Unintended Consequences of Attack Ads

I don't plan on more than a few posts about the election, and even that will be non-partisan in nature since I am vehemently non-partisan; I tend to despise all the parties, and party-centred politics, to a greater or lesser degree. With that in mind I would say that the barrage of attack ads against Dion by the Conservative party can have consequences they do not intend. Let me explain by showing how I interpret these attacks.

I almost always discount any attack ad because it is so expected in any competition. We all know that Coke hates Pepsi and that Pepsi hates Coke; of course I expect that Liberals and Conservatives hate or at least dislike each other. So what? That's expected, and irrelevant to me and my vote. Instead, when I hear a non-stop series of attack ads this is what I think:

• Every attack ad is a lost opportunity to tell me what the Conservatives stand for and what they will do in the next Parliament. They are doing this to deflect attention from an agenda I might otherwise dislike, or because they have nothing concrete to offer. That is, they are declining to promote their own agenda.
  
  
• The relentless attacks on Dion lead me to believe the Conservatives are afraid of him because there may be more substance to him than I realized. Since the Conservatives are so worried about him I need to pay closer attention to what he is saying. If the Conservatives really thought he wasn't a threat, their campaign would ignore him.

With those lessons learned at Conservatives' cost of their attacks on Dion I am now more likely to seriously consider the Liberals. It's still a dilemma for me since I have ample reason to turn my nose up at the prospect of voting for either. I may say more about this in a future post.