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This is the final article in The Globe's series of profiles of all 9 remaining Liberal leadership candidates.

It often seems like there's little about Bob Rae that Canadians don't already know. His decades in public life have been well chronicled by platoons of journalists, an effort to which he has contributed with two books of autobiography.

But for anyone seeking to understand his current run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada — a race in which a Globe and Mail poll this week showed Mr. Rae neck and neck with his old friend Michael Ignatieff, and with the potential to win — one of the least-known chapters of his life may be among the most telling.

It was in the mid-1960s, just as he was entering university, that Mr. Rae first learned of his Jewish roots: His grandfather William Cohen, the eldest son of Orthodox Jewish refugees from Lithuania, had adopted the surname of his Scottish bride, Nell Rae, not long after they had immigrated to Canada just before the First World War.

As he always does, the young Mr. Rae reacted methodically. He found out as much about Judaism as he could, then decided to let the issue go. He later would marry a Jewish woman, who would raise his three daughters in that faith, but he would retain his Anglicanism all the while.

It is complex territory, but Mr. Rae resists being put into some kind of hyphenated category. “I am what I am,” he said in one of two long recent interviews.

This pragmatic accommodation is typical of his behaviour throughout his political career. He joined the New Democratic Party not so much out of ideological fervour but because it looked like the most suitable of the options in front of him. As an NDP premier in Ontario from 1990 to 1995, he abandoned some of the party's most sacred shibboleths because the alternatives seemed to him less appealing.

And now he is returning to the Liberal fold in which he grew up, because he believes that it's the place where he can have the greatest impact as a public servant.

Mr. Rae will always be the man who suffered one of the greatest political humiliations in Canadian history, kicked out of office after one term by Ontario voters who had had more than their fill of his scandal-plagued government.

So his decision to re-enter the political world has sparked a thriving industry analyzing his motives: Is it boredom with private life? Is he seeking redemption?

But the answer may in fact be simpler and more pragmatic: “I am what I am.” And he is a politician.

It's a soft summer evening on the green shores of Hillsborough Bay and Bob Rae is finding out how politics is practised on Prince Edward Island. The Cardigan federal Liberal association is holding its annual strawberry social in Tea Hill Park just outside Charlottetown, and it's a vintage island event. There's the ice cream with strawberry sauce and there's a band playing hurtin' country music.

But none of this competes with the long arms of constituency MP Lawrence MacAulay, who corrals arrivals and lines them up with himself and Mr. Rae for a quick photograph to commemorate the night that the candidate for the leadership of the federal Liberals came to town. By the evening's end, 204 pictures are taken and Mr. Rae's toothy smile has threatened to become permanent.

“This is how you get votes in PEI,” an aide to Mr. MacAulay says. “Every one of these people will get a picture sent to them.”

Mr. Rae is impressed. “I've learned a lesson today in politics from Lawrence,” he tells the crowd. He wishes audience members Lou and Ruth a happy 63rd anniversary.

And the next thing he does — this Rhodes Scholar who served five years as Ontario's premier and can talk knowledgeably about democracy in Iraq, the investigation of the Air-India crash and Canada's constitutional history — is to start singing the old chestnut You Are My Sunshine.

That's the yin of Bob Rae. The yang is a photograph that sits on a side table in his law office, high above the streets of downtown Toronto. It's small and a little grainy, but for him it is just as significant as the more formal portraits of Martin Luther King and Tommy Douglas hanging nearby.

The little girl in the photo is Kiranjit Rai. She was 11 years old when she died in the midair bombing of an Air-India plane more than two decades ago. Mr. Rae got the picture from a relative of the girl last year, when he was sorting through the entrails of the investigation into the worst mass killing in Canadian history. Something in her smile touched a nerve.

“This is what it's all about,” he said. “When it comes right down to it, this is what this bombing is about. It's about killing a little girl and other little children and whole families.”

