Fire and Ashes (21 page)

Why theoretical acumen is so frequently combined with political failure throws light on what is distinctive about a talent for politics. The candour, rigour, willingness to follow a thought wherever it leads, the penetrating search for originality—all these are virtues in theoretical pursuits but active liabilities in politics, where discretion and dissimulation are essential for success. This would suggest that these theorists failed because they couldn’t keep their mouths shut when flattery or partisan discipline required it of them. Equally, however, theorists may have lacked those supreme virtues that separate successful politicians from failures: adaptability, cunning, rapid-fire
recognition of Fortuna, the keen intuition that a situation has changed and that what was true once is no longer so, together with the noble capacity to lead, to charm and to inspire.

Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a second-class intelligence but a first-class temperament. Holmes was being condescending.
⁶
Roosevelt himself was happy to admit that he had no theory of politics, other than being a Christian and a Democrat, but no theorist could have created the modern liberal state and revived his people’s faith in politics in the pit of the Depression. Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach,” forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

You would think very poorly of me if you supposed that I believe I belong in this company. Neither my actual experience nor my reflections on it put me anywhere near their league. I’m simply taking consolation where I can, and what I learned from them, of course, is that failure in politics has its own authority, not equivalent to the validation of success, but the authority of lived experience. Those who have failed in politics have paid for what they know, and those who pay for knowledge in the real currency of life are entitled to a hearing.

These writers are inspiring in another way. They took a very specific experience—the Roman republic in its final decline, the Florentine republic as it tumbled into dictatorship, the American republic in its fiery birth, French politics in the dog days of Louis Philippe, the British Parliament in its imperial heyday, and the stillbirth of German democracy after 1918—and lifted that specific experience into a generic reflection about the essence of politics. They knew that all politics is local—as we say—shaped by the institutions and historical
context that frame the political battle, but they also sought to penetrate to the core of politics as the noblest and most vexatious of all human activities. Thanks to their struggle to locate the generic within the specifics of their own experience, they have given everyone who has ever served in the front lines of politics the vocabulary to comprehend what they have lived through. And for those contemplating a career in politics, these great writers have always offered the debutant the unvarnished reality of the game, if a debutant would only listen.

Several weeks after my defeat, I went to thank Peter Munk, a wealthy man who had given generously to my campaign despite making no bones about voting for my opponents. There aren’t many good sports like him left. As partisanship gets worse, ecumenical generosity diminishes. He’s the rare exception. Over lunch he told me about a time in the 1970s when a company he started—Clairtone—went bankrupt. After its liquidation, he walked around in the financial district feeling there was a bull’s eye on his back. He’d recovered his fortune and much more since then, but he had never forgotten what it was like to fail. In the weeks after my defeat, I had lots of advice from successful people about how to recover. Write romantic fiction, the real estate developer Elvio DelZotto told me, and make yourself some money for a change. David Peterson, who had suffered a bruising defeat as premier of Ontario, told me the good thing about defeat is that you regain the right to tell people to go to hell. Peterson is living proof of the adage “living well is the best revenge,” but he added that it took him years to work the pain of failure out of his system. Hard physical exercise helps, he said. Chop down trees, clear brush, build yourself a cabin. Another friend thought he was being comforting when he said at least I’d get a good book out of it. I told him I hadn’t gone into politics to get a good book out of it.

The remark I remember best, the one that got me thinking about the book I
did
want to write, came from a taxi driver. As I got into his cab, he pulled his rear-view mirror to get a closer look.

“Are you who I think you are?”

“I am,” I said.

“I voted for you.”

“I’m glad somebody did.”

Then he shrugged and said, “It’s politics.”

It was if he was saying, “Look, this is how the world is. You did not know it before. You know it now.” As we talked, I learned that he was from Lebanon and had been in Canada for twenty years. He combined a cabbie’s shrewd grasp of the democratic politics of his new country and a sardonic memory of the brutal confessional politics of Lebanon. I began to see that “politics” was the word he used for the baffling combination of will and chance that determines the shape of life. The way taxi medallions are awarded in a city, for example, was politics. The way dictators continue to rule poor countries was politics, the way Lebanon was carved up by the civil war was politics and, he was saying, the way well-meaning innocents get beaten was politics. When I paid my fare and left him, I wanted more than anything to write about this politics, this brutal game, this dramatic encounter between fate and will, malignity and nobility that fascinated him as much as it fascinated me.

On August 22, barely three months after winning the greatest political victory of his life, Jack Layton died of cancer at his home at the age of sixty-one. Along with thousands of others, Zsuzsanna and I attended his memorial service in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall and afterward walked home through streets filled with melancholy citizens struggling to come to terms with the bitter ironies of fate. I remember a conversation with one woman who wanted to explain why the media were wrong for criticizing Jack for failing to disclose the true state of
his health when he was campaigning. “I’m a cancer survivor,” she said. “You say what you have to say. You believe what you have to believe, in order to get through it. Politics doesn’t come into it.” I could only agree.

Sometime in late August, I went to see the Red Sox play the Blue Jays in the Rogers Centre in Toronto. I love the game. My mother loved it too and we spent happy hours of my childhood watching games on a black-and-white TV. Even the game’s
longeurs
are loveable because they offer opportunities for reverie. As the beer cans and hot dog wrappers accumulated at my feet, I got to thinking that what politics most closely resembles is sports. There is the same team play, the same locker room banter and the same pain when you get beaten. Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn’t one. There is no referee and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can’t cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes. In sports you play by the rules. In politics you just play and the winner re-writes the rules afterwards.

