Ignatieff Rising

Liberal leader, Harvard professor, and, as it turns out, real human being.

A week into the election campaign, the National Post’s John Ivison says the momentum is clearly in Michael Ignatieff’s favour, largely because the Liberal leader has been able to show that, contrary to the Conservatives' portrayals of him, he is not an intellectual automaton sent from Harvard to destroy the nation’s soul. “People who have met him face to face express their surprise at the difference from the ‘uptight business guy’ they have seen on television,” writes Ivison, and on his first national campaign he’s proven adept at kissing babies, handing out hotdogs, and all the other things politicians do to prove they’re human beings. Contrast this to the approach of Stephen “No More Questions, Please” Harper, and one can understand why Iggy’s gaining ground in the polls, temporarily at least.

While many pundits were mystified that the Liberals triggered an election last week when the party was trailing so far back in the polls, the Vancouver Sun’s Barbara Yaffe writes that the Grits may have known their leader would shine on the campaign trail all along. Some cynical folks in the media (including a Liberal insider) speculated that forcing the election was part of the Liberals’ plan to hasten Ignatieff’s departure, but Yaffe thinks a "more reasonable theory is that Liberals believe, in a campaign, voters at last will take notice of their leader and find him a reasonable, even likable man.”

Sun Media’s Michael Harris blames Ignatieff’s resurgence on Stephen Harper’s continued “substitution of messaging for communication … The prime minister uses language to create facts, not to convey them.” Harris says a prime example of this imperious messaging strategy is their continued insistence that the fighter jets they plan to purchase are not as expensive as everyone else on the planet seems to think. But this is the kind of budget dispute any party would stay “on-message” for; a much more startling example of messaging is the way the Tories talk about Ignatieff as the “leader of the Opposition Coalition,” although no such thing exists. Reading Conservative campaign literature, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d slipped into an alternate universe.

Image courtesy Reuters.