Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  At the time, he was riding high and so were we. Our party stood well in the opinion of the country and our poll numbers climbed into the mid and upper thirties, meaning we might have a chance of forming a government at the next election. Our party was seen to have forced a government to do the right thing in a national crisis. Later that winter, when the Canadian portion of the North American automobile bailouts had to be voted on in Parliament, we lined up again with the government. It wasn’t difficult: all you had to do was look at the automobile supply chain in every town in central Canada to know that we couldn’t let the main manufacturing employer tumble into a disorderly bankruptcy.

  It felt good to be making decisions and even better to be making the right ones. I felt few, if any, moments of hesitation or doubt, and while I found my job incredibly challenging—leading a national party, running a huge staff, managing a caucus of talented, disputatious senators and members of Parliament—I revelled in the challenge. Our office crackled with the excitement that comes when you feel the political wind at your back. My young team in the Leader’s Office seized the moment to drag our party into the twenty-first century. Years in office had made us complacent. Our campaign organization had been allowed to decay. Our fundraising apparatus still hadn’t woken up to the Internet era, while the Conservative government combined the fundraising advantages of incumbency with a ferociously effective Internet and direct-mail campaign. We had nothing comparable. We didn’t know who our voters were, where they lived or what they wanted. We didn’t even know much about our thousands of party members across the country. We didn’t have the data, and until we did we were flying blind. We dispatched a young crew down to Washington and they came back with the software used by Obama’s Democrats to raise money and organize their electoral base. With our “data monkeys” finally at work with the right tools, we thought we could build the competitive information base necessary to fight the next election.

  The prime minister had survived, but he had been damaged by the coalition crisis. He had won the battle for public opinion by portraying the coalition as a coup, but he couldn’t erase the feeling, in the press and the public, that he had brought the crisis upon himself with arrogantly partisan manoeuvring and a total failure to appreciate the seriousness of the economic crisis. Since our party had shown, through the budget and auto-bailout votes, that we were prepared to co-operate with him to pull the economy out of the ditch, we expected him to change course and become less nakedly partisan. I told the prime minister in one of our meetings that if he wanted our co-operation in Parliament he would have to call off his attack dogs. He fixed me with his cold eyes and said nothing, but looking back now, I see what he must have been thinking. He had just survived the near collapse of his government, his caucus must have been shaken by his astonishing lack of judgment, and he needed to demonstrate, right away, that he was still in charge. Instead of calling off the dogs, he let them loose. In early May, barely ten days after our party convention in Vancouver confirmed me as leader, the Conservatives ran their first attack ads. They ran two of them over and over in what turned out to be the largest single ad campaign in Canadian history outside of an election period. Their lines became bywords. If you were in Canada at the time, you probably know them by heart: “Michael Ignatieff. Just Visiting,” and “Michael Ignatieff. He Didn’t Come Back For You.”1

  Between May 2009 and the election two years later, they ran those ads everywhere, buying airtime on the shows with the highest viewing figures. I couldn’t turn on the Oscars without seeing my face in the commercial breaks. I couldn’t watch the Super Bowl without being told that I was “just visiting.” Their attack exploited a hole in Canada’s election laws that ought to be closed. There are strict limits on expenditures for all parties once a federal election is called, but there are no limits outside the election period. Normally, governments in Canada get on with governing between elections. They don’t run campaigns against opposition leaders. But in the new politics of the permanent campaign, governing is campaigning. The effect of their attack was immediate. Our poll numbers began to slide. Among the party faithful I could always get a hearing, but outside, beyond the precincts of the party, a strange silence descended. I could talk but nobody listened. I was just visiting.

  My opponents had followed a cardinal rule of attack politics: go for an opponent’s strengths and his weaknesses will take care of themselves. In my case, what drew Canadians to me was precisely that I was an outsider. I’d gone out into the wider world and tried to make something of myself, and I’d come home because I wanted to serve. The Conservatives went right at the narrative of homecoming and turned it on its head: I was a carpetbagger, an elitist with no fixed convictions, out for myself and not out for Canadians. It didn’t matter that, by the time the attack ads were launched, I’d been home for three years and won two elections. Nothing mattered. To say I was just visiting did more than question my allegiance; it also implied that I was an elitist snob for whom politics was a diversion. The ads brilliantly combined the class and the citizenship gambits in one devastating line of attack.

  As they say in the States, I was being “swift-boated.” In the US presidential election of 2004, some Vietnam veterans ran devastatingly effective attacks against the Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry, questioning his service record as a young lieutenant commanding a Swift Boat that saw action on the Mekong River in Vietnam.2 Kerry had come home from that experience as a decorated veteran and had gone to Capitol Hill and attacked the conduct of the war. Kerry’s testimony, which I vividly remembered because I was at Harvard at the time, made him a hero to the anti-war movement and launched his political career in Massachusetts, but it left many veterans bitter and angry. In 2004, some of those veterans, funded by a Republican multi-millionaire, launched the swift-boat attacks on Kerry’s candidacy, and the attacks were so successful that to “swift-boat” became a verb in the lexicon of American politics. When Kerry appeared at the Democratic Convention and “reported for duty”—playing on his military service as his claim to the presidency—his candidacy was already doomed. At the time, I was among those who found his inability to reply inexplicable. It wasn’t as if a reply wasn’t possible. He could have asked, for example, why his war record was the issue—he actually saw combat in Vietnam—when his opponent, George W. Bush, used his father’s influence to finagle an easy period of service in the Air National Guard, flying loops over Texas. But Kerry never went on the attack. Now that I’ve replayed these swift-boat ads for my students—as well as the ones unleashed against me—I begin to see why they reduced Kerry to silence. The problem was that the ads contained an element of truth, and it is truth that makes attack ads so damaging and so difficult to rebut. The ads replayed his testimony to Congress, with his lacerating condemnation of American military conduct in the jungles, the search-and-destroy missions, the killing of citizens, the torching of harmless villages. If he was to turn back the attacks of the swift-boat veterans, he had to become again the fiery young man he had once been and reclaim the fiery anti-Vietnam rhetoric that had once been his own. He would have had to say, I was that young man and he is still there inside me. I am proud of what I said then and I believe it today. If you don’t vote for me, that’s your business, but I won’t walk away from what I said about Vietnam. Kerry would have had to turn America’s memory of Vietnam into the same kind of teachable moment that Obama made of the Reverend Wright controversy that threatened to derail his candidacy in the spring of 2008.3 Obama decided to own the rage of Reverend Wright and the black church of which he was a member and pivot to the question of why, decades after the civil rights revolution, race was still such a painful and divisive topic in America. In doing so, he gave himself the standing to lead the American discussion on race and, in the process, gave himself the standing to become the president. The swift-boat attack offered Kerry the same opportunity to pivot—to own his past in order to establish the authority to own the debate on Vietnam—and in this ul
timate test of political skill, he failed.

  I’ve rehearsed the Kerry moment in detail because, in the smaller arena of Canadian politics, the “just visiting” attacks presented me with the same challenge. Like the swift-boat ads, “just visiting” did contain enough truth to be credible. The fact was that I had been out of the country for thirty years before that. Most damagingly, the ad had included a clip of me telling an American interviewer on camera in 2004 that “we” had to decide what kind of country we were so we wouldn’t torture detainees in any circumstances. Using “we” was the kind of mistake you make when you push an argument one word too far in order to win over an audience. The irony, of course, was that I knew I could never be, would never be an American. That was precisely why I had come home. But none of this mattered. I was convicting myself out of my own mouth, and the effect on the morale of our troops was immediate. Caucus colleagues commiserated at the unfairness of it all, but they were professional politicians and I could see they thought I had been struck a mortal blow.

  The longer you leave an attack unanswered, the more damage it does, and if you refuse to “dignify” the attacks with a response, you have already given up. Dignity doesn’t come into it. If you don’t defend yourself, people conclude either that you are guilty as charged or that you are too weak to stand and fight. After all, if you won’t stick up for yourself, you won’t stick up for them either. This is how you lose standing with voters.

  We didn’t have the money to run a counter-ad campaign, and in any case, what would it have said? I love my country very much? Attack ads force you to refute a negative and drive you onto the terrain of your opponent, where you are bound to lose. They had made me the issue and I knew I had to make them the issue. In speeches throughout the summer of 2009, I counterattacked. Did the prime minister get to decide who was a good Canadian? Nearly three million Canadian citizens live overseas, almost a million of them in the United States. Were they less Canadian than the ones who stayed at home? Did we actually believe that the only good Canadian was someone who’d never been out of the country? I believed I was fighting for a generous, cosmopolitan idea of citizenship against provincial small-mindedness, fighting not just for me but also for the next generation. I met these young Canadians all the time: they were my students, my campaign aides, my friends. One amazing afternoon in Pearson airport in Toronto, for example, Zsuzsanna and I were waiting for a flight and, in the space of five minutes, four separate young people came up to say hello. One was heading off to Bangladesh to work on micro-credit for rural village women; another was a water engineer bound for an irrigation project in Kenya; a third was heading to Brazil to work on rain-forest conservation; and a fourth was flying to Singapore to work for a merchant bank. That was the Canada I loved, and I didn’t want any of them to come home one day and run for office and be forced to defend themselves for having lived the way I had lived. In attacking me, the Conservatives were attacking anyone who had ever gone out and then come back home. And this was home, dammit.

  No matter how I tried to widen out the issue beyond me, it didn’t work. I was still “just visiting.” Since the press wasn’t listening to my story and our party didn’t have the resources to launch an ad campaign of our own, I sought to earn a hearing the hard way. We refitted a bus, called it the Liberal Express, and throughout the summer of 2010, Zsuzsanna and I—together with a small team—made campaign stops in every province and territory. I spoke in every kind of venue: in farmyards where pigs strolled majestically in front of the podium; on wharves where the lobster pots were drying; in vineyards where the vines were ripening; and in the parking lots of coffee shops.

