Who Are You, And What Have You Done With Michael Ignatieff?

On the Liberal leader's metamorphosis into a less annoying version of himself.

The Toronto Star’s Rick Salutin used to be really irritated by Michael Ignatieff, even before he came back from Harvard to enter Canadian politics. But this election campaign, he’s managed to tone down the cringe factor. He’s abandoned his un-Liberal intellectual advocacy for military intervention in places like Iraq, he’s stopped talking so much about himself, and overall he appears a more comfortable candidate. “One sign of this evolution comes from Harper,” writes Salutin. “He seems off his game. He keeps flubbing it, starting with his early campaign challenge to a one-on-one debate, which he suddenly retreated from when Ignatieff agreed. Wouldn’t Harper … have anticipated that move?” Salutin speculates that the Conservative leader may be running scared, but surely that’s overstating the point. While he’s been less than perfect in the first two weeks of the campaign, he’s still got a healthy lead in the polls. It’s doubtful he’s having nightmares about Iggy just yet.

While Ignatieff is beginning to look like a better version of himself, according to the National Post’s Lorne Gunter, Barack Obama is starting to look a lot like his predecessor, George W. Bush. The president who promised hope and change has reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, crafted an anti-Kyoto environmental policy similar to Dubya’s, imitated Bush’s Iraq troop surge in Afghanistan, and invaded a Muslim country under questionable pretenses with uncertain goals. “Mr. Obama is beginning to see that on international issues, multilateralism isn’t as easy as simply arranging a group hug,” says Gunter, “and George Bush wasn’t just some ignorant cowboy, firing madly in all directions at once.” It’s true that that characterization of Bush was always inaccurate (although his actions didn’t always help to refute it), but the Libya intervention is surely markedly different from the Iraq war, being, at least for now considerably less costly in terms of lives and money. It’s one thing to begin an ill-advised bombing campaign; it’s quite another to painstakingly build a case for war that turns out to be full of holes, and costs a trillion dollars.