Why has Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff failed to resonate with voters?

The air of desperation hanging over the Liberal campaign like a dark cloud likely isn't funny to Liberals, but it reached bizarre and can't-help-laughing proportions when Michael Ignatieff urged a roomful of surprised looking party supporters to "rise up, rise up" on Friday night.

You might have felt like jumping from your couch, hands reaching skyward.

"He looked like a Bolshevik televangelist," Pat Martin remarked to Yahoo!Canada News in a trademark bite, ironically and perhaps accidentally playing on Ignatieff's Russian aristocratic ancestry and his actual physical appearance, black eyebrows, grey hair, gravelly voice calling on voters to throw off their chains and stop 2011 Stephen Harper, instead of a 1917 czar or drawling plantation owners in Georgia.

With Paul Martin and Jean Chretien recruited from their retirement sideline seats, it's looking more and more like the 2006 campaign when, as Harper stirred up odours from the sponsorship scandal like a drawer full of smelly socks, Martin and the Liberals practically begged voters to switch from the NDP to keep Harper and his not-so-hidden agenda out of office.

But it's not the same this time. Everyone claims history repeats itself, but it never does, exactly.

The watershed in this election came at the televised debates, following which pretty much every poll and unusual device known to measure audience response produced results that said though Harper came out ahead in the English debate and Gilles Douceppe won in French, Jack Layton placed second, well ahead of Ignatieff, in both debates.

No matter how many tricks Peter Donolo has up his sleeve, how many new faces the Liberals can pull out of a hat to put on Ignatieff, there is too much water under the bridge already.

They can't go back in time, to late 2008 and January 2009 when, desperate to get out of the mess they were in and the establishment took the party through a kind, genteel coup, nudging Stephane Dion aside, rejecting Bob Rae, an impossible choice since no way, no how, were Ontario Liberals ready to accept him for all they knew with his NDP card still in his wallet, and handed the reins to Ignatieff.

Liberals in the gentle establishment of Toronto first eyed him as the dream candidate who would step in to take Martin's place after voters had turned his majority into a Liberal minority in 2004.

With Judge John Gomery displaying an unexpected zeal to root out the origins of the sponsorship scandal, the next election was practically guaranteed to put Harper in 24 Sussex, likely with a minority and despite his own past, working for a lobby group established decades ago to oppose medicare, telling a private audience of Americans Canada was a nanny-state socialist heaven while the U.S. was the world's "shining light," and the famous letter proposing a firewall letter to protect Alberta from the rest of the country.

But there are some truths coming out in this campaign, as they have over the past two years while the Conservatives mercilessly pounded Ignatieff with attack ads, some fair and some unfair.

Ignatieff's signature is the very last on a letter of support from the caucus MPs for the 2008 coalition agreement with the NDP, when the opposition was set to oust Harper so soon after that year's election and all three opposition leaders were set to troop down to Rideau Hall to offer Governor General Michaelle Jean an alternative.

The Bloc Quebecois was not going to be part of the coalition government itself, so the Conservative TV spots in that regard come close to missing what pollsters and political scientists agree must be one of the essential ingredients for attack ads to be convincing — a grain of truth and believability.

And the ads neatly skirt the fact that Harper himself signed a similar letter in 2004 when it looked like the Martin government would lose a confidence vote only three months after the election that year.

But the "He Didn't Come Back for You" ads are a different story, though they also might not meet the attack-ad believability benchmarks entirely.

There is no indication Ignatieff was planning to return to Canada on his own in 2005, after 27 successive years working abroad, in the United Kingdom primarily, as an intellectual television personality, author, quasi-philosopher and historian, and then five years as a professor at Harvard.

But the record does contain indisputable evidence that he returned after Ian Davey, Alf Apps and other prominent members of Toronto Liberal establishment circles convinced him he could become the next prime minister of Canada.

So, the attack ad's claim 'he did not come back for you' could be taking take hold with voters, if it hasn't already.

It's not really the return though, that is Ignatieff's weakness in this election or any election, unless it's a decade from now.

It is the departure and time away.

The Liberals had to put him on a summer-long bus tour of Canada last year not just to show the country him, but to show him the country. It was to introduce Ignatieff to Canadians as much, or more, as it was to introduce Canadians to Ignatieff.

Ignatieff went to England for his university graduate and post-graduate studies, returned in 1976 and then left again two years later.

He missed a lot during the time he spent abroad.

The 1980 Quebec referendum, the 1982 constitutional upheaval, the Charter of Rights, the bitter battles between Alberta and Ottawa over oil prices and profits, Brian Mulroney, the Meech Lake accord, free trade, John Turner patting Iona Campagnolo's bum in the 1984 campaign, Most of Pierre Trudeau, Maggie Trudeau, many Stanley Cup games, and the watershed years that shook Canada's political landscape after Mulroney's rule profoundly divided the country and led, eventually, to the ascendancy of Ignatieff's chief opponent right now, Stephen Harper, who has spent his entire life in Canada, immersed in its politics, and hockey playoffs.

Who, then, has the advantage in that duel?

If Harper does get his majority, no one can blame it on voters, or Billy Graham.

