The cynics will say that big thinking is a typical delusion of intellectuals foolish enough to try their luck in politics. This fails to appreciate the decisive role that ideas can play in defining a candidate, and in bringing people over to your side. Politicians must have special gifts for knowing when an idea’s time has come and for dramatizing those ideas so that citizens are gripped by the vision. When we released “An Agenda for Nation Building,” we had our fair share of catcalls from the press and rival candidates, but I could tell from the way young people came to talk to me after meetings, with well-thumbed copies of our little red book in their hands, that we were striking a chord.
Thanks to these ideas and an energetic cross-country campaign, I had made the running in the race so far. Now my rivals were waiting for me to stumble.
In July 2006, war erupted in Lebanon, and by early August, all of the candidates for the leadership were being judged by how well we positioned ourselves in relation to the unfolding crisis. It is worth pausing to reflect on how peculiar this was. None of us could have had any conceivable impact on the outcomes in the Middle East. We were in opposition rather than government. At most, the issue of the war offered opportunities to appeal for votes in the Jewish community and the Lebanese and Muslim communities across the nation. However real the suffering was in Lebanon itself, it was deeply unreal as a political issue in a Canadian leadership contest. But politics is like that. Issues arise over which a politician has no actual control but which come to define whether he is up to the job.
When understood politically, the war in Lebanon was an opportunity to position myself. Positioning is not the same as taking a position. It is not about addressing the substance of an issue or producing a policy that responds to the complexity of the situation. No actual expertise is necessary in order to position effectively. Positioning is about placing yourself on a political spectrum, differentiating yourself from your opponent without alienating too many people in the process. To position yourself is to align your public stance to the constituency you wish to win over. You have to be strategic, meaning that you don’t have to say what you think but you must say what you intend. If you position successfully, you win support without appearing to cut your cloth to suit your audience. If your positioning fails, you will be seen to be pandering.
To put it plainly, my positioning on the Lebanon war was a disaster. In an unguarded moment, I told an interviewer that I wasn’t losing sleep over casualties in Hezbollah-held areas in Lebanon. I meant that Hezbollah had begun the war and had to accept the consequences, but my words were quickly parsed as cold-blooded indifference to civilian suffering. This did not go down well in Montreal, where there is a strong Lebanese presence. Days later, in a television appearance on Quebec’s most watched program, Tout le monde en parle (Everybody’s Talking About It), trying to repair the damage done by my previous remark, I said that Israeli forces may have committed a “war crime” in their attack on a place called Qana. Once my words were translated and circulated in the English press across the country, all hell broke loose. What I meant was that the Israel Defense Forces, in a legitimate response to Hezbollah attacks, had engaged in indiscriminate use of force against a target that housed civilians. At Harvard I had taught the Geneva Conventions and I knew the distinction between a war crime and a crime against humanity. I didn’t believe the Israel Defense Forces had been slaughtering civilians. I believed they had used excessive and indiscriminate force. What Jewish community supporters heard, however, was that I was accusing Israel of behaving like the Nazis.
It’s not what you mean. It’s what they hear. I would not retract, because Human Rights Watch had confirmed the use of indiscriminate force, but I did reaffirm my lifelong commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself. Nothing I said dug me out of my hole. With a couple of ill-chosen sentences, I had managed the almost impossible feat of alienating Jewish, Muslim and Lebanese groups alike. I was aghast at the media storm that ensued, the anger and disillusionment from Jewish supporters and the way the controversy stopped our campaign in its tracks. The incident revealed the strange fact that the most divisive issues in the domestic politics of multicultural societies turn out to be international ones, in countries far away. Distant conflicts make communities circle their wagons, and a politician’s reactions are closely parsed for magic words of reassurance. Your job as a politician is to position yourself as the master of balanced understanding. I failed on all counts. After the furor over the Lebanese war died down, Ian Davey told me politicians have nine lives. Over Qana, I consumed eight of them.
