His defence of the decision to invade Iraq \u2014 while discredited as time passed \u2014 was elegant and provided a sweeping historical and geopolitical context that was never present in the triumphalist exhortations of other supporters. And while it was often cited out of context, his parsing of concepts such as a \u201cmoral war\u201d and the lines between justifiable and illegal state use of force in his book The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror <\/em>made it absolutely clear that you were reading the works of a superior mind.<\/p>\n He had held academic postings at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford. He had been on the cover of GQ<\/em> magazine. The British press had labelled him \u201cthe thinking woman’s crumpet.\u201d<\/p>\n In sum, he was the total package. It was small wonder then that the three so-called \u201cmen in black\u201d who came to visit him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2004 would see him as the ideal candidate to lead Canada’s natural governing party past its sponsorship-scandal muddle back to glory. Given his pedigree, his accomplishments and the accolades he had received throughout his career, the man himself could be forgiven for agreeing with them.<\/p>\n But we all know how that worked out. Michael Ignatieff did indeed go on to lead the Liberal Party of Canada \u2014 though not in the way anyone envisioned in 2004. Instead, seven years later, he presided over its worse electoral showing in a century.<\/p>\n Two years after that ignominous failure, Ignatieff returns with this memoir of his travails in the arena of public life. He states that his purpose in chronicling this journey is \u201cfor the young man or woman who believed in me and saw me fail. I am writing this to help them succeed when their time comes.\u201d But in most of this thin (183 pages) tome he wrestles with a more introspective (if unasked) question: Was it something about him that led to this monumental \u2014 and uncharacteristic \u2014 failure; or is it the political system itself that is too brutish and crude to allow the likes of him to survive?<\/p>\n Ignatieff’s opening chapter is entitled \u201cHubris\u201d and in it, he hints that the answer will be found in the first half of this question. He makes clear he wants \u201cto explain how it becomes possible for an otherwise sensible person to turn his life upside down for the sake of a dream, or to put it less charitably, why a person like me succumbed, so helplessly, to hubris.\u201d Ignatieff asks \u2014 seemingly rhetorically \u2014 \u201cThe idea [to return to Canada to become prime minister] was preposterous. Who did I think I was?\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that this opening introspection lasts for a meagre three and a half pages, however, suggests his modesty is a tad fleeting.<\/p>\n While confessing that \u201cI certainly didn’t have a good answer to the question of why I wanted to hold high office,\u201d he proceeds to wonder if his motive might be found in family history: a father with a lineage that goes back to \u201cminor -nobility\u201d in 19th-century Russia and who went on to a distinguished career as one of Canada’s most accomplished diplomats; a mother who was the niece of Vincent Massey and whose roots go back to building of the CP Railway. This heritage caused him to feel as if he \u201cbelonged to a family of nation builders.\u201d<\/p>\n But if DNA beckoned him to public life, Ignatieff also acknowledges that he grew up in an environment \u2014 and around the likes of Lester Pearson and Jack Pickergill \u2014 where \u201cgood government…was [viewed as] the ultimate solution to any national problem.\u201d It’s a perspective that may have shielded him from the new realities that awaited his return to Canada after his 30-year absence.<\/p>\n This admission lays the groundwork for the stunning self-doubt that winds its way through the greater part of his story. Here we begin to see the transformation of Michael Ignatieff. A man who was always the smartest guy in the room finds himself \u201cabout to spend the next five years of my life in a state of constant dependence on the opinions of others\u201d; he \u201chad to unlearn being clever, being rhetorical, being fluent.\u201d This is how he describes it: \u201cAs you submit to the compromises demanded by public life, your public self begins to alter the person inside. Within a year of entering politics, I had the disoriented feeling of having been taken over by a doppelg\u00e4nger, a strange new persona I could barely recognize.\u201d His rude exposure to politics seems to draw him to a conclusion that to sublimate your authentic self and become someone else (being dependent on \u201cthe opinions of others\u201d and \u201cunlearn[ing] being clever\u201d) is a prima facie prerequisite of the new craft he wished to ply.<\/p>\n And so he tries to adopt a new persona and begins to play the game by these rules. He gets on the Liberal Express bus and tours small-town Canada, kissing babies, slapping backs and demonstrating that he appreciates \u201chow much depends on making a connection, any connection, with the people listening to you.\u201d<\/p>\n We also know how this<\/em> worked out.<\/p>\n In Ignatieff’s telling, his efforts to \u201cconnect\u201d with average Canadians failed because his opponents \u201cdenied me standing in my own country,\u201d robbing him of his authority to make his case. He is, of course, referring to the Conservative attack ads that accused him of \u201cjust visiting\u201d and claimed that \u201che didn’t come back for you.\u201d He admits that this relentless cant \u201cdid contain enough truth to be credible\u201d \u2014 he had, after all, been out of the country for 30 years. He also notes that \u201cthe longer you leave an attack ad unanswered, the more damage it does,\u201d attributing the effectiveness of the Tory ads to the Liberal Party’s lack of funds to counter with a campaign of its own, as well as the media’s lack of interest in the stump speeches of an opposition leader.