To know what makes Mr. Rae tick, one has to try to reconcile these two scenarios. The guy who once appeared on MuchMusic to sing a song he wrote seems, at first glance, to be at odds with the fellow who eagerly takes on weighty public-policy issues. The fact is, however, that they have co-existed for years.

Everyone who knows him acknowledges that Mr. Rae is brilliant, but, taken together, all their stories paint a portrait of a very complex man. He's the compelling performer with little ability for small talk. He's the consummate intellectual who couldn't lead his government down a constant ideological path. He's a guy with a big ego who has also struggled with insecurity.

Above all, however, Bob Rae is a political recidivist. He left politics on a cold day in January, 1996, four months after the NDP government he led in Ontario suffered its spectacular electoral rebuff. He said he wanted “to spend more time as a private citizen, as a husband and as a father.” His party was also at a dismal 16 per cent in the polls.

But while his fellow former premier Frank McKenna of New Brunswick wasn't tempted by the cheese, the 58-year-old Mr. Rae has once again gone back to the trap. He entered the Liberal leadership race in April, with his wife, Arlene Perly Rae, and two of his three daughters by his side, saying that “politics and public service matter.”

Of course, we knew that public service mattered to Mr. Rae. He has spent the past decade working as a helpful fixer for governments in Canada and abroad.

Through the Forum of Federations, he has assisted the peace process in Sri Lanka and provided constitutional advice in eight countries, including Iraq, Nigeria and Mexico. He mediated the tricky dispute over native fishing rights in Burnt Church, N.B., advised the Ontario government on postsecondary tuition fees, represented the Red Cross in the restructuring of Canada's blood services, aided lumber companies fighting U.S. restrictions on softwood-lumber trade and even helped to pull the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from the brink of bankruptcy.

His work on Air-India was widely lauded by the relatives of the 331 people killed on Flight 182, who were disappointed by Canada's long, futile police investigation.

“He understood instinctively why we felt so completely marginalized all those years,” said Lata Pada, who lost a husband and two daughters.

But it's more difficult coming to terms with Mr. Rae's decision to re-enter the gladiatorial political world — particularly as a Liberal. After all, the scar tissue from his turbulent years atop Ontario's NDP government has healed nicely. His years as an elder statesman — Canada's Jimmy Carter, as it were — had, to some degree, rehabilitated an image that was badly damaged by running a government that took policy U-turns and alienated its core constituency.

For years, he referred jokingly to himself (stealing his wife's phrase) as “a recovering politician,” and he insists that he was happy doing what he was doing. How, then, did he fall off the wagon?

“For me, it's a matter of saying I believe in public service, I believe in the political process,” Mr. Rae said. “I know this sounds corny, but I really do believe in it, and I do think it's almost like a vocational thing.”

Many of Mr. Rae's friends told him that he didn't need to do it. But he always replied that he knew where his duty lay. Ms. Perly Rae saw the itch up close. “I think politics is in his blood,” she said. He looked around, saw the dangers that he believes Prime Minister Stephen Harper poses to national unity and social cohesion, and “he just felt he had more to contribute.”

In fact, contributing has always been Mr. Rae's way of being Canadian. Much has been made of the three-decade absence from this country of leadership rival Michael Ignatieff, but Mr. Rae had his own prolonged time living abroad.

Born in Ottawa, he felt early the impact that the diplomatic career of his father, Saul (who was a friend and rival of Mr. Ignatieff's diplomat father, George). In 1955, when Mr. Rae was 7, his father was dispatched by the Liberal government as Canada's representative in North Vietnam. Reluctant to see his father return to Asia after a home leave, the little boy bawled his eyes out at the airport.

“No doubt, there is a Freudian explanation of my relationship with the Liberal Party of Canada,” he noted in his 1996 book, From Protest to Power.

The next year, he joined his father on the road. He spent the next decade living in Washington (where he delivered Richard Nixon's newspaper) and Geneva.

