Fire and Ashes (11 page)

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:

Tous ensemble!
I cried, and my supporters in the great hall took up the chant. All Canadians everywhere, citizens of one great country,
Tous ensemble!

Down in the crowd were my oldest and truest supporters, the team from the Etobicoke–Lakeshore constituency. When other delegates had taken up the chant, one of my constituency people, an Anglophone,
kept asking, above the din, “What does he mean?
Tous ensemble
? What’s he talking about?”

I had meant we were all together.

Zsuzsanna and I left our suite and went down onto the floor for the balloting. You cannot imagine the noise, the lights, the cameras everywhere, the microphones waiting for you, the strange ebb and flow of a convention floor, the conga lines of singing delegates, the strange collective madness of the crowd that takes over a big political gathering where a real decision is being made. The balloting in the convention hall took all afternoon. I toured the lines of those waiting to cast their vote and thanked people for support. We led on the first ballot, but more narrowly than we had hoped, and stayed ahead on the second, but rivals combined and by the third, I was behind. The fourth ballot would be decisive. Bob Rae had just been eliminated on the previous ballot and had to decide what to do with his support. I was on the convention floor with Zsuzsanna and we walked toward the Rae camp. Camera crews followed us together with a surge of supporters. If Bob were to endorse me on the floor, the leadership would be mine. We had known each other since childhood. Our parents were friends. That afternoon, I had embraced his mother, sitting with the family on the convention floor. We had been rivals at university. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship while I went to Harvard. When he was going through a rough patch, he came and lived on my couch for six months. He went into politics in the New Democratic Party and rose to become premier of Ontario before suffering a tough defeat. He was an able politician, a lifer longing for redemption. As far as he was concerned, he had earned his chance and I hadn’t earned mine.

So there we were, suddenly at the moment of truth in which friendship and politics clash, surrounded by camera crews and journalists with microphones held out to catch every syllable, and the deafening
chants of forty-five hundred delegates, alive to a decisive moment. As I stepped into the cordoned area where the Rae followers were gathered, John Rae, Bob’s elder brother, blocked my way. He had been Prime Minister Chrétien’s political confidant and manager for thirty years. I’d known John since childhood. We’d both been on the floor of the 1968 convention that chose Trudeau as leader of the party. Now we were face to face, and the question was whether he would reach out and shake my hand. If he did, that meant the Rae camp would come over to me. The leadership would be mine. Instead, he did something that shocked me then and shocks me now to recall it. He bared his teeth with the ferocity of an animal defending a lair, extended his arms, went into a crouch to ward me off and screamed, “Back!” I’d never seen a face so twisted with rage and anger and a strange and touching desire to protect. This wild, passionate, animal desire to win and the animal hurt at losing must figure in any honest account of politics. That was it. I backed away. If he and his brother couldn’t have it, I wouldn’t have it either. The Rae camp released their delegates and, on the fourth ballot, the convention chose Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker whose many qualities included the fact that he was neither Bob nor me.

Once the result was announced, Zsuzsanna and I made our way from the convention floor, wading through the debris of confetti, discarded noisemakers and placards, toward a hotel ballroom where our shell-shocked supporters had gathered. I stood on a chair and thanked them but I can no longer recall what I said, because I only remember a young Quebecker, Marc Gendron, who had been with us from the beginning, crying on Zsuzsanna’s shoulder, and our calm and zen-like personal assistant, Marc Chalifoux, losing his composure and his eyes filling with tears.

As for the two of us, we were dry-eyed in defeat. This was politics as it truly was, brutal, exciting and risky. We had done battle and we
had done our best. As we shared a meal and a glass of wine alone in our hotel room above the convention centre that night, as delegates streamed home by bus and train and plane back to all the corners of the country, we knew we had done as well as amateurs could have done. We had tried but we had not been ready. If there was still another chance, we would stay and try our hand with Fortuna once again.

SINCE THE ROMAN FARMER CINCINNATUS
left his plow to save the republic from danger, outsiders have stepped into the political arena and portrayed themselves as anti-politicians come to save politics from itself. I’d played the Roman farmer and I’d come up several hundred votes short. As I wound up my leadership bid and returned to the capital to begin my life as a member of Parliament, I had to stop playing the gentleman amateur. It never pays to pretend that you are better than the game or even to think that an amateur can beat the professionals. There are good reasons why politics is a game for professionals, for men and women who make it their lives’ work. Most politicians these days start their careers in their twenties as staffers and then move into elective office in their late thirties; they spend their entire lives in the bubble of the political world. I had assumed politics had a place for amatuers but I had been wrong. Outsiders can win—Barack Obama showed how—but he won, first of all, by learning his trade through those humbling years in the Illinois senate. Then, having learned the basic skills, he set out to beat the insiders at their own game by mobilizing an electorate—youth and minorities—that both parties had neglected and by using the power of social media to draw them into his campaign. When I was running in 2006, the astonishing Obama campaign was still two years in the future. No one had yet shown how an outsider could win.

Our party had flirted with me as an outsider and ended up going with an insider. The new leader, Stéphane Dion, had been in politics for a decade. He had shown courage during the referendum on Quebec separation in 1995, debating the arguments of the separatists and making the case for Canada and national unity with flair and conviction. He had gone on to be a campaigning minister of the environment, though he had to wear the Liberal government’s failure to implement the Kyoto Accord on climate change. During the leadership campaign, I had challenged him on this during a debate in Toronto: “We didn’t get it done, Stéphane.” My punch landed and so there was not much love lost between us. He had won the leadership by siphoning away the youth vote with a strong environmental appeal and by persuading the party elites that they were safer with an experienced hand. Now, as is often the case in politics, rivals had to become allies. This, by the way, is much misunderstood by press and citizens alike. Voters find it morally puzzling that opponents can attack each other one day and then turn around the next day and begin to work together again. Where is loyalty, conviction and principle in all this? As Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln shows, parties cannot hold power successfully unless competitors put mutual dislike aside, at least publicly, and learn to function as a “team of rivals.”
¹
Much pride and hurt must be swallowed in the process, but sometimes, as in the case of Lincoln, rivals come to admit—how rare this is—that their rival actually deserved his status as the first among equals.

I didn’t feel much rancour in defeat, but I also knew that long years of opposition stretched ahead, working for a leader whose basic political instincts did not strike me as immediately convincing. One option was simply to fold my hand and decide politics had been a mistake. A couple of days after my defeat at the Montreal convention, the dean of the Kennedy School, who had been following my itinerary in Canada
more closely than I suspected, phoned and asked whether I would like to come back to teach. I was touched and surprised but I explained that my decision to return home had been sincere, and besides, the people of Etobicoke–Lakeshore had elected me as their representative and I owed them some representation. Needless to say, I had other motives too. I thought the party had made a mistake, and there were quite a lot of people coming up to me in airports saying, “It should have been you.” On the strength of this and an instinct that I owed it to the people to stay on, I met Dion after the convention and demanded that I be made his deputy leader, a post whose only value was that I would lead the Opposition’s attack in the House of Commons at the daily Question Period whenever he was absent. Dion reluctantly agreed because he had little choice: he was a compromise winner with a weak base of support. Over the next two years, he did his level best to keep me out of the loop, and so, for all the fine speeches we both made about creating a team of rivals, we were never a team, just rivals. But it’s how politics usually turns out, and had I been in his position, I might have done the same. I was the ghost at his feast.