<\/p>\n But by this point in the telling, you begin to see what everyone else saw but Michael Ignatieff could not. The Michael Ignatieff we saw trying to wage retail politics was not just unconvincing, but a candidate who smothered and denied the very virtues that originally made him such an appealing addition to public life. Take this passage: reflecting on the 2011 campaign, he claims that \u201cthe best part about being a politician is that you live the common life of your country: at the lobster festivals, county fairs, demolition derbies, corn roasts, rodeos, backyard barbecues and holy days at the synagogues, temples, mosques and churches…I served cotton candy, sampled samosas, threw out the first pitch, flipped burgers, fired the starter’s gun, rode horses in the parade and felt how good it is to be in places where no one can be turned away and where we share life together.\u201d And \u201cI loved every minute of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Now I have no reason to doubt that Michael Ignatieff found a certain epiphany in the common sense and common occurrences of common folk. But by his own admission, he confessed that \u201cnone of this [the glad-handing and the small talk of campaigning] came naturally to me,\u201d including physical contact with people. And I do not believe for a minute that he ever thought that this was \u201cthe best part about being a politician\u201d or even that he \u201cloved\u201d it \u2014 or, more damningly, that this was \u201cwhat he came back for.\u201d While I am neither Sigmund Freud nor a clairvoyant, I suspect that the author is being more dishonest with himself than with us.<\/p>\n Here is how the real Michael Ignatieff seeks to explain his understanding of what the \u201ccommon touch\u201d of a politician and a connection with the voter require: \u201cThese are ancient arts, the skills that are commended in -Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier<\/em> written in the early sixteenth century…The word he used to describe the key talent in politics was \u201c\u201d\u02dcsprezzatura.<\/em>‘\u201c (In case you are bewildered by this curious definition of what it takes to be a man of the people, he offers the reader some assistance by noting that \u201cthis is without an exact equivalent in English.’\u201c)<\/p>\n Watching Ignatieff throughout his time in politics, I was reminded of a great hockey goaltender who had been hit in the head once too often; every time an opponent drew back his stick to shoot again, he winced, rendering himself unable to stop the puck.<\/p>\n Michael Ignatieff didn’t come back to ride a horse in a parade, but when he did, not only did he look awkward and out of place, he also reduced himself to \u201cjust another politician\u201d pandering for votes. Indeed, it was this inauthentic self that he put on display that robbed him of his standing and authority and gave credence to the claim that perhaps \u201che didn’t come back for you.\u201d<\/p>\n Ignatieff came back because he was a superior intellect, with an evolved understanding of the world and Canada’s role in it, and \u2014 whether through hubris or ambition \u2014 believed he had the talent and wherewithal to run the country. Early after his return he wrote \u2014 without the counsel of his fart catchers \u2014 an 8,000-word policy manifesto entitled \u201cAn Agenda for Nation Building.\u201d In it he laid out his prescription for righting wrongs against Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, improving productivity through investments in higher education and research and development, and restoring central Canada’s economic prowess by investing in high speed rail and knitting the country together with a new national energy grid.<\/p>\n Yet for the next five years, Canadians heard nary a word about these innovative and bold ideas. Had he stuck to that belief in ideas \u2014 and shown evidence of it instead of listening to the opinions of others or buying into the notion that he had to turn himself into someone he wasn’t \u2014 he might be prime minister today.<\/p>\n Reflecting on his shortcomings \u2014 and housed more comfortably, once again, in the hallowed halls of academe \u2014 Ignatieff finds solace in his vast understanding of the history of intellectual thought. He notes that brilliant men, from Cicero to Edmund Burke to de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill and Max Weber, all tried their hand at the real world of politics. All were found wanting. \u201cWhy theoretical acumen is so frequently combined with political failure throws light on what is distinctive about a talent for politics,\u201d Ignatieff writes. \u201cThe candour, rigour, willingness to follow a thought wherever it leads, the penetrating search for originality \u2014 all these are virtues in theoretical pursuits but active liabilities in politics, where discretion and dissimulation are essential for success.\u201d<\/p>\n This is an excuse dressed up in the fancy cloth of Ignatieff’s usual good writing.\u00a0 Authenticity matters in politics. Ignatieff’s mistake was the failure of nerve to be himself. He lost playing by someone else’s rules, and yet now declares that these rules are immutable.<\/p>\n It’s a conclusion that leaves me wondering how someone so smart about so many things could be so wrong about the one thing he seemed to care so much about.<\/p>\n Photo:\u00a0Art Babych \/ Shutterstock<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Full disclosure: I have always liked and admired Michael Ignatieff. Before he returned to Canada in 2005 to run as the Liberal candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore with his not-so-secret plan to run for the party’s leadership, I felt he was probably Canada’s finest public intellectual. His book and television series Blood and Belonging was one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":274002,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9385,9358],"tags":[],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[4295],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[7136],"class_list":["post-263527","issues","type-issues","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-medias-et-culture","category-politique","irpp-category-politique","irpp-tag-medias-et-culture"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Michael](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/assets\/Uploads\/gregg-img1.jpg\")