It’s worth pausing here to reflect on what the incident reveals about the use of language in politics. If you’ve spent your life as a writer, journalist and teacher, nothing prepares you for the use of language once you enter the political arena. It is unlike any word game you have ever played. You may fancy yourself as a communicator, but the first time you step up on a political platform, you can have the weird feeling that you have walked into Woody Allen’s film Bananas, in that sequence where the guerilla leader changes the official language of his Latin American country to Swedish. You leave a charitable realm where people cut you some slack, finish your sentences and accept that you didn’t quite mean what you said. You enter a world of lunatic literal-mindedness where only the words that come out of your mouth actually count. You also leave the world where people forgive and forget, where people let bygones be bygones. You enter the eternal present, where every syllable you’ve ever uttered, every tweet, Facebook post, newspaper article or cringe-inducing photograph remains in cyberspace forever for your enemies to use against you. If you find yourself explaining yourself at a press conference, you have already lost half the battle. In the case of the Qana incident, I had the absurd feeling that the missing context for my remarks was actually my whole life. Did nobody know that I had taught and lived in Israel and written the biography of Isaiah Berlin, a committed Zionist?5 How could anyone have supposed that I was anything but a critical friend of Israel? But this was not the point. I had failed to understand how communities listen when they feel they are under attack. Isaiah Berlin and I used to talk about this. He would say, in jest, that the only real political question, when he was growing up in Jewish north London in the 1920s, was, “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” This is how language in politics is actually heard, not just by Jews, but also by any community that seeks recognition from a politician. The Sikhs wanted to know how I stood on the suppression of Sikh rights in India; the Tamils wanted to know how I stood on the brutal civil war tearing Sri Lanka apart; Iranians wanted to know my position on the brutal theocracy in Iran. For the Jewish community, the bottom line had to be unequivocal support for Israel’s right to defend itself. I had no trouble whatever with this, but I questioned whether a democratic state’s legitimate rights entitled it to violate the laws of war. This shouldn’t have been the issue. Why should a politician take it upon himself to rule on an embattled state’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions? It was not my job. What the Jewish community heard in my comment on Qana was that I was questioning their right to defend themselves. No matter what I did after that, I could not recover the confidence of the community leadership. When Stephen Harper aligned Canada with the most intransigent of Israeli positions, I couldn’t rally support among those members of the Jewish community who believed Israel’s best guarantee of its security lay in a two-state solution. I had lost my standing, my ability to get a hearing.
In politics, as in life, the challenge is how you learn from your mistakes. Later on, after the controversy had died down, I gave a speech at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto where I drew the lessons I had learned:
By trial and error—mostly by error—I’ve come to a few conclusions about how I should act. In reaching these conclusions I am guided by one of Winston Churchill’s wonderful remarks. He said politicians shouldn’t be sofas. We shouldn’t bear the shape of the last person to sit on us. We should keep our own shape, no matter what. We should
have principles. So what are they?
The first rule is to be consistent. I must not defend Israel in this house of worship only to betray it in a mosque across town. I must not defend the rights of Palestinians to a state of their own in a mosque only to betray this commitment here in this great synagogue. I must be consistent.
A second rule is that I must not inflame discord with ill-chosen words. I must say what I mean and only what I mean. I must not pander to the forces of hatred and discord. When I do so, I betray my obligation to unite Canadians. A third rule is that I must speak for Canada. I am not here to speak for any political group within Israel or anywhere else. It is the national interest of Canada that must guide my actions as an elected representative. In relation to the Middle East, that means striving to prevent a wider and deadlier conflict in which Israel goes to the wall.6
What you learn from your mistakes is that politics is a game with words, but it isn’t Scrabble. No one who enters the political arena for the first time is ever prepared for its adversarial quality. Every word you utter becomes an opportunity for your opponents to counterattack. Inevitably you take it personally, and that is your first mistake. You have to learn what the lifers, wise with years of experience, have long since understood: it’s never personal; it’s strictly business.
As the leadership campaign approached its finale, the public debates among the candidates curdled into bitterness and acrimony. I remember one of the final debates, in Montreal in late November 2006, when one of my rivals, Bob Rae, repeated the old charge that I had some explaining to do on the issue of torture. If not, he implied, I could not be a reliable defender of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I was angry that a friend would repeat such a tired canard, and afterward, as we passed in the hall, he looked at me and shrugged. “It’s politics,” he said. He was right, of course. In politics, there is no such thing as good or bad faith.
You can try complaining about the bad faith of an opponent to the press, but they aren’t the referees. They’ve come to watch the fight and they want a good one. As one of them said to me, “Our job is to watch the battle and then come down on the field and shoot the wounded.” Once you’ve been shot at, you handle all your interactions with the media with utmost care. You become strategic. You become as careful as your appearance, every hair in place, tie well knotted, suit immaculate, armoured for the day of battle. In entering politics you have to surrender spontaneity and one of life’s pleasures—saying the first thing that comes into your head. If you are to survive, you have to fit a filter between your brain and your mouth. When words are weapons and can be turned against you, freely expressing yourself is a luxury you can’t afford. Your language, like your personality, becomes guarded. You can still have fun. Indeed you must have fun, since everyone likes a happy warrior, but every happy warrior is a watchful one.
Obviously, a straight answer to a straight question is a good idea, and when citizens put a question to you, such candour becomes an obligation. They elect you, after all. The rules are different with the press. In the strange kabuki play of a press conference or interview, candour is a temptation best avoided. Be candid if you can, be strategic if you must. All truth is good, the African proverb goes, but not all truth is good to say. You try never to lie, but you don’t have to answer the question you’re asked, only the question you want to answer.
As you submit to the compromises demanded by public life, your public self begins to alter the person inside. Within a year of entering politics, I had the disoriented feeling of having been taken over by a doppelgänger, a strange new persona I could barely recognize when I looked at myself in the mirror. I wore Harry Rosen suits—and Harry himself had chalked the trousers—and my ties were carefully matched to my shirts. I had never been so well-dressed in my life and had never felt so hollow. Looking back now, I would say that some sense of hollowness, some sense of a divide between the face you present to the world and the face you reserve for the mirror, is a sign of sound mental health. It’s when you no longer notice that the public self has taken over the private self that trouble starts. When you forget that you have a private realm that you want to keep separate from the public gaze, you’ll soon surrender your whole life to politics. You become your smile, the fixed rictus of geniality that politics demands of you. What that happens, you’ve lost yourself.
