KEY POINTS:
A sure sign that a politician is losing the plot is when he or she starts blaming the media for a slump in the polls. Winston Peters' default position throughout his political life has been that the media prevents the truth about his political genius from reaching the eyes and ears of the nation. But when the political polls have turned against him, he has never blamed the messenger. Rather he has smiled inscrutably and - thus far at least - delivered the numbers that count, at the ballot box.
It remains to be seen whether New Zealand First, currently polling well below the five-per-cent threshold, will be rescued by its leader's recapture of Tauranga. But it is tempting to wonder whether Prime Minister Helen Clark, sensing approaching electoral oblivion, is engaging in the time-honoured political strategy of getting her retaliation in first.
Facing opinion polls that put Labour as much as 20 points behind National - which could, on the numbers, easily govern alone - Clark launched an extraordinary attack on the New Zealand Herald, accusing it of being "a Tory paper" that had "shown no charity to Labour in the party's 91 years of existence". She singled out for special mention the newspaper's long-serving cartoonist Minhinnick for "flaying" Labour Governments.
The argument that Minhinnick's political leanings were conservative is not a difficult one to sustain, but the PM deserves all the ink a cartoonist might throw at her if she seeks to blame Min for her troubles. He retired in 1976 - five years before Helen Elizabeth Clark was elected MP for Mt Albert - although he did contribute cartoons sporadically over the next decade. Sir Gordon, as he was when he died in 1992, would doubtless be gratified to hear that a 21st-century prime minister was blaming him for her government's woes after eight years in power, but he would be unlikely to accept the credit for such an abiding influence.
Labour's problems are of a very different provenance and a much more recent vintage - and the Herald's well-reasoned opposition to the Electoral Finance Act (in which it was scarcely a lone voice) has nothing to do with it. In an online poll at nzherald.co.nz on the day of the PM's outburst, 80 per cent of 3000 respondents believed Labour was to blame for its own polling troubles and four per cent blamed National. Unpalatable though Clark may find the fact, the "blame the media" approach is not going to cut much ice on polling day.
In any case, the explanation has to work both ways. If Clark is to lay the blame for her personal popularity - in the last One News-Colmar Brunton poll she polled 27 to John Key's 36 as preferred prime minister - at the feet of the media, she must allow that the fortunes of her opponents (the demise of Don Brash, for example) were similarly creations of the media and not the result of her political savvy.
The plain fact is that Labour, limbering up for an election at which it seems certain to take a hammering, is looking tired. Steve Maharey has gone, Michael Cullen - who has attracted the nickname Michael Sullen in some quarters - has lost the sparkle in his eye and, apparently, the fire in his belly as well.
Meanwhile Clark, who has never seemed at ease with middle New Zealand, looks more remote and aloof by the month. She has not been helped by the uncharacteristic behaviour of her famously retiring husband, Professor Peter Davis, who, not for the first time, penned a letter to the paper.
Davis' suggestion that the Herald's coverage of the Owen Glenn loan affair was driven by a desire to "foment happy mischief" and that the newspaper was "having great fun at [Labour's] expense" would have seemed quaintly chivalrous if it had not been so ill-judged. It cannot but create the impression that the PM needs all the help she can get.
The election result is far from a foregone conclusion. It remains, and probably will remain, the case that Labour will have coalition options not open to National. But to exercise them, it must carve heavily into National's poll lead. And it must start doing so now.
