Ashes

Failures of election campaigning

Fire and Ashes by Michael Ignatieff

I ought perhaps to have reviewed this earlier, when there was a real Canadian general election in the offing and something to talk about. Forgive me. But the time still seems apt, as another Canadian Liberal party leader — this one a prime minister, not an aspiring head of government — attempts to capture international attention with rhetoric and posing as a philosopher king.

At one point in the last decade, I heard someone say that when Michael Ignatieff, who before becoming a politician was an academic, a writer for the serious magazines, a TV personality, a public intellectual, failed at becoming Canada’s prime minister in 2011, two things happened.

The first was that his supporters were desolated. They were uncommonly young and idealistic. How often those two things are combined in the person of a failed party leader. And they were told that politics was a rough game and the outcomes are not all certain, and justice — as you see it — is not always done and the good things you most want and anticipations you most cherish do not arrive as they are promised. They may have gone off Canadian federal politics all together. They may have become more and more despondent, hopeless, made themselves fodder for other movements.

And the other thing that happened, this commentator said, was that the Liberal party decided the only possible way to recover from a near-total wipeout, such as they’d suffered, was to elect an ‘even more gimmicky leader.’ And hence we got the younger Trudeau, airhead, pretty boy, addicted to photo opportunities; the son of a former prime minister in a country less dynastic than the United States and less so, indeed, than Britain. Trudeau, who once had a camera crew film him developing a party trick — a trick that was claimed to be ‘pretending to fall down the stairs,’ but which actually consisted, so far as I could see, of actually falling down the stairs. But with the boy Trudeau saying he intended to do so.

Now, I must say, looking back, that Ignatieff does not seem that outrageous a choice of man to lead a first-world country. Sure, he hadn’t been a member of parliament at all when he was approached by the people in grey he describes in his book. These devious, scheming Liberal party cardinals told him that he could be prime minister, like Macbeth is told he might become king.

And Ignatieff, rather than thinking that these people were creeps and possibly lying to him, set out to do what they said, and what they prophesied. He gave up his fairly lucrative career writing books and appearing on TV. He said goodbye to London, New York, DC. Adios to the lecture circuit, the talk show sofas, the Newsnight Review. Time to be elected to some random House of Commons riding, as selected for him by the cardinals. And to do all the chicanery and shaking of hands required by local politics, and to court donors and to prance about as if you have the answers.

And then, after some time, after some years of this, the inevitable challenge for the leadership, the backbiting and double-dealing. The promises that go nowhere; the talking to people’s wallets and not their souls. All of that, and after it yet another stage of humiliations — being an opposition leader, handling internal party questions and discipline, cooking up policies that the civil service and judicial regimes might suffer you to implement. And thinking of squaring the voters.

And the gruelling marathon of campaigning, the endless rounds of meeting donors — some of whom will attempt to humiliate you with their folksy ways, while you’re just an out of towner and not a salt of the earth man such as they, a man with a truck, a man donning workwear. Or a person too educated for his own good, with Parisian French and not their very own Québécois.

All of this being said, why would anyone want to be prime minister of a mature democracy? The Canadian prime minister might have more powers than his British or French equivalents. More sway over domestic politics and policy than the American president. But why do it? Why suffer media attacks, domestic political madness, endless questions about your essential nature, thoughts on your marriage, considerations of your aptness to handle international crises, financial crises, monetary crises? Suggestions that perhaps you’re too effete and unmasculine. Blackmail attempts, what we may assume to be a campaign of constant surveillance.

Why would anyone do it?

For Ignatieff, of course, ego played a part. He is admirably candid about it. Ignatieff thought he should be prime minister because someone like him ought to have the job, someone who’d seen the world, someone with things to say. Not an ideologue but a thinker — an intellectual, but not a cold one. The professoriate with a human face.

And he believed, to some extent, justified or not, that Canada needed someone to save it. That the voters were being failed; that a better and fairer and nobler society was possible; and that the other guys, if let back in, would ruin their fair land. That’s clearly what Ignatieff thought.

And he lost. He lost badly. And despite a few positives from the whole show — Ignatieff is rather pleased, it seems, about his politician’s ability to have a short nap everywhere, for instance in a moving car — he does not seem much better for the experience. A sadder and only slightly wiser man.