MONTREAL — Bob Rae the performer, the go-to policy guru, and the elder statesman just couldn't make Liberals completely forget about Bob Rae the former NDP premier of Ontario.

His message throughout that the scars he bore from those much critiqued years at Queen's Park should be evidence of a great political wisdom, rather than a sign of weakness.

"I made mistakes before I was in politics, I made mistakes when I was in politics, I made mistakes as premier,'' Rae said when he launched his leadership campaign.

"I can only tell you I have learned from those mistakes and I am the wiser for them.''

He repeated that sentiment during his unscripted speech Friday night, a risky effort to highlight his warmth and his ease on stage.

But the rank-and-file apparently couldn't get past those years as premier when he struggled through a recession and a daunting deficit. Perhaps more importantly, Rae was a relative newcomer to the Liberal party, only buying a membership in the spring.

But he had been a member before.

Rae began dipping his toes in politics during university, working on a few Liberal campaigns, including that of leader Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

It was when he returned to Canada from studies at Oxford in 1974 that Rae decided he was best suited -- at least then -- to promoting the aims of the NDP.

Four years later, he ran in a federal byelection and won a Toronto seat. He later became one of the most familiar faces in the Commons and a key accomplice to the fall of Joe Clark's minority Tory government in 1979.

But Rae's time on Parliament Hill was to be short-lived.

In 1982, he ran for the helm of the Ontario NDP and won handily, despite fierce opposition to the young politician from party stalwarts.

"I was labelled arrogant, aloof and a right-winger more at home in the boardroom than in the union hall,'' Rae writes in his autobiography From Protest to Power.

Even Rae himself admits the shock the party felt when they climbed to power in 1990, beating David Peterson's Liberals. He walked into a province in deep recession, the worst since the Great Depression.

What happened in the next five years was a near freefall in the polls. Rae alienated some of his party's traditional union support base with the so-called "Social Contract''' that reworked public-sector contracts and introduced the despised "Rae Days''' -- 10 unpaid days a year for government employees.

The NDP government had also sunk into a deep deficit in those years, trying to spend its way out of a crippling recession, making enemies in the business sector.

Rae's NDP government was soundly defeated in 1995 by Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives.

Reasons given for the loss were varied, from obstructionist bureaucrats to the deficit, to inexperienced staff and the media. Rae resigned soon afterward and went back into the academic and legal world. There he began a steady rehabilitation of his reputation, plucked by different provincial, federal, corporate and international leaders to help advise on a range of tough issues.

The highlights included a stint as lawyer to the Free Trade Lumber Council; a seat on the Security and Intelligence Review Committee -- a CSIS watchdog; author of a commissioned report for the Ontario government on post-secondary education; and mediator in the 2000 Burnt Church native lobster-fishing dispute in New Brunswick.

Rae also helped found the Canada-based Forum of the Federations, a group that promotes federalism worldwide and works with fledgling groups. As chair of the organization in 2002 and 2003, he spent time in Sri Lanka overseeing constitutional talks between the government and the Tamil Tigers.

One of his last tasks before he went back into politics was to review the investigation into the 1985 Air India bombing for the federal Liberal government.

Those accomplishments of later years -- as well as Rae's ability to rack up friends -- helped him establish a remarkable stable of support going to the weekend leadership convention, including many cabinet ministers and party luminaries. Many of them had struck up friendships with Rae over the years.

And Rae was identified by Conservatives as the candidate they saw as the biggest threat.

All of that still couldn't put Rae over the top, with many Liberals fixated on what they saw as a man who was "unwinnable'' in Ontario, a key area for any leader who wanted to secure an election win.

That feeling was borne out in a little scene Friday night before the first- ballot results were revealed. As Joe Volpe decided to throw his support behind Rae, a number in Stephane Dion's camp began aggressively urging Volpe's delegates not to make the move.

As one Dion supporter put it, "They're from around Toronto just like us, it's not right.''