Been caught voting: Iggy's game change

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has been having a much better campaign than anyone ever expected he could. Sure, he's only just breaking into the 30s in the polls and the Harper Conservatives enjoy a double-digit lead, but he's much better off than he was a month ago, when fully half of his own caucus wanted him hanged from a lamp post like Mussolini.

For a guy that's never really campaigned for anything other than the Liberal leadership before (which he lost to the hapless Stephane Dion,) Iggy's performance on the hustings has been pretty close to flawless. He followed a good opening with the release of a platform that isn't even that much sillier than Harper's.

That might not be reflected in the national polling yet, but that's immaterial. This election is about one thing and one thing only, a Harper majority versus another Harper minority, and that's largely going to be decided in Ontario. The Ontario numbers are quite different from the national ones. The Liberals started the campaign ten points behind and now they're statistically tied with the Tories. I never thought that a Harper majority was all that likely, and if Ontario keeps trending the way that it has, it becomes a virtual impossibility. In fact, the Conservatives could even wind up losing seats.

And that got me to wondering how Iggy would fuck it up. Anyone who knows anything about Canadian politics knows that Michael Ignatieff has been a singularly bad leader. His best chance of becoming prime minister was almost immediately after assuming the leadership, when he could have defeated the 2009 budget, forced an election and probably won a minority of his own. He chose not to, instead waiting until that September to try to defeat the government, an attempt which ended with his nearly being laughed right out of the country and his entire staff being fired.

From that point forward, it became pretty clear that Iggy would only ever govern this country by accident and serious people began to wonder if he would even retain the leadership until the election.

But it would be unfair to not point out that he's had a pretty spectacular two weeks. Ignatieff is easily surpassing the low expectations set by two years of expensive and brutally effective advertising by the Conservatives that wholly defined him as an elitist foreigner. No one thought that he'd be able to do it, including a solid plurality of his own party, who have already been window shopping for his successor and planning how to survive under a Tory majority. But he did it. He wiggled out of it.

Which is why this story is so devastating.

As the Liberal leader scoots across the country asking for your vote, it seems he has forgotten where he has voted in the past.

Ignatieff now claims he has never voted in a foreign country, but quotations from his past suggest he voted Labour in Britain and would vote Democrat in the U.S.

"I am an American Democrat. I will vote for Kerry in November," Ignatieff told The Glasgow Herald in 2004.

Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard at the time, was defending his record as a human rights advocate against charges that he had become a neo-conservative who backed then-president George W. Bush in the Iraq war. Ignatieff and some other left-leaning intellectuals supported Bush in the early days of the war.

Oh. That doesn't look good, does it?

Even though Iggy was in Cambridge as the chair of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights at the time, he was not an American citizen, and foreigners casting ballots is frowned upon by U.S law. Some might even go so far as to call it a felony. Actually, it's two felonies. One for registering to vote and another for actually voting. The Yankees could throw you in the clink for a decade if convicted on both counts.

But I'm sure there's an explanation for that, right? There's just gotta be! After all, Michael Ignatieff is the self-anointed Smartest Guy in the World and he wouldn't ask us to let him run the country if he was running around foreign countries and committing felonies just seven years ago. So cue the official denial in three ... two ... one ...

Despite the statement that he would vote for Kerry, Ignatieff now says he has never voted outside of Canada.

"Mr. Ignatieff is and always has been a Canadian citizen, period. He has never held any other citizenship and as such, has never voted in a foreign election," Ignatieff spokesman Michel Liboiron told QMI Agency.

Asked to clarify why Ignatieff once said he would vote for Kerry and why he says now that he has never voted outside of Canada, Ignatieff's spokesman dodged the questions.

"Mr. Ignatieff has simply confirmed what we already know — that he is a progressive, compassionate liberal. Always has been, always will be," Liboiron said in an e-mail.

There. That was easy, wasn't it? Can we all move on now?

While the public record only shows Ignatieff said he would vote for the Democrats, his record in Britain shows he did vote.

