dull ads are dull

Seriously, y’all: this is why he gets the big bucks from that fancy-schmancy DC public affairs firm .

Where ITQ — and probably more than a few others — watched the first round of Ignatieffcentric maybe-pre-election spots and found herself grasping for something — anything! — to say (deficits bad, trees pretty?), Patrick Muttart manages to uncover a far more deliberate, sophisticated message that targets a very specific demographic — one that, as luck would have it, lines up perfectly with the main line of attack that his party has been already been using against the Liberal leader for months:
Conservative strategists scoffed at the Liberal strategy, saying Mr. Ignatieff was simply playing to his core constituency of “rich, urban and internationalist” voters. The ads reinforce Mr. Ignatieff’s elitist status with voters, the Tories argued.

“Quite frankly, he doesn’t need additional ‘snob’ votes as there are none left on the table. He’s got a lock on this corner of the political marketplace,” Conservative party strategist Patrick Muttart told CTV news yesterday.

“There’s nothing in the spot that would move the votes that need to be moved in a general-election campaign. He’s simply reminding voters that he left Canada for 34 years and had no interest in returning until the job of Prime Minister was made available to him.”
Check it out — he didn’t even have to update the talking points: Ignatieff: Still Just Visiting. Ask him about his summer chateau in Provence!  Really, what are the odds?

Note: ITQ is assuming that the metavisionary Mr. Muttart is talking about the one English spot that has been released so far,  since even when she squints, she can’t find anything in the French text that would act as a siren song for “rich, urban and internationalist voters.”

As for his use of the word “snob”, ITQ couldn’t help but be reminded of a satiromeme that surfaced on a leading right-leaning website during the last US election: