If you’re interested, my latest piece at The Guardian — on celebrated public intellectual, former Harvard professor, and current Canadian Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff — is here.
In brief, I don’t much care for him. (I supported former Ontario Premier Bob Rae for the leadership, but Rae pulled out of the race late last year.) Here’s a taste:
To me, though, he has never seemed to be much of a Canadian, and certainly not enough of one to be our prime minister. It’s not that he has spent so much of his life overseas – mostly in Britain and the US. It’s that he has seemed to aspire actively to be anything but Canadian, and more specifically to be American. Which is fine, in a cosmopolitan sort of way, but he comes back to Canada with an air of condescension about him, as if he has seen the world and conquered it and has now decided, with the coaxing of a party eager for him to lead it back to the promised land, to sully himself in the world of politics supposedly on our behalf but really because he just wants to be prime minister, so great would it look on his resumé, a capstone to a long and successful career.
Still, he’s better than the alternative, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his vicious band of Bush-lite Conservatives.