  I loved every minute of it. The best thing 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. On the Liberal Express tour that summer, 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. I learned a lot about the place of politics and politicians in the common life: at these festivities, mostly organized by volunteers and community groups, a politician had to know his place. The people wanted us there because we were representative of the community, but they didn’t want us turning the event “political.” We could “bring greetings,” but campaign speeches or partisan attacks were out. What you learn from this is that the common life runs deeper than politics, runs below the fault lines of partisan acrimony and taps into our deep need as human beings to be together, to do things with a common purpose, to achieve more by being together than we could possibly achieve alone.

  I loved that summer tour, especially because I was able to show the country to my young staffers the way Pierre Trudeau had showed it to me in 1968. Many of the eastern Canadians had never been out to British Columbia, and it was like watching my younger self to see the play of astonishment on their faces as they watched their magnificent country rolling past the windows of our Liberal Express. I particularly remember one small railway town, Yale, British Columbia, whose residents—all 250 of them—came out to hear me speak in the deep shade of the mountain peaks that encircled their town. Just as I got to the part about how my great-grandfather had been through Yale in 1872, about how the railway had built our country, and how we needed to rebuild it together again, a diesel rolled through, hauling ninety cars’ worth of ore. The driver’s horn echoed off the mountainsides and drowned out my last words, but it completed them in a way that was perfection. When the Liberal Express rolled up to our caucus meeting in Baddeck, on Cape Breton Island on Canada’s Atlantic coast, in August 2010, even the doubters in my caucus had to admit that I had done everything I could to turn our fortunes around. Every time we’d made our case to the people I could tell they were listening and I felt, for the first time, that they saw me as one of their own. But you couldn’t meet enough people in the flesh to counter an ad campaign that was on every television set in the country. By the end of the summer, we had made a lot of friends but we hadn’t moved the polls an inch. I have to hand it to the prime minister. He didn’t attack what I said. He attacked my right to say anything at all. He denied me standing in my own country.

  The rules that govern standing deserve a closer look, since standing has become the primary area of combat in modern politics. You no longer attack a candidate’s ideas or positions. You attack who they are.

  “Standing” is a word from the law that means the right to have your day in court. Judges decide who gets standing. They regulate standing to control their courtrooms and maintain the boundary between law and politics.4 In everyday life, we use the word to accord respect to forms of personal authority. Experts have standing with us by virtue of their expertise, professionals by virtue of their training. A friend who has gone through a tough time has standing with us. We listen to what they say. Granting someone standing is not displaying deference. It is showing democratic respect.

  When you enter politics, your first job is to secure your standing, the authority to make your case and ensure a hearing. This will not guarantee you election, since your opponent might have more, but without it, you don’t have a chance. In theory, all citizens ought to have standing, since all citizens are equal and all have the right to run for office. But standing is not a right. It is a privilege earned from voters, one at a time. It is a non-transferable form of authority. Nothing about past rank, expertise, qualifications or previous success entitles you to it. We can all think of people of good character who never achieved standing with a national electorate. We can also call to mind political figures whose character was questionable, Bill Clinton being a possible example, who never lost standing with the voters. Nor is having standing the same thing as being liked. We can all think of successful politicians, like Richard Nixon, for example, who were never muc
h liked but still managed to conserve reluctant standing from the electorate. You might suppose that popularity would confer standing, but there are plenty of celebrities, pop stars, basketball players and television show hosts who fail to translate their popularity into political success. Some think that money will confer standing, but multi-millionaires recurrently run for office in the United States and lose, the most recent example being Mitt Romney. Nor do degrees confer standing. Success in education is a badge of merit that people actually earn, yet people with degrees often have trouble converting their achievements into standing. The reason is simple: education codes as entitlement, and voters hate entitlement, the way they hate privilege. Educated people routinely complain about this but they are wrong. Standing has to be earned and degrees earn you nothing. This estimable principle leads, however, to a paradox. You can be elected without education, character, likeability, popularity, degrees or a fat bank account, but you cannot be elected without standing. Given these rules, it’s a wonder that we elect as many capable politicians as we do.

  Endorsements from powerful people and organizations used to confer standing, but these endorsements matter less than they once did. Unions used to endorse candidates, but unions are weaker than they were and union members vote their own preferences more often than they take political dictation from their leaders. Women’s organizations used to endorse candidates, but women voters want to decide their vote for themselves. When I was in politics, various self-appointed power-brokers among the immigrant organizations would come and promise an endorsement in return for some favour, but I always had the sneaking suspicion that they were pretending to an influence over their people they didn’t actually have. Likewise environmental groups, the news media and editorial pages all endorse candidates and the endorsements do not confer much in the way of standing.