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magazine, could have worked against him with voters.

Mark Leccese, a journalism professor and media blogger at Boston.com

, wrote that Mr. Ignatieff’s colleagues were dismayed that negative connotations about Harvard — long a code word in U.S. political rhetoric for “out-of-touch elitist” — seemed to have crossed the border into Canada.

“If Ignatieff had been a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, would the ad have been as powerful?” he wrote.

But U.S. commentators trying to make sense of Mr. Ignatieff’s defeat seem to have little understanding of how well political ads questioning Mr. Ignatieff’s time abroad played with Canadian voters, Mr. Cellucci said.

“They don’t fully appreciate that as great a relationship as we have, the United States and Canada, as close as we are, it’s important to Canadians to be Canadian, not American,” he said. “I think that’s the point that they’re all missing and this effort by the Conservative party that kind of turned Michael Ignatieff into an American, that’s what really hurt the most. I don’t think some of the commentators are aware of how deeply Canadians want to be different than Americans.”

However, those commentators who pay close attention to Canadian politics would likely be more surprised that a renowned scholar had even become head of a political party in the first place, something that would rarely happen in the U.S., Mr. Wilson said.

“Being an academic would not be a good start in this country and being an academic who had spent a long time outside of the United States is a double whammy,” he said. “People would be less surprised that it happened and was done badly but that it happened at all.”

National Post





tmcmahon@nationalpost.com