If the latest profile of Michael Ignatieff (in the Sept. 7 issue of The New Yorker) leaves its U.S. audience confused about why he wants to be our next prime minister, it will leave Canadians even more mystified.
In the profile, expatriate Canadian essayist Adam Gopnik tells us that he has known the Liberal Leader for a long time. “He had never struck me as a natural politician, the kind of Homo clintonius who feels the need to woo and win every table,” Mr. Gopnik says. He wonders what led Mr. Ignatieff to seek power, and how that experience has changed him.
Mr. Gopnik's encounters with the Liberal Leader over the summer have convinced him that Mr. Ignatieff has undergone a profound transformation. He is no longer “retiring and precise, professorial in demeanour,” with “a vibe of virtue rather than of ambition.” Instead, he has become a calculating actor. “He hadn't become more timid or cautious; he had become, in a professorial way, more theatrical, and more cunning. … To trade philosophy for politics is to trade observation for acting. Everything becomes a kind of performance – he was onstage at every moment … all in the search to become, for a moment in time, the written rather than the writer.”
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