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He meant that a politician can be elected with no education, no charisma, no qualifications and no honesty, but no one can be elected without standing. It is a gift from voters, he said, to be treated as one of them, and in this he compared his own experience to that of Barack Obama, “a sitting President forced into the indignity of releasing his birth certificate” by people who denied his standing, or his right to occupy the office.

“We’ve blurred opponent with enemy,” Mr. Ignatieff said. “Belonging matters more than confidence, expertise or trustworthiness.”

He himself was “successfully denied standing” in Canadian politics by a Conservative smear campaign about his alleged foreignness and self-interest, he said, to the point that he could not turn on the television “without seeing my own damn face.”

“I fought the election in a kind of echo chamber in which the only sound I could hear was the sound of my own voice,” he said.

To a packed house of law students, he came across not so much as a sore loser but an intellectual one, seeking a deeper meaning in the drubbing handed to him by Canadian voters last May, in which he even lost his own seat.

He called for a ban on party advertising outside electoral campaigns. “I would, wouldn’t I?” he quipped, and did not dwell on it.

There were moments when he sounded like an unpopular teenager complaining about how phony the cool kids are, and others when he expressed haughty amazement that a man of his accomplishments could be denied standing in Canada.