after Eves's election as leader, the PCs closed the gap in popular support considerably, placing only two percentage points behind the Liberals in two summer public opinion polls. By the autumn of 2002, however, Eves's "honeymoon" with the voters was over, and the party fell back in the polls, hovering in the mid-to-high 30s, while the Liberals scored in the mid-to-high 40s. Despite his attempt to recast the Tory government as a moderate one, Eves was unable to reverse the slide in the polls the Tories had suffered in the last years of Harris's tenure. Eves asked Flaherty's campaign chairman, Jaime Watt, to co-manage the PC election campaign, along with the rest of the "Whiz Kids" team that had previously worked for Harris. Only Tom Long, the central organizer in Harris's campaigns, refused to work for Eves. The "Whiz Kids" reputation for competence was marred by publicity stunts such as handing down his government's second budget at the headquarters of Magna International instead of in the provincial legislature. Voter backlash against this break with parliamentary tradition forced the delay of a planned spring election in 2003. In May 2003, Eves released the party's platform, "The Road Ahead". The document promoted an aggressive hard-right agenda, and was closer in spirit to Harris and Flaherty's agenda than to Eves's own. In releasing this document, Eves reversed his earlier positions on banning teacher's strikes, jailing the homeless, private school tax credits and same-sex marriage. The platform also called for mortgage interest deductibility. The PC election campaign was riddled with mistakes and miscues, and Eves appeared uncomfortable trying to sell a platform he had opposed only a year earlier. In contrast, the Liberals had spent the last four years positioning themselves as the government in waiting, and ran on the simple platform of "Choose Change". PC television ads which attacked Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty as "still not up to the job" were received poorly by the voting public, and allowed the Liberal campaign to portray the Tories as needlessly confrontational. A critical point in the campaign was when a member of the Eves team jokingly referred to McGuinty as an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet", a comment that made the Tories appear desperate to vilify their opponents. In the final days leading up to the vote, Eves was further criticized for saying that McGuinty just says "whatever comes into his pointy little head".