Michael Ignatieff receives a lesson in humility

By Rick Salutin
July 16, 2010
Rabble.ca

Political reality has been giving Michael Ignatieff a lesson in humility, and he needed it.

This is a guy who's spent much time, since moving back from the U.S., telling us what kind of guy he is, as if we need to know. ("I made a very calculated decision that I am the guy I am.") He spent the 1990s with his career on a steep rise. He acquired a heady podium in The New York Times, became chair of Harvard's human-rights school and regularly explained reality to Michael Enright on CBC Radio.

The rise came in tandem with him providing human-rights arguments to justify traditional U.S. policies of attacking or invading weak countries for its own reasons, and because it could. New arguments were needed after the Cold War, and people like him supplied them. But he seemed to think his ideas caused those policies, rather than justifying predetermined actions. It's the intellectual equivalent of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

Even when he apologized for something, like supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was half-hearted and self-congratulatory. He and George Bush had sincere, idealistic motives all the way; it just hadn't worked out.

Now he's on a get-to-know-the-leader bus, and the bus is in trouble. It broke down on Day 1. He handled that with aplomb and a witty crack about Stephen Harper's being seen sneaking off with oily hands. (Party leaders have support groups tasked with supplying witty cracks for such moments.) At the Calgary Stampede, he actually wore the cowboy hat better than Stephen Harper ever has. It seems to suit his lanky, as they say, frame, and self-image. It's also true he looked more like the Jack Palance villain in Shane than the Alan Ladd hero. Que sera, sera.

Continued. . .