In 1966, he enrolled in the University of Toronto, where he reconnected with Mr. Ignatieff, a childhood acquaintance in Ottawa, and “threw myself into every conceivable activity.”

He got involved in student politics. But while he flirted at the edges of the anti-war “teach-ins” that were then the rage, he was no radical. Indeed, he worked closely with Claude Bissell, then the university's president, to reform the institution's government.

He also worked in theatrical productions, and he helped to organize an infamous concert by Frank Zappa that ended with his band, the Mothers of Invention, filling the pipes of the organ in Convocation Hall with shaving cream. As he later wrote, “The university solemnly sent me a bill for the cleaning.”

Mr. Rae wrote for the student newspaper, The Varsity. With his horn-rimmed glasses and well-aged tweed jacket, he may have looked the part of the uncool brainiac, but a fellow staffer remembers him as “always far too self-confident and self-assured to be a nerd.”

He also found time to attend the 1968 Ottawa convention that selected Pierre Trudeau as Liberal leader. An acquaintance from that era recalls Mr. Rae cheering as the convention said goodbye to its departing leader, Lester Pearson.

Three years later, in the autumn of 1969, Mr. Rae left Canada again, to go to England as a Rhodes Scholar. It was the start of five years in which “I would go back and forth across the Atlantic several times, never quite sure where was really home or what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

He spent three years at Oxford, where he did a graduate degree in politics, starred as a “dirty old man” in a pantomime production of Cinderella, travelled and “fell in and out of love more than once.”

This latter activity left a couple of strong memories. Once, after a woman had been observed leaving his dormitory room in the morning, contrary to rules about overnight guests, he was summoned to explain himself and was greeted, “Oh, yes, Mr. Rae, it's about the fornication in your room.”

On another occasion, he stuck his ember-filled pipe in the pocket of his tweed jacket while contemplating the pursuit of a woman studying at a library table nearby. He didn't notice that his jacket was smouldering until a librarian came up to him and said: “Excuse me, sir, but I believe you are on fire.”

When he left university, he stayed on in England, unsure what to do next. He found himself for the first time battling depression. It hit suddenly, and he wrote later that he realized it was connected to his “transatlantic quest for identity.” He couldn't sleep or write and his self-esteem was zero.

He tried travelling as an antidote — he visited his old friend Mr. Ignatieff in Cambridge, Mass., for several months. But he realized he was only delaying the task of solving his problems and he drifted back to London. For a time, he saw a therapist. But it was only when he volunteered at a legal-aid clinic in north London that the clouds lifted. “In helping others,” he later wrote, “I helped myself.”

In 1974, he felt he had to choose between Canada and England, where he also had family roots. He was 25 and had lived most of his life outside his native country. He could have chosen the cosmopolitan route, as Mr. Ignatieff did, and become an expatriate. But he came home instead to study law at the University of Toronto.

“It was a very conscious decision that I was not going to be an outsider,” he said recently. “I was going to come back and be really integrated into this part of my life. And I really made it happen.”

Once again, he threw himself into his new life. Being a student wasn't enough — he volunteered with the Steelworkers union and taught management studies at the university. He also, for the first time, became active in the NDP.

“From the outset, politics is how he connected with this country,” said political journalist Graham Fraser, a lifelong friend who was recently nominated to be Canada's official-languages commissioner.

Mr. Rae's affiliation with the NDP was a measured thing. His family were Liberals and it was supposed that he would follow suit. While he was in England, for example, a young cabinet minister named Jean Chrétien took the advice of a departing aide named John Rae that his kid brother should be hired.

The offer was made, but declined. Mr. Rae said he wanted to stay on at Oxford. But the future prime minister liked the idea enough to pursue him, on a visit to England not long after the initial phone conversation.

In a postscript, when Mr. Rae phoned Mr. Chrétien to congratulate him on his 1993 election victory, he was chastised for not accepting the job offer 22 years earlier.

