TORONTO - As much as they hated those attack ads in the late 1990s that painted Dalton McGuinty as "just not up to the job," the Ontario Liberals were evidently taking notes.

Back then, Mike Harris's Progressive Conservatives set the precedent for branding an opponent before he had a chance to brand himself. While the Tories were criticized for going so negative before Mr. McGuinty had even entered his first election campaign as Liberal leader, they had rightly calculated that it was worth a bit of short-term pain for long-term gain. The backlash against their tactics wasn't a factor by the time the June, 1999, election rolled around, but the image of Mr. McGuinty as a bumbler certainly was.

Now, their roles reversed, the Liberals are trying to do the same thing to the Conservatives' new boss. Casting the guy who ran Rogers Cable and helped save the Canadian Football League as incompetent wouldn't have much traction, so instead Mr. McGuinty's party is targeting John Tory's blueblood background.

The Liberals, not surprisingly, are taking considerable heat for their tactics - including handing out silver spoons engraved with Mr. Tory's initials at last weekend's leadership convention and setting up a Web site that depicts him as cartoon character Richie Rich. But since Ontarians won't go to the polls for another three years, they're not overly concerned with how it plays now; their only goal is to ensure Mr. Tory's privileged past becomes part of his political identity.

Since the Liberals - like everyone else - now test every strategy through an endless number of focus groups, they've obviously concluded that this line of attack has some traction. But it's hard to imagine that Mr. Tory's affluence will prove a big liability. Canadians have never shown an aversion to electing well-heeled leaders - as the Liberals' federal cousins could tell them, since neither Pierre Trudeau nor Paul Martin exactly came from a working-class background. And unlike certain politicians south of the border, it's not as though Mr. Tory can be accused of having spent idle decades living off the family fortunes before taking the plunge into politics.

So for now, at least, Mr. Tory probably isn't in panic mode about spoons, cartoons or whatever else the Liberals throw at him. But if he's really worried about what could derail his leadership in the early going, he should look inside his own party.

There are not too many similarities between Mr. Tory and Ernie Eves, the inept leader he's replacing. But the one area of common ground is that, like the former premier, Mr. Tory is from the moderate side of his party. As such, the fate that befell his predecessor should be instructive.

There are many reasons Mr. Eves drove the Tories into the ground in last year's election - among them his own poor work ethic, a terrible relationship with the media and voter fatigue after more than eight years of up-and-down Conservative rule. But one of his biggest mistakes, as many of his former supporters see it, is that he allowed himself to be turned into something he wasn't.

Like Mr. Tory, Mr. Eves won the PC leadership by defeating Jim Flaherty - a hard-line right-winger for whom the Common Sense Revolution was too tame. But once he'd won, he effectively handed over the keys to his office to the the same people who had run Mr. Flaherty's campaign.

Having run for the leadership as a Red Tory ("I'm not an ideologue," he said during the race, "I'm neither left-wing nor right-wing"), Mr. Eves wound up with a hard-line election platform that looked very similar to the one Mr. Flaherty had run on. The result was ugly: A moderate leader putting in a half-hearted effort to sell policies that he himself had argued against little more than a year before. No longer having any idea who Mr. Eves was or what he stood for, voters turned to the Liberals in big numbers.

A stronger personality than Mr. Eves, with a clearer sense of self, Mr. Tory is less likely to fall into the same trap. But he'll still face pressure from Mr. Flaherty's supporters, many of whom were running the party when Mike Harris was in charge, to adopt the policies and language of the Common Sense Revolution.

If he's as smart as his career to date suggests, Mr. Tory will ignore them. For party leaders, a clear sense of direction is at least as important as which direction that happens to be. If Mr. Tory attempts to reinvent himself, voters will likely see right through him and punish him much the same way they did Mr. Eves.

By electing Mr. Tory over Mr. Flaherty and fellow hard-liner Frank Klees, the third candidate in last week's vote, Conservatives chose the direction they want to go in. If the new leader starts to second-guess them, he'll do himself more harm than a thousand silver spoons ever could.