This Is Going To Be Funny: The Reinvention of Michael Ignatieff

It's not often that you see a politician without a soul. Sure, there are lots of them that are such douchebags that they look like they don't have one, but they usually do. They just happen to be douchebags.

Michael Ignatieff has no soul. More exactly, he has no central belief system. He built a career as an academic by playing to cheap seats, saying or doing whatever it took to demonstrate that he was "just like us", overlooking the fact that most of us aren't descended from Russian royalty.

After 9/11, and during his tenure at Harvard, he wanted to prove that he was tougher on terrorism that Bush, so he went about about justifying torture, the invasion of Iraq, and all other manner of dumb shit.

Then he got a visit in Cambridge from Alf Apps and Ian Davey, who explained to him that he had an opportunity to become prime minister of Canada. Not having lived here for 34 years, the good professor had a lot to learn about his home and native land, specifically that there aren't many Bush Republicans up here. In short order he renounced virtually everything that he had said in public over the previous five years.

And the best part? He still lost. At the 2006 Liberal leadership convention, he got his ass handed to him by the Mr. Magoo-like personage of Stephane Dion. Dion, while a good and decent man, was the single most ineffective politician in my lifetime, and he brought the Liberals to their lowest percentage of the popular vote in the party's history. Were it not for dopey mistakes on the part of Stephen Harper and the September collapse of the economy, the Grits might have been voted right into extinction in October, 2008.

Dion was subsequently thrown right out of the leadership and Ignatieff was installed. "At long last", the conventional wisdom in Liberaland went, "we have a winner."

Except they didn't. Ignatieff continued Dion's insane practice of supporting the Harper Conservatives when they were weak and opposing them when they were strong. Ignatieff's best shot at deposing Harper came and went with the 2009 budget and, when he decided to prop the Tories up then, any chance of his ever living in 24 Sussex Drive vanished, probably forever. For all of the Conservative bitching about the evils of a coalition government, there already is one - a Grit-Tory coalition that has been running the country for almost five years.

In keeping with his practice of making exactly the wrong threat at exactly the wrong time, Ignatieff this week warned anyone that would listen that he would defeat Harper on next year's budget, which will force an election. This in the face of a raft of polls (which I don't necessarily believe) that show the Conservatives inching toward a majority government.

The best part is that this isn't the first time that Iggy has done something this crazy. In September of '09 he told Harper that "your time is up", and promptly lost 16 points in five weeks, putting even their Toronto stronghold in jeopardy. The NDP saved the day on a confidence vote, an election was avoided, but Ignatieff was mortally wounded. The only way that he'll ever become prime minister is by accident.

Nearly half of Liberal voters want the Crown Prince of Cambridge gone, so he's desperate. Ignatieff is therefore reverting to form and promising to be whatever he thinks people want him to be, which in this case is apparently Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Mayor Rob Ford’s victory in Toronto this fall is good news for the federal Liberals and the kind of election campaign they intend to wage against the Conservatives, says leader Michael Ignatieff.

“I’m proud to represent a riding in Etobicoke. The same people who elected Rob Ford elected me,” Ignatieff said in a year-end interview with the Star on Thursday.

When a federal election does happen — possibly as soon as a few months from now — Ignatieff believes he and his Liberals will have a campaign appeal that taps into the concerns and worries of the kind of voters who threw their support behind Ford.
“These are very sophisticated voters and what they seem to be saying with Rob Ford is: we want good government. We want value for money from our taxes. It’s not a message that’s anti-Liberal,” Ignatieff said.

Not only is that the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard, it sets a new record for Iggy stuffing so much wrong in so few paragraphs.

Firstly, the voters who elected Ford mayor are anything but sophisticated. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with mathematics will tell you that. Mayor Ford is going to bankrupt Toronto as a right-wing populist, but he'll do it differently than David Miller's left-wing populism did, and that's all that seems to matter. Remember, Ford's first act as mayor was to bury several hundred million dollars into a hole that hasn't even been dug yet.

