Zing!
Heh.
Perhaps the best demonstration that a leader should know as little as possible about foreign policy is Michael Ignatieff. The former Liberal leader, BBC globetrotter and Kennedy School thinker is the subject of a new book by our distinguished colleague Peter C. Newman, who signed on to chronicle Ignatieff’s triumph in the recent elections but who remains flexible based on changing events. Newman is down on the Liberals these days, but remains oddly persuaded Ignatieff had greatness in him.
“This party needs to change, this party has to grow, this party needs to renew,” Ignatieff told Newman in July, 2010. “We’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do.”
“If people could have only heard the way he talked to me on the bus,” Newman writes. I think that’s precisely backwards. People heard, loud and clear, that the Liberals need to change, grow and renew, and that they had a hell of a lot of work to do. So people declined to elect them.
Oh well.
Meanwhile, Harper’s image as a Bastard is cemented by this piece.
Hell, just from the layout — headline of “Decency alone can’t save Parliament”, with a photo of the PM firing off something from his seat 11 over on the Speaker’s right.
There’s a lot of punditry over-thinking the failure of Liberal traction.
Isn’t it possible that:
1) Ignatieff had an extensive public record of advocating solutions that were more in line with the Tories, rather than the Grits.
2) A significant amount of mental and physical energy was wasted trying to bind a right-leaning leader and a left-leaning party together.
3) Perhaps the public might have, accidentally or otherwise, caught wind of the gap between Ignatieff’s pre-politics soundbites and his campaign trail rhetoric? And perhaps they might have been unsure over which version of the man was the most genuine?
4) Perhaps, in the battle between Tory titans with pasted-on Liberal beliefs, the PM ended up winning because he has a slightly longer record of portraying a pretend Liberal. And after several boring mandates, the PM has convinced the electorate that not only is he not pretending, the boring part is 100% genuine. Everyone now realises that even a surprise shift to an ultra-right-wing Conservative agenda will occur with a speed that makes glacial drift seem like Formula One.
If Bob Rae somehow magically evades his party’s restrictions and takes a shot at the (permanent) brass ring, the Ignatieff scenario will play out again, but from the left side of the spectrum.
LOL @ “Perhaps, in the battle between Tory titans with pasted-on Liberal beliefs, the PM ended up winning because he has a slightly longer record of portraying a pretend Liberal. And after several boring mandates, the PM has convinced the electorate that not only is he not pretending, the boring part is 100% genuine.”
Ignatieff was always a bad fit with his supposed party.