Unfortunately, the photo it captioned focused on Mr. Chrétien’s crooked smile and that allowed him, reacting as the victim, to talk about how he’d had to live with people making fun of his facial paralysis all his life. After that, the Tories were dead. In what must be the intergalactic record for heroes to zeroes, they won only two seats, down from 169 in 1988.
Even so, “Is this a prime minister?” is what this generation of Tory strategists will be asking about Justin Trudeau for the next year, though they are smart enough not to use that tainted phrase — unless it tests well, that is. The 1993 Tory strategists, who were every bit as smart as their successors, used it because it resonated with public reservations about Mr. Chrétien, who had always been a loyal fixer but to many people wasn’t prime ministerial material. It turns out he was, even if he came close to losing the 1995 referendum, mainly by allowing himself to be talked out of his battler’s instinct to campaign long and hard against the separatists.
In my adult life we’ve had four long-serving prime ministers who, whether you agreed with their agendas or not, were clearly very substantial people: Trudeau père, Brian Mulroney, Chrétien and Stephen Harper. About each, however, people worried in advance whether they were up to the job. Pierre Trudeau was a professor, playboy and dilettante who had been in politics only three years. Brian Mulroney had been a labour lawyer and president of a foreign-owned mining company but had never been elected to anything. Doubts about Mr. Chrétien were legion. Stephen Harper, who ran as an anti-politician, had in fact spent most of his career in Ottawa, helping build first the Reform Party and then a new Conservative party, though only through several false starts that at least demonstrated political skill and perseverance.
Is Justin Trudeau a similarly substantial person? That people have doubts about him evidently doesn’t mean he isn’t. They had doubts about the four men mentioned. And in fact two other impeccably prepared prime ministers — John Turner and Paul Martin — about whom almost no one had doubts given each’s long experience and real accomplishments in politics, ended up being spectacularly unsuccessful, in large part because of the high expectations their c.v.’s had generated.
That Justin Trudeau has been the subject of a flattering photo spread in Chatelaine also isn’t grounds for disqualification as prime minister. Chatelaine did a flattering photo shoot of the Harpers at home in 2007, though exactly how flattering is hard to say since the photos are no longer available on the magazine’s website. Pierre Trudeau was the subject of all sorts of flattering photo spreads in 1967 and 1968.
It’s a little more alarming that the Chatelaine story spends much of its time reporting how Mr. Trudeau apparently enjoys using his five-month-old son as a kind of juggling pin. Childhood concussion activists will not be amused.
Even worse, when asked to name books that “have made a lasting impression on him” Mr. Trudeau’s reported answer was “the works of Stephen King.” In fairness, we don’t get to hear that answer. Maybe he was being ironic or playful. Or had been concussed. But his father, who had memorized lengthy passages from the classics, would not have been amused.
OK. Intellectuals don’t always do well in politics. Oliver Wendell Holmes said of Franklin Roosevelt, the 20th century’s most successful politician, that he had a “second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” — though being a Supreme Court justice, Holmes presumably set the bar for intellect pretty high. Mr. Trudeau’s temperament seems to appeal to Canadians, especially compared to the dour scourges, Harper and Mulcair, who oppose him. Whether or not he has enough of the bright stuff to be PM the next 12 months will tell.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com/
Author: William Watson
No comments:
Post a Comment