Here’s a Brit-born writer living in Toronto:
“Harper embodied the qualities you’d look for in a bookkeeper or accountant: he didn’t seem to have much personality to get in the way of the dull tedium of governing the country. That’s the source of the Trudeau costernation. Conservatives fond of Harper aren’t so much offended by Trudeau’s earnest popularity as they are mystified by it: they can’t imagine why anyone would want to take a photograph with the person they chose to run their country. The warmth and geniality Trudeau project so effortlessly are not, at least to the incurious or unimaginative, easily reconciled with the demands of the Prime Minister’s office.”
Some great writing, therein, and I’m pissed off he anticipated my next Hill Times column, which reads in part:
“So too Justin Trudeau, who the camera loves and – to his critics – loves the camera right back. Trudeau knows, perhaps, that leaders are measured by the impressions they create, not the policies they promulgate.
There’s a risk in all of this, naturally. If, six months from now, Trudeau is indeed branded as Prime Minister Selfie – if his administration is simply regarded as a four-year-long photo op, punctuated only by state dinners and the occasional foreign trip – he’ll be in trouble. He needs to be more than the callow and shallow caricature his opponents suggest he is.”
Conservatives forget they had their own image-conscious deity, however: Ronald Reagan.
And he was popular for a long, long time, as I recall. And lots of conservatives would’ve lined up for selfies with him, too.
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