Rae vs. Ignatieff

The tussle between Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff is shaping up to be a replay of the Democratic race between Clinton and Obama. It will be a Canadian version of the leadership fight south of the border! Condensed into a few months as compared to the three-year-long mud fest the Americans prefer, our Liberal leadership race will sort out the bottom runners very quickly. The party spies will dig up just enough dirt to discourage the also-rans, leaving only Bobby and Iggy to fight it out to replace Dion, the only Liberal leader who never made it to 24 Sussex.

The race for leadership may not quite make it to the level of entertainment that the Democrats displayed, but it will have its moments. Building on the effectiveness of the ‘Flying Puffin’ ad, someone in Iggy’s camp will Photoshop the Rick Mercer clip where Bobby dives bare-butt into a lake. The clip will however be pulled when the Ignatieff camp realizes that showing Bobby has balls gave their opponent more credit than they had intended.

Rae, of course, has more baggage than the skinny dip. His dismal efforts at running Ontario as the NDP Premier may have at least taught him that he was not a closet NDP’er but a true Liberal. At least that is what he would have us believe. Too many Ontarians are not going to buy that line. Rae does bear some similarity to Hillary, in that he is from the ‘old school’ of politics. He has been around, seemingly for ever, beginning with his support for Pierre in the heydays of Trudeau-mania. However, if we are looking for some charisma, e.g. the Obama campaign, we will have to look elsewhere.

Obama had a visual attraction for some Democrats in that he was what the people to the south refer to as African-American. This made him noticeably ‘different’ in appearance to the old white guys who normally hold high office south of the border. At this time, we do not have any African-American-Canadians in the race for office next May. Even had we someone of colour, I doubt we would give them a label such as Chinese-Canadian or First Nations-Canadian – we just don’t do that in the great white north. People in the Ignatieff camp might have already considered using Michael’s Russian heritage, but running as a Russian-Canadian just won’t work now that the Russian Bear has been sharpening its teeth again. Putin has Palin watching him across the Bering Strait, but you never know . . .

The question is, will Rae and Iggy be able to raise campaign money using the internet as Obama did? Rumour has it that the Liberal bank is as empty as the 1st Bank of Iceland. They do not have enough shekels to help their current leader who has had to take out a 2nd mortgage on Stornaway. The problem for these two aspirants to high office is that if Canadians start using the internet to research the two men, it may backfire.

Wiki (take a grain of salt) notes that Ignatieff argued in favour of ‘indefinite detention’, ‘coercive interrogation’, ‘targeted assassinations’, and ‘pre-emptive wars’ in the fight against terrorism. If anyone thought that PM Harper was a little right-wing, watch out for Iggy! This guy is as much a liberal as is his opponent! This man supported the war in Iraq but after everyone else realized it was a ghastly mistake, he did acknowledge that he had made an error that might be typical of ‘academics and intellectuals’.

So unless some White Knight rides in from the boondocks, it appears we will have either a lawyer or an egghead as out next prime minister-in-waiting. The one woman who might have made the race interesting has already dropped out. Martha may not be a Hillary, but it would have at least added some colour contrast to the blandness of Bobby and Iggy. The excitement of the race may be palpable to the insiders but unless the media can rescue this campaign from utter boredom, we may as well watch the taped reruns of the Obama and Clinton debates.

It is unfortunate for us that YouTube was not around when Bobby and Iggy were roommates at college. Surely, there might have been some interesting footage. Or was there?