Perhaps. Perhaps not. Genius is fleeting and youth is abundant. There were bright, dynamic young Canadians who believed in Stéphane Dion too. There are still bright, dynamic young Canadians who believe in Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe, even Elizabeth May. For now though, Iggy’s kids enjoy a unique moment. Theirs is the possibility of something entirely new.
If there is an obvious curiosity it is Goldenberg, his head bobbing above the crowd as he walks through the foyer after question period. Growing up in British Columbia, the son of two doctors, he read Ignatieff’s writing on human rights in high school and signed up for the Liberal party at 14. Having skipped Grade One, he left for Boston at the age of 17. His first seminar was at the Carr Center for Human Rights, then helmed by Ignatieff.
He became a columnist for the Crimson, Harvard’s daily campus newspaper, penning sentences like “Harvard has long worked to ensure that America’s ruling class hasn’t been especially stupid” and tossing off words like “codswallop.” After graduation, he went to Rome to work with the UN’s World Food Programme. He returned to work with Ignatieff’s local campaign in Toronto last fall and then, while contemplating law school, was convinced to stay and assist with Ignatieff’s leadership campaign. When that became moot, Goldenberg came to Ottawa.
He is now the only full-time speechwriter Michael Ignatieff has ever had. “I don’t presume to take credit, really, for what he says now because the ownership belongs to him. By the time he actually says it, I’ve helped shape the draft, I’ve helped organize some of the thoughts, I’ve helped come up with some of the lines, but when I do I don’t venture far from what I’ve been given by him,” he says. “If I were he, I would certainly be uncomfortable with somebody shaping my words when my words are what have defined me for my entire life. So I have to approach that with the utmost respect and reverence, deserved respect and reverence.”
There is probably something unusual about someone so apparently smart speaking about politics in such tones. He is very much still the student, learning from Ignatieff’s revisions and frequent ad libs, but studying too, he says, the words of John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Jean Chrétien, René Lévesque and Adrienne Clarkson. He sometimes talks and gestures like the man whose voice he must by now know better than his own. And in between repeated assertions of how “cool” it is to be doing what he does, he speaks in long, artful sentences of the sort you’d expect from a young man of his occupation. “My ambition has always been to sort of take whatever talents I have and to put them into the service of people who are trying to change the world,” he offers at one point. And he seems very much to believe it.
Near the end of one conversation, he launches into a soliloquy of sorts—about walking to work and seeing the Peace Tower, about service and ideals and respect. Ignatieff, he says, stands against the cynicism that is so often everywhere else. “My day to day is motivated by that belief on his part and that I think everyone in our office shares, that sense of motivation,” he says. “And that is something that I could not have imagined, perceptively, until I started doing it, started being a part of it. It’s a really special thing.”
He says so with all the bravery of a young man courageous enough to wear a bow tie in college.
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