Martin thought his troops were immune. They weren't. Communication director Scott Reid came out with the "beer and popcorn" crack. Party official Mike Klander compared NDP candidate Olivia Chow to a dog in his blog.
And how to explain Buzz Hargrove? At a Liberal rally, the auto workers' union chief said one way to defeat Mr. Harper would be for voters in some Quebec ridings to vote for the Bloc.
Mr. Harper strayed from his message track only once. Last week he mused aloud about how the Conservatives could not have a real majority because the courts and the Senate will be dominated by Liberal appointees for years to come. The remarks gave Mr. Martin an opportunity to suggest that the Conservatives had some kind of dark, hidden agenda that would be executed if they could stack the courts.
But it was already too late for the Liberals. The tipping point may have been Dec. 28 when it was disclosed that the RCMP was conducting a criminal investigation of a possible leak of sensitive information from the Finance Department about the tax treatment of income trusts.
The news was a sudden reminder of the scandal and stench dredged up by the Gomery inquiry.
Stephen Harper needed to do nothing more than to play out the string with his powerful three-word sales pitch: time for change.