I recalled a wonderful passage in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, in which Prince Andrei, waiting for the Battle of Borodino, reflects on the difference between war and chess. In chess a bishop is always more powerful than a pawn, while in battle a platoon can sometimes overpower a company.
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War, in other words, has no rules—just strategies. There is an unpredictable element—will, courage and chance—that can decide outcomes. That also seemed true of politics, a supreme encounter between skill and willpower and the forces of fortune and chance.

Finally, sitting there in the stands as the late afternoon shadows moved across the field, I reflected on the way failure is built into baseball the way it is built into politics. “All political careers eventually end in tears,” someone once said. It’s also true of sports. All the great careers in sports end in rueful acceptance that muscle memory, killer instinct and inner fire have mysteriously ebbed away. But failure does not just frame the end of every sports career. It’s built into the moments
of success too. The greatest people who ever played the game of baseball reached base only three times for every ten they were at the plate. In the late innings of the game, I began to watch the batters after a failed at-bat, how they returned to the dugout, ignored the crowd, never tossed their batting helmet, and withdrew into themselves, mentally adjusting some feature of their action so that they would knock it out of the park next time. There was a discipline at work here with these journeymen baseball players that struck me as admirable. As the game came to an end and the stands began to empty, I thought back to the night I lost the election, standing at a podium in front of a disconsolate crowd that already was dwindling and beginning to file away into the night. I had always been aware, throughout my political career, that down there in the crowd or out there watching on TV, was a young man or woman who would be thinking,
I could be him
. That young person was still out there. I hoped he or she was thinking,
He didn’t get there, but I will
. Now I felt, with all my heart, that I wanted to give them every encouragement.
I didn’t get there, but you will
.

I realized the truth of what Elinor Caplan, a retired politician, once told me: you’re never out of politics. You may have been sent back up into the stands, but you’ll still be watching the game. I’m up in the stands now, watching the ones who are stepping forward to take my generation’s place, and I’m waiting for the one—the natural—who has what it takes. Everything I’ve written is for the young man or woman who believed in me and saw me fail. I’m writing this to help them succeed when their time comes. I took a long time to understand whom I was doing politics for. Now I know. I took a long time to understand what politics should be about. Now I know that too, and it is what I want to talk about now, at the very end.

YOU MIGHT WELL DRAW
the wrong conclusion from this tale of mine. You might be thinking that politics is a dirty game that should be no business of yours. I hope you’ll finish reading this book believing something very different: that it’s a noble struggle that will require more self-command, judgment and inner toughness than you ever thought you possessed. The nobility lies in the battle to defend what you believe and mobilize others in the fight to preserve what is best about our common life as a people. The challenge lies in trying to change what must be changed and preserving what must be preserved, and knowing the difference between the two.

Before you enter the political arena, old hands may tell you to be careful, not to say or do anything that will tarnish your chances in the future. You will be told not to accumulate baggage. I entered politics with a lot of baggage and I paid full freight for it, but it’s better to have paid up than to have lived a defensive life. A defensive life is not a life fully lived. If you take prudence as your watchword, your courage will desert you when the time comes to show your mettle. You can be sure that politics will demand more of you than prudence.

You can’t know, in advance, what you’re in for, but really, our lack of foresight in life is a blessing. Don’t be afraid to take the plunge and don’t be afraid to fail. If you can free yourself of the idea that failure is a
disgrace, you won’t be crushed by it and you won’t be spoiled by success either. Strive for success and don’t allow any excuses for failure, but above all learn equanimity. You can always control the factors that depend on you alone—your courage, will, determination and humour—but you can’t control the forces that come into play when you enter the public arena. Since Fortuna largely determines political careers, you have no reason to rail at fate if she turns against you. Don’t make the mistake of supposing you control your fate. That’s called hubris.

Embracing a political life means shedding your innocence. It means being willing to pay the costs before you even know what they are going to be. It means knowing who you are and being adamant about what a political life is for. You can’t succeed unless the people who elect you believe that you’re in it for them. If you’re not in it for them, you shouldn’t be in politics. It might take a long time to figure out who you do politics for. You learn this slowly over a hundred meetings with strangers and you gradually take their cause to be your own. They become the people you serve and the ones you justify yourself to. Becoming their representative is a relationship that changes you forever, and its rewards are great. If they believe in you, they will stick with you through thick and thin.

You aren’t entitled to their loyalty. You earn it from them every day. You earn it by being who you say you are and by showing that you are on their side. If you have standing with them, they will stick with you even when they disagree. They will trust you to lead them if they believe your convictions are sincere.

Citizens know the difference between someone who seeks their approval and someone who seeks their respect. You don’t always have to be popular to succeed. Your people don’t have to like you but they must respect you, feel that you have integrity, believe that you are working for them.

Your opponents will try to define you, and if they succeed they will have beaten you, so you must keep control of your story. The story you need to tell should be about the community and country you want to build. You need to tell a story that links your fate to theirs, your life to theirs, your cause to their own. You need to fit policy and your personal story into a convincing narrative. The story you need to tell is how to strengthen the common life, how to stand together against the forces of inequality, envy, division and hatred that are ceaselessly pulling our societies apart, and how to defend the eternal proposition of all progressive politics: that we must share our fate and live in justice with each other. A story about shared fate and justice will be a national story, one that should draw upon all the sources of common experience that hold us together as citizens and give us common allegiance to one another and to our institutions. It will be a story that tells us we should be better than we are.