(CP Photo)

The air of desperation hanging over the Liberal campaign like a dark cloud likely isn't funny to Liberals, but it reached bizarre and can't-help-laughing proportions when Michael Ignatieff urged a roomful of surprised looking party supporters to "rise up, rise up" on Friday night.

You might have felt like jumping from your couch, hands reaching skyward.

"He looked like a Bolshevik televangelist," Pat Martin remarked to Yahoo News in a trademark bite, ironically and perhaps accidentally playing on Ignatieff's Russian aristocratic ancestry and his actual physical appearance, black eyebrows, grey hair, gravelly voice calling on voters to throw off their chains and stop 2011 Stephen Harper, instead of a 1917 czar or drawling plantation owners in Georgia.

With Paul Martin and Jean Chretien recruited from their retirement sideline seats, it's looking more and more like the 2006 campaign when, as Harper stirred up odours from the sponsorship scandal like a drawer full of smelly socks, Martin and the Liberals practically begged voters to switch from the NDP to keep Harper and his not-so-hidden agenda out of office.

But it's not the same this time. Everyone claims history repeats itself, but it never does, exactly.

The watershed in this election came at the televised debates, following which pretty every poll and unusal device known to measure audience response produced results that said though Harper came out ahead in the English debate and Gilles Douceppe won in French, Jack Layton placed second, well ahead of Ignatieff, in both debates.

No matter how many tricks Peter Donolo has up his sleeve, how many new faces the Liberals can pull out of a hat to put on Ignatieff, there is too much water under the bridge already.

They can't go back in time, to late 2008 and January 2009 when, desperate to get out of the mess they were in the establishment took the party through a kind, gentle coup, nudging Stephane Dion aside, rejecting Bob Rae, an impossible choice since no way, no how, were Ontario Liberals ready to accept him for all they knew with his NDP card still in his wallet, and handed the reins to Ignatieff.

Liberals the gentile establishment of Toronto first eyed him as the dream candidate who would step in to take Martin's place after voters had turned his majority into a Liberal minority in 2004.

With Judge John Gomery displaying an unexpected zeal to root out the origins of the sponsorship scandal, the next election was practically guaranteed to put Harper in 24 Sussex, likely with a minority and despite his own past, working for a lobby group established decades ago to oppose medicare, telling a private audience of Americans Canada was a nanny-state socialist heaven while the U.S. was the world's "shining light," and the famous letter proposing a firewall letter to protect Alberta from the rest of the country.

But there are some truths coming out in this campaign, as they have over the past two years while the Conservatives mercilessly pounded Ignatieff with attack ads, some fair and some unfair.

Ignatieff's signature is the very last on a letter of support from the caucus MPs for the 2008 coalition agreement with the NDP, when the opposition was set to oust Harper so soon after that year's election and all three opposition leaders were set to troop down to Rideau Hall to offer Governor General Michaelle Jean an alternative.

The Bloc Quebecois was not going to be part of the coalition government itself, so the Conservative TV spots in that regard come close to missing what pollsters and political scientists agree must be one of the essential ingredients for attack ads to be convincing — a grain of truth and believability.

And the ads neatly skirt the fact that Harper himself signed a similar letter in 2004 when it looked like the Martin government would lose a confidence vote only three months after the election that year.

But the "He Didn't Come Back for You" ads are a different story, though they also might not meet the attack-ad believability benchmarks entirely.

There is no indication Ignatieff was planning to return to Canada on his own in 2005, after 27 successive years working abroad, in the United Kingdom primarily, as an intellectual television personality, author, quasi-philosopher and historian, and then five years as a professor at Harvard.

But the record does contain indisputable evidence that he returned after Ian Davey, Alf Apps and other prominent members of Toronto Liberal establishment circles convinced him he could become the next prime minister of Canada.

So, the attack ad's claim 'he did not come back for you' could be taking take hold with voters, if it hasn't already.

It's not really the return though, that is Ignatieff's weakness in this election or any election, unless it's a decade from now.

It is the departure and time away.

The Liberals had to put him on a summer-long bus tour of Canada last year not just to show the country him, but to show him the country. It was to introduce Ignatieff to Canadians as much, or more, as it was to introduce Canadians to Ignatieff.

Ignatieff went to England for his university graduate and post-graduate studies, returned in 1976 and then left again two years later.

He missed a lot during the time he spent abroad.

The 1980 Quebec referendum, the 1982 constitutional upheaval, the Charter of Rights, the bitter battles between Alberta and Ottawa over oil prices and profits, Brian Mulroney, the Meech Lake accord, free trade, John Turner patting Iona Campagnolo's bum in the 1984 campaign, Most of Pierre Trudeau, Maggie Trudeau, many Stanley Cup games, and the watershed years that shook Canada's political landscape after Mulroney's rule profoundly divided the country and led, eventually, to the ascendancy of Ignatieff's chief opponent right now, Stephen Harper, who has spent his entire life in Canada, immersed in its politics, and hockey playoffs.

Who, then, has the advantage in that duel?

If Harper does get his majority, no one can blame it on voters, or Billy Graham.