Hope triumphs over fear, or fear Labour's only hope?

At the weekend Scotland on Sunday's Kenny Farquharson claimed "the political orthodoxy today is that you win elections by being more optimistic than your opponent" and "this Holyrood campaign is shaping up into a classic contest between optimism and pessimism, between hope and fear".

To that extent, he says, the SNP's campaign has propelled them to pole position in the opinion polls.

But this approach clearly hasn't cut much ice with Brian Monteith, who in yesterday's Scotsman suggested that Labour should target the SNP's renewable energy targets thus: "More windmills mean more subsidies and higher bills - causing greater fuel poverty that will leave old people dying."

Hence the apparent triumph of hope over fear is perhaps replaced by an approach implying that fear is Labour's only hope. Indeed, surely battle-weary voters are not taken in by the hope factor alone - in extremis perhaps neatly encapsulated in the term 'vision' - but instead regards the likes of the SNP's manifesto launch as being another triumph, this time of gloss and glamour over substance.

For the crude opportunism of the SNP's surprise extension of the council tax freeze and its ludicrously optimistic renewables targets have been widely pilloried. Likewise Labour's magpie-like approach to policy formulation and the crudity of things like its knife crime policy.

Indeed, although the Tory/Thatcher factor highlighted by Labour is regarded as being over-negative during this campaign, in last year's Westminster poll this seemed to win the day for the party in Scotland.

And while this morning's Scottish Sun has declared early in favour of "Play it again, Salm", in characteristic style its campaign coverage so far has arguably been dominated by negativity towards Labour in general and the lampooning of Iain Gray in particular.

Of course, Brian Monteith's suggestion could turn out to be an unmitigated disaster for Labour if attempted, and perhaps the likes of the Sun's attempt at character assassination could backfire.

And no doubt everyone is swayed by both negative and positive factors, with perhaps the average voter placing more emphasis on the latter. Indeed, while this blogger is of the disposition which says that the more optimistic the scenario depicted by a politician the further from reality it's likely to be, perhaps the average member of the public isn't quite so cynical.

But the if the accepted wisdom is that political optimism will trump pessimism then there's clearly a paradox between this and the perception of public distrust regarding politicians.

Perhaps the key to squaring the circle is to recall that the Holyrood victors only require the endorsement of around 20% of the electorate. Most of these votes they would probably garner anyway. Thus the proportion of voters who have to be enthused by the 'vision thing' is small, and certainly not representative of public opinion generally.

And anyway who precisely is aware of the likes of the "socially-networked manifesto...full of images of iPads and renewable energy, of technological miracles that will transform the country" - the evidence suggested by Kenny Farquharson as symptomatic of the SNP's "slick, upbeat and positive" campaign?

This of course is only one facet of an extremely complex dynamic, but what are essentially little more than brand image and marketing gimmicks shouldn't be allowed to obscure the substantive merits of the product itself, which unfortunately is very often best characterised as shoddy goods.