As November turned to December 2006, with the convention upon us, all the advice from the team was to play it safe, to cut down unforced errors, keep within the tramlines and never go off script. This may have been prudent advice, but it had the effect of draining me of conviction. I could feel myself becoming less inspiring as every night went by. All actors, and all good politicians, have the particular brand of stamina known as “keeping it fresh.” They keep finding a way to renew the role. Showtime for me—the round of delegate meetings and fundraisers—became a circus act more threadbare with every repetition. As the convention finale approached and our team, now numbering in the hundreds, was engaged in frantic last-minute phoning to line up delegate support, I found myself wondering what political life was doing to me. I had made myself into a politician, and I didn’t much like what I was becoming.
I hoped none of this showed as Zsuzsanna and I toured the hospitality suites of the convention centre in Montreal, as we rallied our troops and as I negotiated for support in secret meetings in hotel suites with other candidates. It was politics in all its shameless charm. Rival candidates would sit down and sound me out about what I could offer them if they swung their support to me on the convention floor. I had nothing to offer them, since we were in opposition, but I had no scruple about playing with Monopoly money and offering them significant roles in some government to come, sealed by solemn handshakes. I knew that the same candidate would then head off to the next secret meeting to see what future offices my rivals had to offer. I knew that no deal signed and sealed with a handshake would survive if I failed to show overwhelming support in the first ballot. If I proved vulnerable, my support would drain away to the candidates who had momentum. A convention where the result is actually decided on the floor is always like this. Everyone is making bets on your staying power. Power-brokers from the Sikhs, the Muslims, the Lebanese, the Greeks, from every tribe in Canadian multiculturalism, came to my hotel suite and, after solemn conclaves and assurances of mutual respect, would offer me their delegates’ votes. It wasn’t obvious to me that their delegates’ votes were theirs to pledge to me in the first place, and I knew that some of them were selling the same bloc vote to a rival candidate in a hotel suite down the hall.
By the convention, I had given everything I had to the battle. I was resigned to any outcome and found myself humming that Doris Day tune “Que Sera Sera.” The result would now be up to a team of hundreds, working the convention floor and the hotel hospitality suites, reeling in delegates, rounding up stragglers and trying to stop defections. It had become obvious that I wouldn’t win on the first ballot. I had passionate advocates who saw me as renewal, change and internationalism incarnate, and I had detractors who saw me as a Harvard snob, carpetbagging elitist and George W. Bush apologist. While some welcomed my positions on Quebec as a nation, others believed I was selling out the national unity of Canada. While some were drawn to my call for a new politics, others questioned whether I had the judgment to be a successful leader at all.
Upstairs in my hotel suite, as I wrote my convention speech with my advisors kept firmly off to one side, I wanted to slough off all the negative press coverage, all the encrusted misconception. I wanted to be free of all the quotes and misquotes. I wanted a moment of pure recognition in which all the scales of misconception would fall away and I would stand in front of my forty-five hundred fellow citizens and be seen—and accepted—for what I actually was. To be chosen leader would be that final moment of recognition. You want these things, believe me. In search of that moment, I rehearsed my convention speech, trying to find the words that would set the convention alight. When the moment
finally came, I gave the speech to the packed hall and felt, as paragraph followed paragraph, a growing sense of release and elation:
I say tonight what I have said throughout this campaign. We must be—we are—the party of hope. And hope begins with opportunity.
Opportunity for low-income Canadians who want to scale the welfare wall; for aboriginals who want to live in communities where small businesses can thrive; for fellow citizens who need affordable housing; for immigrant Canadians who want to work in jobs they love; for women who want to live free of poverty and violence; for farmers who want to pass on profitable farms to their kids; for seniors who are entitled to live out their own Canadian dream in dignity.
If hope begins with opportunity, opportunity means education. We must be the party that says to every young Canadian: if you get the grades, you get to go.
Opportunity also means innovation. Every scientist, every researcher, every businessperson and investor must look to our party and say: those Liberals, they get it.
An opportunities agenda means faith in the Canadian future, a future where Canadians of Chinese and Indian descent help us conquer the exploding markets of China and Asia.
A future where we do not mortgage our children’s future with debts we have not paid off today. A future where the air is clean, the water is pure.
When governments put a price on pollution, markets respond. When markets respond and governments act, our heritage can be redeemed and our children’s legacy assured.
A good citizen of Canada is a good citizen of the world. Liberals want a Canada that leads in the international fight against AIDS. A Canada that leads in the fight to defend democracy and human rights, a Canada that invests in women’s literacy, primary health care and good government. A Canada that invests in its military so that we can protect the vulnerable and defend the weak.
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