“The funny thing is, Prime Minister,” Mr. Rae replied, “if I had taken that job, I would never have become premier of Ontario — and you would probably never have become prime minister.”

But why did he choose the NDP? His exposure to Conservatives in England had turned him permanently off siding with them, even though neither of the Tories prominent in Ontario in 1974 — national leader Robert Stanfield and premier William Davis — seemed wedded to feudal ideas.

As for his father's party, “my problem with the Liberals was, and is, their smugness,” he would later write in From Protest to Power, as well as what the young Mr. Rae felt was the conservatism of Mr. Trudeau.

At that time in Ontario, the NDP were doing well — the 1975 election would make Stephen Lewis opposition leader — and they seemed to fit in well with the activist work he had embraced, on behalf of tenants and injured workers.

“There was no blinding epiphany that led to a conversion,” he wrote later. “The NDP came to feel more my political home than any of the alternatives.”

His ascent in the political world was blindingly fast. He was courted by the NDP for the 1975 Ontario election, but turned them down. He remained active in the party, though, and was a logical choice to run in a 1978 by-election after a New Democrat MP in east-end Toronto resigned.

In the Commons, he soon became his party's finance critic, and had a prominent role in the debate that led to the defeat of Joe Clark's government in December, 1979. Mr. Rae's wit and sound-bite skill brought him instant cachet.

He attracted the attention of John Diefenbaker. “You're making quite a name for yourself,” the former Conservative prime minister said. “Let me give you some advice: Don't take any shit from anybody.”

It wasn't long before the Ontario NDP came knocking. As leader from 1982 on, he battled to re-establish the party, which had fallen on hard times after the departure of Stephen Lewis. Wooing supporters with a pitch that there was no salvation in the party's founding, radical Regina Manifesto, Mr. Rae was attacked for being too corporate. But he tried to fit in, even describing the movement he was leading with the phrase “socialism is love.”

He does not have fond memories of his first campaign in 1985, when he looked like a rookie. One day, at a campaign meet-and-greet at a St. Catharines, Ont., mall, he looked hopelessly lost while Ms. Perly Rae took great delight in approaching wary shoppers. It wasn't the last time people would note that she had the natural touch that her husband lacked.

That election gave the NDP the opportunity to conclude a deal with the Liberals to knock off the 42-year-old Conservative dynasty. But Mr. Rae's party received no lasting benefit. Two years later, voters gave all the credit to the Liberals, returning David Peterson to office with a sweeping majority.

Those years in the late 1980s were tough ones. In 1985, Ms. Perly Rae's parents were killed on a sunny Sunday afternoon when their car was struck by a speeding vehicle that had spun out of control. Politics took a back seat as Mr. Rae helped his wife recover from the blow. Sometimes he would leave the legislature after the afternoon question period and simply take her to the movies.

In 1989, Mr. Rae's younger brother, David, died after being diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He had beaten the cancer, thanks partly to Mr. Rae's own donation of bone marrow, but he succumbed to the effects of drug and radiation treatments.

On the eve of the 1990 election, Mr. Rae had concluded that another Liberal victory was inevitable and that he would leave politics when it was over.

But the public had other ideas. It rebelled against Mr. Peterson's decision to call the vote after just three years and his preoccupation with the Meech Lake constitutional talks, and gave the NDP a majority government.

Mr. Rae often tells a joke about that surprising NDP victory. It's like the dog that chases a car every day, he says. One day, the driver stops and asks the dog what he wants. “I don't know,” the dog replies. “No car ever stopped before.”

The first year in office for the woefully unprepared New Democrats was, at one level, it was a farce: One minister took a lie-detector test to prove she had lied. Mr. Rae had to fire one cabinet member for having a sexual affair in which there was no sex, and another for posing fully clothed in a tabloid newspaper.

It was also deadly serious. The government misjudged the severity of an economic recession, and tried to spend its way out of it. It raised taxes and tripled the budget deficit from the previous year to nearly $10-billion. Tens of thousands of Ontarians lost their jobs and the unemployment rate rose to nearly 10 per cent and welfare rolls swelled. The province's fiscal situation remained relatively healthy, but the government lost control of the storyline to business critics.

Worse, Mr. Rae confounded his own supporters by abandoning the NDP's commitment to public auto insurance without a full cabinet debate and by building a casino in Windsor after condemning the “casino economy” as immoral.

The killing blow, at least among public-service unions, was the imposition of forced, unpaid days off — the infamous “Rae days.”

Political journalist Thomas Walkom concluded that the Rae government dashed the hopes of those who believed in an alternative to the political and economic orthodoxy. “In effect, the Rae government said to the country: It's pointless to argue with the dominant ideology,” he wrote in his 1994 book, Rae Days.

This time, when the election came, there was no surprise. The NDP emerged from the 1995 election with just 17 seats in the 130-seat legislature. Five months later, the man who had led them for 14 years walked away from Queen's Park.

And now he wants to be the next Liberal prime minister.

Mr. Rae explains his decision by saying he believes Stephen Harper's government poses a danger to Canada.

“I'm not doing this out of a sense of personal unhappiness with where I am or what I'm doing,” he said. “I'm doing it because I see this as the best way in which I can serve the country if that's what people want me to do.”

His brother, John, thinks he was willing to be wooed back because opportunities to climb to the top of the national political ladder don't come around very often. “He wants to be the leader of the party and he wants to be prime minister of the country,” John Rae said.

Some people take a more psychoanalytic view. “I think he needs, deep down at his core, to be a player,” said Charles Pascal, secretary of the Atkinson Foundation and a deputy minister in the Rae era. “He needs to get up every morning and needs to make a difference.”

Some friends and former colleagues, almost all of whom declined to be identified, suggest that politics may simply be Mr. Rae's ideal vocation. They say the past decade has answered his need to immerse himself in serious issues — but that it didn't satisfy his affinity for show business.

It may seem counterintuitive to voters who see only Mr. Rae's policy-wonk side, but he has a wide vaudeville streak: His grandmother loved the music halls of her native Glasgow and passed along this love to her children, who performed as the “Three Little Raes of Sunshine” in their youth. His Uncle Jack stayed in show business his whole life.

Mr. Rae is fond of playing show tunes. In his last days as premier, he performed on television his own anthem for multiculturalism, We're in the Same Boat Now, and considered recording it. His love of the stage is evident to anyone who has ever watched him endure an official dinner and then blossom behind the lectern, delivering an exuberant, funny, smart and unscripted speech.

But if his return to politics provides diverting parlour talk about his motives, his decision to join the Liberals stirs up a higher-octane debate. Turncoat politics are not new, of course — Winston Churchill should have had his own turnstile outside Conservative headquarters.

But Mr. Rae led the Ontario NDP to electoral victory and now he's seeking to lead the federal Liberals to another. If he is successful, it would be without precedent in Canada.

Mr. Davis, a former Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario who has been Mr. Rae's friend for more than two decades, said he wasn't surprised at the evolution. “I think it's a recognition that he found the policies of the NDP somewhat restrictive in today's world environment.”

Many Liberals have welcomed Mr. Rae. “I'm happy that he's joined,” prominent party member Jack Rabinovitch said. “I think he's been a Liberal all his life without him knowing it.”

Senator Jim Munson, a loyalist for Mr. Chrétien, thinks that by his performance in the leadership race, Mr. Rae “has earned his way back into the party.”

But others are leery of their new pal. A supporter of a rival camp sent out an e-mail message this week alleging that Mr. Rae had been asked to join the party many times before and always declined. “He said ‘yes' when he decided he wanted to be leader,” the message read. “That's commitment.”

Some Liberals can cite from memory Mr. Rae's decade-old accusation of “smugness.” One high-profile activist sniffed, “He's a tourist in the Liberal Party.”

The candidate himself has confronted his switch of allegiance head on. In his campaign-launching speech, he referred to his NDP past and said his route to becoming a Liberal wasn't direct, “but it has been honestly and sincerely taken at each step of the way.”

He even makes jokes about it. At a Charlottetown gathering of Liberals in the summer, he was told that the December leadership convention would be the most exciting since the one that Pierre Trudeau won in 1968 — but of course, he wouldn't know about that. Mr. Rae retorted: “I was there in 1968 — it's just the period in between that I was away.”

Mr. Rae hinted at his philosophical wanderlust in his ruminative 1998 book, The Three Questions. “As I grow older, I have had to discard some ideas and policies because they no longer make sense.” He has not been a New Democrat since 2002, when he left over the party's stance on the Middle East (although it was reported this week that he made donations to individual NDP candidates, as well as to Liberals, as recently as January of this year).

But there are people, including some who know him well, who believe that his adoption of the party after a stint of social work in north London in the early 1970s never was convincing. In 1987, for example, reporters covering his second campaign as leader of the Ontario New Democrats took great delight in asking Mr. Rae daily whether he was a socialist. The more he squirmed, the more he talked about “social democracy” instead, the more determined they were to keep after him. He never did answer directly.

Some New Democrats wonder if he was ever a true believer. Many wish him good riddance. “If Bob Rae can do to the federal Liberals what he did to the Ontario New Democratic Party, I'll donate a thousand bucks to his campaign,” said a sarcastic Peter Kormos, the MPP kicked out of the cabinet for posing for the Toronto Sun.

Others are even more bitter that Mr. Rae is now comfortable amid the establishment that once savaged him, and that he critiqued so well.

“His critical and analytical faculties seem to have gone to sleep,” a former adviser said. “He seems at peace among the platitudes and flaccid positions of the party he has turned to for the fulfilment of both his personal and psychological needs, as well as his political ones.”

Mr. Rae defends his record in government and, indeed, some of the things he did — such as the financial rescue of Algoma Steel Co. and de Havilland Aircraft Co. — were praiseworthy. He said of his break with the NDP that “on my part, there is no recrimination.”

Many of his former cabinet colleagues do not have fond memories of their five years in office. They recall a premier who was aloof and often defensive — signalling the latter with hostile language that usually included a furiously tapping toe.

Current NDP Leader Howard Hampton is circumspect about his predecessor, but those years still make his job difficult. Many of his attacks on Ontario's current Liberal government have been defused by Tourism Minister Jim Bradley, who keeps a well-thumbed copy of Rae Days in his legislative desk. Some days, to save time, Mr. Bradley will simply shout out, “Page 79” — a shorthand reference to Mr. Rae's retreat from public auto insurance.

Mr. Hampton has had to undo the effects of Mr. Rae's policy flip-flops. “We've had to work very hard at communicating to the average Ontarian what the NDP is all about.”

The schism between Mr. Rae and his former party is neatly illustrated by the interchange last spring in The Globe and Mail when the leadership bid was first launched. The candidate's contention that he had recently discovered that politics was about people and not ideology was savaged as a “banality” by Ed Broadbent, a former NDP leader and a mentor to Mr. Rae in his early days on Parliament Hill.

“To define one's political goal as, in effect, seeking the middle ground is to reveal a deep commitment to the status quo,” Mr. Broadbent wrote.

Another former adviser from Mr. Rae's NDP days scoffed at his oft-voiced refrain that he believes in a “balance” on social and economic issues: “Balance didn't build medicare.”

By all accounts, the idea of joining the Liberal race began with Mr. Rae himself. “I don't think he would have forgiven himself if he hadn't thrown his hat in the ring,” his wife said.

But Mr. Rabinovitch was one of a number of friends who talked to Mr. Rae about it. His family — even daughter Lisa, who famously declared Mr. Rae's government “toast” shortly before the 1995 Ontario election — was supportive. He delayed making a decision because he wasn't sure whether Mr. Harper would ask him to continue his pursuit of the Air-India case.