In a 1998 book, Ignatieff says he voted Labour in 1997 to oust the ruling Conservatives. The Conservatives had been in power since 1979, first under Margaret Thatcher and then under John Major.

"Why did I vote Labour? I wanted the rascals out," Ignatieff said in Identity and Politics: A Discussion with Michael Ignatieff and Sean Neeson.

Identity and Politics is a record of an Ignatieff speech and a question and answer session at the Liberal-Democrat conference in Brighton, England, in 1998. A copy of the short book is kept at the Library of Parliament.

The Liberal-Democrats are a left-of-centre party that used to place third in British politics but recently became part of a coalition government with the Conservative Party under Prime Minister David Cameron.

In Britain, it would have been completely legal for Ignatieff to vote. British law allows citizens of Commonwealth nations living in Britain to cast ballots. Residents aren't automatically registered to vote and are required to sign up to get their name on the voters list. According to online records, Ignatieff was registered to vote in Britain as recently as 2002.

Okay, I guess moving on is out of the question then, huh?

First, let's dispense with what the Official Liberal spin - that will be repeated ad nauseum by the party's blogosphere toadies - will be. They'll hang everything on the sentence "British law allows citizens of Commonwealth nations living in Britain to cast ballots." They'll further suggest that Iggy's seeming intention to vote for Kerry was a touch of hyperbole that got away from him.

And it won't work for a bunch of reasons.

1. It reinforces the "Just Visiting" meme that the Tories have invested two years and millions of dollars in creating. There's no way that they're going to let that go, particularly since Ignatieff just breathed new life into it.
2. This election was supposed to be a referendum on Stephen Harper and whether he's worthy of the majority he almost certainly has nocturnal emissions dreaming about. And that referendum is clearly boring the tits off of the country. I have yet to hear anyone anywhere suggest that they're excited about this campaign. Well, through his own stupidity, Ignatieff made himself a huge issue, which is never a good idea in an election entirely about the incumbent.
3. When confronted with easily verifiable allegations, he lied. If he was registered to vote in Limelyland, it logically follows that he cast a ballot there too, particularly since he had to go to the time and effort of actually getting himself on the voter list. And that puts the lie to the contention that he "has never voted in a foreign election."

While voting in foreign countries feeds Harper's "Just Visiting" narrative, lying about it creates an entirely new one. Not only are the Conservatives going to milk this for all it's worth - and I expect a new ad campaign built around the theme no later than Wednesday night - the press is going kill him for treating them like idiots. Lying to Goddamned Liberal Media is never a good idea. Doing it during a campaign is lethal. They'll crucify him just to set an example to everyone else in politics.

The very worst part of this story is the timing of it. Tomorrow is the English language Leader's debate, and the French debate is on Thursday. A ton of voters are going to start paying attention to this campaign just in time to see "Just Visiting" reinforced on live national television and Ignatieff's lies about it.

No one has a motive to let this go. Harper wants the Grits knocked back to the mid-20s in the polls, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois want to steal Liberal seats once it appears that they're fatally compromised, and the media is going to be furious that Iggy lied to them like they're retarded children. This has the potential of being a perfect storm.

A debate that should've been about the many reasons Stephen Harper should be denied a majority government is now going to be about just how much of a lying foreigner Michael Ignatieff is. Unless Harper does something so magnificently dumb that it cannot be ignored, this campaign has been fundamentally reframed.

For the first time, I'm prepared to say that a majority is a distinct possibility. I still don't think that it'll happen, but I'm not as confident about it as I was just 12 hours ago.






Update: Well, Igatieff came out this afternoon and admitted that he in act did vote in England. With the documentation available, he didn't have much of a choice. The Tores are going to mercilessly pound him directly into hell with this. I wonder how long the Conservative campaign had this gem handy because there's no way they didn't plant it with QMI.

The story also displays some truly awesome communications incompetence on the part of his staff, which makes for a neat little "process story."