There is this peculiar phenomenon in sports.

Have you ever noticed how it is that in a hockey game the puck always seems to bounce towards the blades of the best players — and sticks there? When Wayne Gretzky was on the ice it seemed as though the puck was connected to his stick by an invisible elastic band.

Or, in football — notice how the bounce of the ball after a punt or a fumble always seems to end up in the arms of a player from the team that is best organized, and is on its way to a win.

It’s as though there is some invisible force at work that reinforces the efforts of those who are well-prepared and well-organized. The other team makes mistakes, and the puck or ball or whatever, always seems to slide or bounce the other way.

Some call it “getting the breaks” but I say, it’s not luck or pure chance at work here. In practice, “the breaks” come to those who force them, and then move quickly to take advantage of them.

So it is in that other great game — the one called politics.

And so it is that the national campaign for the Conservative Party, has had the Liberals back on their heels fighting a desperate defensive battle, since the writ was dropped.

And so it is, that the “breaks” have been bouncing toward the Conservatives, adhering to their sticks as though they were coated with Liberal goo.

Here’s what I mean. No amount of campaign planning could have manufactured the two Liberal Party boobs who embarrassed their leaders with untoward insults flung at the leaders of the other two major parties and even at the wife of NDP leader Jack Layton. The remarks were racist, scatological and worse, and seemed to fit the image of careless corruption in the Liberal Party that Steven Harper is working so hard to create.

And then there is the non-issue of whether Ralph Goodale should have resigned because several fast moving stock dealers on Bay Street might have had information prior to the official announcement from Mr. Goodale that the government was not moving on additional taxation on income trusts and was lightening taxes on other investments.

The curious aspect of this bit of political fluff, is that the RCMP is investigating something that is not a crime. At this point, there is absolutely no reason for Mr. Goodale to resign. He is culpable of nothing, except in Mr. Harper’s fevered imagination.

Doesn’t matter. For Steven Harper, this was yet another example of the pattern of cupidity and scandal and moral corruption on the part of the government, even though there is not a whiff of evidence as yet, that anything untoward took place in Mr. Goodale’s Department of Finance.

It is passing odd that the Mounties chose to make a public announcement of their investigation in the middle of an election campaign, an investigation that won’t be completed until long after Election Day.

Doesn’t matter. Once again the Conservatives got the bounce when there was precious little campaign news to report, and the media were looking for something juicy to fill their airtime and newspaper columns.

There now seems to be a growing consensus amongst the pundits that the Liberals are losing this election campaign. It would seem so. Slowly but surely the Conservatives have been inching upward in the daily tracking polls conducted by CPAC. Where the polls were showing a ten point difference, the gap is now half that, and the trend line favours the challengers as the campaign enters the crucial final weeks.

Apart from the goodies handed to him by Liberal functionaries, Mr. Harper has been charging about the country making pledges and promises that lack substance, but have voter appeal because they are so simplistic. They are like the advertising of unscrupulous retailers — great appeal for the bargains, but hidden fees in the fine print.

The genius (if that is the right word) of the Conservative campaign, is that the simplistic promises force Mr. Martin into long and detailed explanations of why Mr. Harper cannot do what he says he will do for one legislative reason or another.

In other words, Mr. Harper is deliberately misleading the electorate, pandering to the electorate, with simplistic unfulfillable propositions.

Take for instance, Mr. Harper’s promise of a free vote on same sex marriage. It don’t mean a thing, no matter what way you swing. Such a vote would be meaningless, unless Mr. Harper intends using the notwithstanding clause to get around the Canadian Constitution.

Mr. Harper says he will not do that, confirming that his promise of a free vote is nothing more than grandstanding to his bedrock support amongst the so-called social conservatives.

Then there is his broadside, playing to the sentiments of Canadians by accusing the government of disrespecting veterans. Mr. Harper accuses the Liberals of flagrant patronage in appointments to the Veterans Appeal Board, and says things like, “All too often we hear stories of veterans who are ignored or disrespected by government. What a shameful way to treat men and women who risked their lives to defend Canada. This shame will end with the election of a new government.”

That, dear readers, is pandering and exploitation of the emotions of Canadians to an absolutely shameful degree. What Mr. Harper does not explain, is exactly how he will go about fixing things, short of firing everybody in sight and replacing them with Conservative patronage appointments.

Not a terribly attractive resolution, that.

Almost all the Conservative promises carry with them the same sort of simplistic remedies for the supposed ills that affect the nation. They are election-style cotton candy. Take a bite and they melt away to nothing.

Most of what Mr. Harper and his Conservatives promise are nothing more than election gimmicks, part of a campaign strategy to position the party and its leader, at the centre of Canadian politics. There’s good reason — it is from there that governments get elected in this country.

It is a promise-them-now, and figure-it-out-later strategy and for it to work, Mr. Harper must change the image most Canadians have of him as a political leader with a hidden agenda. Re- invention always poses that problem of credibility. The strategy is a mirror of Republican politics to the south, where that party successfully hoodwinked voters by selling itself as the party with the moral authority to govern. One year later, the Republicans are a shambles, their image of moral superiority shredded, the Bush legislative program in the dumper, the Bush political capital spent.

The Conservatives gamble that enough Canadians will swallow the moral superiority guff, suspend their thought processes, and send enough Conservatives to Ottawa to establish a minority Conservative government.

Time is running out on Mr. Martin and his Liberals, if they are to forestall a Conservative-run minority government. They will not win a campaign in which they spend most of their time reacting to smoke and mirrors.

And they must stop giving the Conservatives the bounce and the breaks.