Angry in the Great White North

After Question Period today, there was a scrum involving Liberal Party deputy leader Michael Ignatieff. Here is the exchange as best as I can figure it:

Question: If you were the Minister, if you were Prime Minister, would you accept the Chief of Defence Staff contradicting something you said (inaudible)?

Michael Ignatieff: I love the hypothesis that I would be a Prime Minister, but let me not go there. Let me just say that any, any parliamentarian wants to be absolutely sure that everybody's on the same page, that we're singing from the same sheet, that we're talking the same language. You can't go out in a throne speech and, and say 2011 and then have your Chief of the Defence Staff saying well actually, it's 2017. And then third, to make it worse, let's appoint a panel to look at a third set of options and then in the House of Commons, to hide behind that panel when you don't know what the heck you're doing. I mean this creates, this creates a very bad impression of incompetence and mismanagement. And the troops deserve better.

I love the hypothesis that I would be a Prime Minister, but let me not go there. Let me just say...

Michael Ignatieff has a problem. Either everyone mistakenly believes he is gunning for Stephane Dion's job, or everyone correctly believes he is gunning for Stephane Dion's job.

Either way, when he is offered up a simple question like this one, an innocent one when asked of anyone else, his answer will be dissected in detail.

The funny thing is that the correct answer is the same whether he wants the job or not. The key is that it is simple and straightforward. If I was prime minister? Gosh, I don't usuallly spend a lot of time thinking about that. But to answer your question,...

Or something along those lines. Just play it straight up and innocent. Answer the question directly in the way it was posed. Don't get clever.

But "I love that hypothesis"? To a someone worried about signs of discontent in the Liberal Party, those words are not encouraging. No mention of Stephane Dion, directly or otherwise.

He doesn't want to "go there"? Why not? What would he have said? Would he have torn a strip off the reporter for setting up that question, or would he have had some choice words for the quality of leadership being offered by Stephane Dion?

"Let me just say"? So what is he leaving out?

A politician ought never say that he has an answer to a question but that he dare not utter that answer in public.

On all counts, this was not a good answer for a deputy leader, and definitely not for this particular deputy leader. Not a good answer at all.

Craig Offman recently wrote this for the National Post:

In a scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar, worried that his political colleagues might not be so enthusiastic about his leadership, notes: "Let me have men about me that are fat; yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look." To Stephane Dion, Michael Ignatieff must be looking downright cadaverous about now.

Normally I would prefer to dismiss the answer that Michael Ignatieff gave as nothing more than a clumsy extemporaneous attempt to be funny. But we know Michael Ignatieff is always thinking, and coupled with a tendency to be far too frank for his own good, he has gotten into trouble. His leadership bid was deeply wounded when he said he was "not losing sleep" over civilian deaths in Lebanon during the summer war with Israel in 2006. Ignatieff enraged Liberals when he refused to commit to running in a subsequent election if he did not win the Liberal leadership. Ignatieff sowed confusion with his vague answers with regards to Quebec nationhood.

So now when tossed a softball question with the phrase "if you were prime minister", Michael Ignatieff goes on about the way he loves the hypothesis but that he couldn't possibly share his ideas about being prime minister where people might hear them.

I just shake my head. Is it possible for this guy to answer a question in a way that would not make his supporters groan in severe pain?

Advice for Michael Ignatieff: Don't be funny. Don't try to be witty. And for God's sake, don't be sly! It's not entirely your fault, but in your position, and with what people think of your future ambitions, anything that sounds the least bit evasive just feeds into preconceptions that you are either trying to correct (because they are wrong) or that you are trying to deflect (because they are uncomfortably close to the truth).

This goes double for any question that includes the words "prime minister" or "Stephane Dion" in it.