Secondly, the voters of Etobicoke didn't really have much of a vote on Ford or Ignatieff as much they exercised good, old-fashioned expediency. Ford inherited his ward, money and political operation from his daddy, a highly popular MPP in the Harris government. Meanwhile, Iggy was seen as being a future prime minister when he ran in 2006, and it's always best to get in at the ground floor where the gravy train is likeliest to make it's first stop.

Third, a populist message might not necessarily be anti-Liberal, but it'll almost certainly be anti-Ignatieff. Dressing a Russian nobleman Harvard professor up as William Jennings Bryan can only backfire in the most spectacular ways imaginable, but I guarantee you that it'll be the funniest thing that you've ever seen.

Mostly this is because Iggy is misreading the shift in populism over the last twenty years. Populism is a historically left-wing phenomenon, relying as it did on farmers, pitchforks and minting fucking silver. Since Pat Buchanan's 1992 primary challenge to the first President Bush, it has become a pseudo-conservative movement that wants to save Medicare, Social Security and giant standing armies, yet somehow save money. In that, it makes about as much sense as the leftist populism of yore.

He says the Liberals intend to present a campaign platform organized around delivering relief to the middle-class family — “practical stuff” — in five key areas: child care for parents; relief on the cost of post-secondary education; home care for people taking care of the sick and elderly; pension guarantees for seniors and money to help homeowners make their residences more energy efficient.

Ignatieff says these choices will stand in stark relief to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the way they’ve been spending money during their five years in office, whether it’s billions invested in F-35 fighter jets, billions more in new correctional facilities in the law-and-order agenda or $6 billion in planned tax cuts to corporations.

“I think 2011 is likely to be a year of decision for Canadians, so they’ve got to have a very sharply defined sense that there are two choices,” Ignatieff said. “You can have four more years of this, or you can get a compassionate, moderate, responsible government that is focused relentlessly on maintaining the standard of living of the average middle-class family.”

Oh, that isn't going to end well.

You see, the rhetoric of modern pseudo-conservative populism isn't just anti-incumbent, it's anti-government. Ford succeeded only because he managed to convince an angry and stupid electorate that subway systems that stop in each and every basement in the city just build themselves. The Tea Party did as well as it did because it just ignored reality outright and the hopeless fucking Democrats let them.

Rob Ford and most of the Tea Party candidates succeeded to the extent that they did because they mouthed empty platitudes about the evils of government, which disguised the fact that their plans will bust the budget in ways that even the most ardent socialists couldn't pull off. The made the right noises about austerity, but none of their platforms reflect it in any serious way. It's an austerity that only hurts faceless bureaucrats and lets everyone else live it up. It won't work, but it sounds fantastic during a campaign.

Michael Ignatieff isn't even planning on running that kind of mindless campaign. It appears that he's seriously considering running on a message of "The government sucks, which is why you should vote to let it babysit your kids, send them college and nurse you at home when you're sick." It's schizophrenic and even the thickest voter is going to see right through it.

The major problem with that kind of platform is that Ignatieff has a fundamentally liberal base that is rather fond of government. Voters being as stupid and self-interested as they are are likely to focus on the rhetoric and ignore the platform. That worked for Ford because there was no "conservative" alternative to him. But that's not true of the left, who can vote for the NDP and Bloc Quebecois in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, which are the only places left that the Liberals still have seats.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the impending death of the Liberal Party of Canada and Michael Ignatieff has perfectly laid out how he's going to kill it. Iggy campaigning as a svelter, Ivy League version of Rob Ford is no campaign at all. On the other hand, it is the perfect monument to a party that has no ideas at all.

Granted, Ignatieff will probably change his mind 37 times between now and March, so don't hold me to these predictions. I'm just writing about what he said on Thursday, which is likely to change by Tuesday, which is Ignatieff's biggest problem of all.

Having no soul is more problematic in politics that it seems.