Also: When Harper is doing press conferences within Canada but outside of Ottawa, his handlers tend to let everyone get a question in. When it's just the Parliamentary Press Gallery -- in Ottawa or on a foreign trip -- things are a little more tightly controlled and not everyone who wants to ask him something is going to get that chance.... In any event, knowing that Harper is well-briefed and tough to surprise, a smart question, in my view, is one that forces him to think on the spot a bit, to move away from the prepared lines and, if you're successful, to get him to open up a bit more about a given issue.... Harper had the last laugh, of course, when the campaign ended but I go back to that as a good example of a question that elicits an answer that gets beyond the spin and the highly scripted performances because it showed, in a pretty demonstrative way, that Harper was still having a tough time with the "retail" side of politics, the regular guy stuff that helps a politician connect with voters.