KEY POINTS:
Is it a destructive mixture of fear and bravado coupled with blind panic which has driven Labour to turn what had been a slow-burning campaign to undermine John Key's credibility into a full-blown and foolhardy character assassination job?
How else to explain the behaviour of Pete Hodgson, the kamikaze pilot who forgot to pack his aircraft with explosives?
His resorting to smear tactics without providing any substance to justify them reeked of the truly desperate.
His attack on Key in Parliament was so feeble National needed to utter only two words to render his speech redundant: Who cares?
Who indeed. Outside the Labour Party, no one gives a fig about which address Key was or was not living at before the 2002 election.
Yet so obsessed has Labour become with destroying Key's reputation that it is blinkered to what this is doing to its own standing.
Labour crossed a major threshold this week in switching its focus away from Key's supposed policy inconsistencies and on to matters of personal character.
Like the junkie who is ever increasing the dose just to get the same hit, Labour's failure to get any bounce in the polls out of its anti-Key onslaught is seeing it scrape the bottom of the barrel even harder to turn up something, anything, it can chuck in the direction of National's leader.
Labour is not only courting a backlash, it is inviting one to crash through the doors.
That may be happening already, prompting Labour to belatedly pull back. Within 24 hours of his onslaught on Key, Hodgson issued a press statement insisting he was not attacking Key's personal integrity.
Yet his attack could not be interpreted any other way, given he was querying the validity of declarations Key had made on official forms submitted to the Companies Office and the Chief Electoral Officer.
Labour should ask itself why Hodgson was given the thumbs up for this exercise when he had so little to back it up.
But the half-hearted nature of the offensive also suggested there was not universal endorsement in the Beehive. There would have been even less the next morning after Hodgson bumbled his way through an interview on Radio New Zealand's Morning Report.
A master of circumlocution, Hodgson often struggles to get to the point. If you are going to smear someone, you need to get right to the point and produce the goods so the damage to your opponent far outweighs the criticism you will inevitably get for indulging in dubious politics. But even had Hodgson come up with the goods, it probably would not have helped. Labour has gone negative because it believes negative campaigning works.
And there is some evidence that it does. But only if the climate is right for it. The current climate is all wrong.
Labour had been carefully sewing seeds of doubt about Key in voters' minds.
But it will take time for these seeds to sprout. Over-the-top personal attacks from Labour will fall on stony ground in the meantime. They will be judged according to the motives behind them, rather than on their content. Furthermore, voters are attracted to Key for reasons unrelated to his past. Those voters will regard the dredging up of that past as irrelevant and self-serving.
Above all, Labour needs to remind itself of National's persistent failure to get any political mileage out of Helen Clark's signing of a painting she did not do and the later fuss over her motorcade being oblivious to speed limits on South Island roads.
Voters took little heed of these incidents because they had no bearing on what really mattered - Clark's competence as Prime Minister.
Labour's rehashing of what Key did or did not say back in 2002 about living in his electorate falls into the same category.
Labour might argue this is a classic example of Key saying one thing and then doing another. It may say it raises questions of trust, reliability and credibility.
But no one is listening. In thrashing this dead horse, Hodgson was confusing, when he needed to be concise.
It was not clear what he actually accused Key of having done wrong.
Hodgson talked of "serious concerns" surrounding Key's declarations of his residential addresses.
He mentioned the penalties for providing misleading or fraudulent statements.
But he would not put himself on the line and say Key had actually done something illegal.
Little wonder.
The documents may show Key listing his Helensville house as his home for electoral purposes, while using a Remuera address for declarations made under the Companies Act.
But Key has legal opinions, including one from Clerk of the House Dave McGee, saying he acted within the law. Labour has produced nothing to challenge that view.
Beyond furnishing the media with McGee's letter, National's strategy was not to engage with Hodgson because that might look as if National gave some credence to his claims.
That approach changed with Thursday's story in Truth revealing that Key's partners in a commercial property have been subject to leaky home liabilities.
While Key emphasised there was nothing to link him to the construction of leaky homes, Labour flourished the story in Parliament in the hope that he would be deemed as guilty (or at least embarrassed) by association.
Not surprisingly, National in turn claimed the story had been planted by Labour. Whether or not that is the case, coming so soon after Hodgson's attack the story could prove counterproductive to Labour. It could leave the impression the party is feeding the media to extend its campaign of denigration, while trying to cover some of its tracks.
While Labour MPs rejoice each time they make Key squirm in Parliament, the images on the television news bulletins send a message of a governing party which seems more interested in dishing the dirt than governing.
There is one less obvious consequence for Labour from this week's folly.
Key says there is nothing in his past that he can think of that could come back to bite him. To that end, he sought to anticipate Labour's next move by revealing he was interviewed by the Serious Fraud Office in the 1980s over the multi-million-dollar Equiticorp scandal, but as a potential witness for the prosecution.
However, assuming Labour did dredge up something that is really damaging, this week's drain on the party's credibility will make it that much harder to get the mud to stick.
