Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Mr. Ziffy's Summer School Field Trip

I guess all Michael Ignatieff's elite schooling hasn't helped him  learn  much about what hard working Canadians are all about. So his handlers thought summer school might just do the trick. Instead of retreating to his villa in France, they gave  him an assignment. They sent him on a  bus  tour, a field trip to learn about our vast country and to  change his image as one who is an elite into just a normal regular schmuck, Joe Sixpack.   Don MacPherson calls the Mr. Ziffy's cross country magical bus tour  a  field trip.
 Michael Ignatieff is spending his summer on a cross-country field trip, assigned by his handlers to some light pre-campaign training while trying to transform his image from effete intellectual snob to red-ball-cap-wearin', hockey-, beer-and natural-wilderness-lovin' Regular Guy.
That is, if your idea of a Regular Guy is somebody wearing jeans, long sleeves and cowboy boots in Quebec in July, as if he is either lost (the Calgary Stampede is four provinces thataway, pardner) or two months early for the St. Tite western festival.
Or an asparagus, which is what Ignatieff answered an interviewer on a television food show whose final question was if he were a vegetable, which one he would be. According to La Presse columnist Stephane Laporte, the segment ended without further explanation. 
 He is not exactly setting the country on fire. Some at the beginning were touting him as  the second coming of Trudeau.  He's gaffe prone, a flip, flopper and looks  so fake as " a regular guy" like when he was photographed recently drinking a can of Molson. 
So when Ignatieff ostentatiously drank a Molson Dry from the can, he looked not so much like a man relaxing and enjoying a cold one as one who was trying to look the part in an act for the cameras.
The first couple of weeks, the media was all a buzz until they figured out that magical bus tour was, well not so magical. The national media in fact has been rather sparse in their reporting.  Not really much coverage  to tell you the truth.  They instead have used the fake long form census story as a deflection from the less than inspiring Liberal bus trip.

There's still plenty of the  tour left. Maybe things will turn around  but at this point, I kinda doubt it but then again you know what they say about politics.  "A week in politics is like an eternity."
No matter how hard he tries, he's just not one of us.  The party  echelon should just let him be himself.
Canadians are not stupid.  They can smell a fake a mile away. 

I got a feeling Canadians are  not going to give him a that good of a grade at the end this field trip.  So far I don't think he's quite making an A.  I would say more like a C-.  What say you?  How would you grade Mr.  Ziffy's field trip so far?