Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Iggy Gored By Walrus

Ron Graham eviscerates--also excoriates, savages and utterly demolishes--Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in the January cover story of the decidedly left-leaning Walrus Magazine. Here's but a taste:
As Ignatieff once put it, in the annoyingly folksy way he adopts when trying to be a man of the people, “What the heck are the facts?” The facts, to return to the ur-event, were that Apps, Brock, and Davey [the trio that recruited him] hadn’t paid much heed to what Ignatieff might do for the good of the country, however much they might protest to the contrary. They were there for the fun of the sport and the thrill of being insiders. If they were looking for their own Trudeau, it wasn’t because they were looking for Trudeau’s vision or Trudeau’s independence of spirit. They were looking for Trudeau’s panache as an intellectual cosmopolitan, his marketability, his sex appeal, his magic. They thought they had found it — and, just as important, found it first — in Michael Ignatieff.

Nor is there any evidence that Ignatieff himself had anything like Trudeau’s overarching sense of purpose and principle in entering public life. Trudeau could sum up his in one sentence; Ignatieff couldn’t sum up his in a dozen books. A close reading of his articles and essays revealed that he was all over the map (and not just geographically), while adept at papering over the discrepancies and reversals beneath his gifts for prose and argumentation. Just when you’re convinced he stands for individual freedom, he starts making the case for collective rights. No sooner do you have him pegged as a committed cosmopolitan than he pops up as a passionate patriot. He even refers to himself as an American in one place, a Brit in another, and a Canadian somewhere else.

He often claimed, in his own defence, that words didn’t really seem to matter as much when he was an intellectual — a justification that might chill the heart of every American kid who is still learning how to walk on artificial limbs because Michael Ignatieff once carried the day in an oh-so-frightfully-interesting debate. (Even his recantation in the New York Times was, as one wag put it, “more mea than culpa.”) As a reporter and novelist, too, he was practised at channelling the voices and views of others, and there were indications he was trying to do the same as a politician. But being a good mimic or chameleon is not the quality of a good prime minister. The PMO is no place to read books; 24 Sussex is seldom a salon. If you don’t know what you want to do by the time you get there, your true self will get buried under the workload, the crises, and the demands of interest groups.
Iggy no Trudeau? For my money, that's probably the best thing you can say about him.

No comments: