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.
Liberal leadership candidate Bob Rae
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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.
