The education of Michael Ignatieff (and Barack Obama)

Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff have much in common these days. Both are being denounced as elitist, aloof and outsiders.

In the U.S., Maureen Dowd, the caustic New York Times columnist sees Obama as "too lofty" and as a leader who "has failed to present himself as someone with the common touch."

As a result, she says, "he becomes easier to demonize."

In the same vein, her colleague at the Times, Judith Warner, notes that "elite" has gone from being a "word of admiration to one of insult" — and code for "liberal," a highly charged word in U.S. politics at the moment.

Obama's enemies deepen the insult by insinuating he is somehow too "foreign," even that he was born outside the U.S.

Taken all together, the charges mean "this person is not one of us."

Putting a negative frame around a political opponent's image is an old political game. But the new Republican playbook has made turning an opponent's assets into liabilities in the public mind into a low art form.

When Sarah Palin accurately describes Obama as a "professor of constitutional law" (pretty useful expertise, one might think), she means it to be derisive.

Different platforms

The political situation surrounding an American president is different obviously than that of an opposition leader in this country.

The American economy looks stalled at the moment. But Obama's already impressive time in office boasts an unprecedented legislative record that held off a depression, saved the car industry, reformed health care, regulated wayward financial services and began more innovation in the field of education.

Even the combat troops have left Iraq on schedule as promised.

Legislation, of course, earns little public credit. Jobs haven't come back and Afghanistan looks bad. Plus, as Dowd says, Obama's messaging came up real short on occasion.

But being president confers the advantages of having both initiative and the platform he needs to better convince Americans to face up to long-term challenges.

The leader of the Official Opposition in a five-party Canadian system can't claim either of these benefits from which to counter the negative framing — elitist, aloof, "just visiting" — that his Conservative foes have learned to use, first against his predecessor, Stephane Dion, and now against him.

So what's a guy to do?

Get angry

It's curious that we Canadians tend to view a non-politician coming to elected office as initially being more deserving of our trust than those cradle-to-grave aspirants.

But then we seem to jump on them for naiveté and weakness when they don't show the usual combat skills once the political spin, obfuscation and brawling begin.

The herd mentality in Canadian journalism helps explain the prevailing notion that Ignatieff has been a dud.

But you have to ask whether the man's demonstrable international reputation and success, including on TV, remind some of our comfortably-perched scribes and academics of the backwater quality of their own circles.

The notion that Ignatieff was somehow un-Canadian because he worked for a long time out of London is hogwash.

In London, which I visited often in the 1980s and '90s, he was well known as a Canadian who did our reputation in that hard-to-impress capital considerable good.

Later, he made an admitted, though principled, mistake in judgment by supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But he certainly wasn't alone on that and he took his mugging in the Conservative attack ads like a man.

He wasn't bitter. He didn't quit. He kept learning. And somewhere along the way this spring and summer, he has obviously gotten angry.

Which is not a bad thing in a politician. There are many, in fact, urging just that emotion on Barack Obama.

'He knew me'

If, in the past, Ignatieff fumbled over explaining why exactly he was doing the seemingly preposterous thing of seeking to be the leader of a major country without having had any real leadership experience, he is clear enough about his purpose now.

His words aren't reported in our mostly conservative-leaning news outlets. But they are no longer mostly about himself.

Instead, they are about how government could again be an essential social force and steward of the environment.

He appears to have realized that he needs to be appraised as leader of an alternative government and, on his cross-country tour this summer, he has been backed up by credible, progressive former ministers, such as Ken Dryden and Ujjal Dosanjh to help make that case.

When I saw him in B.C. a couple of times recently, the crowds — admittedly Liberal — came visibly alive when a now-impassioned Ignatieff charged that Canada "is being governed by an ideology alien to the character of the country."

As he reels off the litany of steps the Harper government has taken to spin information, punish critics, block Parliament, ignore the courts and scare people with wedge-issue politics of fear, he shows himself to be the kind of leader they came out hoping to hear.

He also seemed, at last, to enjoy mingling and chatting with a great many talkative Canadians.

He gets the purpose. He says he knows that "to lead, you have to listen." And people now listen better to him, because he gets them.

It may be early days still in the upgrading of Michael Ignatieff. But right now, what seems to be making him tick is that he's mad as hell, a trait of leadership that many people will recognize as authentically Canadian indeed.

Plus, the ability to listen rather than lecture can only stand him in good stead.

It captures the spirit of a story Eleanor Roosevelt used to tell about a grief-stricken man who collapsed on Constitution Avenue when her late husband's funeral cortege passed by.

After the mourner sufficiently re-composed himself, neighbours asked, "Did you know FDR?"

"No," he said, "but he knew me."