Mr. Rae also debated the losses of income, privacy and spare time, the procession of church-basement meetings and the certainty of adding to the scar tissue that comes with political wars. Ontario Finance Minister Greg Sorbara, a one-time legislative foe, warned him of the “sharp, jagged mountain” he would be climbing.

In the end, however, that cheese proved too enticing. Some friends suggest that he was galvanized to run by the candidacy of his old friend Michael Ignatieff. Their fathers were friends as well as rivals in the diplomatic corps and it's possible for an armchair psychiatrist to speculate that the complex rivalry has been passed along to a new generation. Perhaps they waited all these years to begin the competition they both knew eventually would come.

But Mr. Rae denied that Mr. Ignatieff's entry into the Liberal race stirred his competitive juices, though he admitted that people would draw whatever conclusions they want to. And it was clear that his old chum's lengthy absence from Canada wasn't far from his thoughts.

“There are things about a country that you don't learn from a book, that you learn from having sat down at tables and having been involved in constitutional discussions and argued into the night with aboriginal leaders and with political leaders across the country,” he said.

Mr. Rae said he decided to run only when Mr. McKenna and John Manley backed away. He discounted the theory that he wanted another kick at the can simply to refurbish his image after his Queen's Park years. He said he had no regrets when he left politics and no “urge or pang” to return.

Mr. Sorbara, however, never doubted his participation. “I got a sense that for him, although he never said it directly, it was about, ‘I will never be able to look myself in the mirror if I don't take up this challenge,' ” the Ontario Finance Minister said.

In The Three Questions, he confronted the political world using Rabbi Hillel's famous quotation from 2,000 years ago: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

A bit precious, but also prescient, given Mr. Rae's return to politics. But its content makes it clear that he has the strong sense of self-belief that successful politicians need. Many people feel strongly about public policy. Not all of them feel that their contribution is needed. Mr. Rae does.

It's a curious observation to make about someone who consistently presents himself in a charmingly self-deprecating way. But, as he says, you can't expect others to believe in you if you don't believe in yourself. One of his favourite requests is “don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternatives.” The Liberals need experience and Mr. Rae believes that he's the guy who has it.

“I don't want to sound like a sort of Zen figure or something, but I do feel a certain sense of serenity about what I've learned and what I can do and what I can't do and what makes sense and what doesn't make sense,” he said.

Mr. Rae's strategists believe that he can separate himself from the pack by emphasizing his record — not only as someone who has run a government, but also has been involved in some of the deepest issues of our time.

“He's a man of experience who understands the country from coast to coast to coast and he won't have to learn on the job,” campaign director Jonathan Goldbloom boasted.

The Rae campaign is on a roll these days. The only two candidates to drop out so far, Maurizio Bevilacqua and Carolyn Bennett, have come to his camp. The sense of momentum was heightened by a midsummer tally of candidate fundraising, showing the campaign in first place with $405,028 in donations.

Heading into the stretch, Mr. Rae is building up his list of supporters, an eclectic mix of former provincial and federal cabinet ministers, riding-association officials and even a fellow pianist, jazz giant Oscar Peterson.

But he trails many other candidates on support within the Liberal caucus in Ottawa. He has won over just seven MPs, compared with 30 for Mr. Ignatieff.

However, as this week's Strategic Counsel poll showed, Mr. Rae has considerably more potential to broaden his support among delegates in later ballots at the convention. The finding are a retort to the friends who tried to talk him out of running — who said he had given his time and energy to his country for long enough.

Mr. Rae always replied that the party, and the country, needed someone with experience. He won't have lost anything if he falls short in Montreal, he said, because he will have had the “incredible experience” of meeting new people.

“There's nothing wrong with losing,” he said. “What's wrong is not trying.”

It's a very pragmatic attitude.

Murray Campbell is the Queen's Park columnist for The Globe and Mail.