Are you sick of media coverage about Justin Trudeau?

I know I sure am. And I’m a Liberal! And I know and like the guy!

I mean, the Liberal leader-to-be gets more ink than would a chance meeting of the newly minted pope, Justin Bieber and Ikea monkey.

Plug the Montreal MP’s name into Google and you’ll get a kabillion results in 0.23 seconds. Will it ever end? Make it stop!

I have it on good authority that Team Trudeau wishes it would, too.

Increasingly — and quietly — the Trudeaumaniacs are growing worried about the insanely high expectations being created by the insane amount of fawning coverage their man has been getting, for month after month.

For instance, if someone at the Toronto Star were to write a column suggesting the sun actually shines out of Trudeau’s behind, it would get printed. No one would blink.

In fact, CBC’s Evan Solomon and CTV’s Don Martin would thereafter seek out experts to discuss the beams of light emanating from the young Trudeau’s bottom and their political significance.

There is a long and proud tradition in Canadian politics. It is called “underselling and overperforming.”

Politicians who did so include Stephen Harper, Jean Chretien, Peter Lougheed and Bill Davis. All were pilots who knew how to fly beneath the radar.

Politicians who don’t — the ones who think it is a good idea to be all over the papers, all the time — tend to be the politicians who are found in political graveyards, stacked up like cordwood.

Generally speaking, voters elect leaders once every four years. Then they hope not to hear from said politicians for another four years or so. Just do the job we hired you to do, keep out trouble and keep out of the media; it’s a simple and simplistic formula and it works.

Justin Trudeau is messing with that formula. Through no fault of his own, Trudeau is getting media coverage of the kind that few of us have ever seen before.

(For instance, were the Messiah contemplating a return, we’d advise him to wait for the conclusion of the Liberal leadership race next weekend.)

The problem with Trudeau’s bursting media clippings file — and not all of the coverage is good, it should be noted — is this: It is creating expectations that no human being could ever, ever satisfy. Justin Trudeau, all evidence to the contrary, is human. Human beings are flawed.

Ipso facto, in the coming months, Justin Trudeau is going to say and do things that will disappoint untold legions of Trudeaumaniacs. It is inevitable.

If entering a witness protection program is not possible, Trudeau and his team need to start lowering the sky-high expectations, pronto.

To this point, Trudeau’s advisers have been the Maytag repairmen of Canadian politics; for them, nothing seems to ever go wrong. Their job has been an easy one.

It’s about to get harder. Team Trudeau must get their guy to step back from the spotlight, a bit, and focus instead on beefing up policy, membership, candidate recruitment and election readiness. They need to get him less media coverage, not more.

That’s unusual advice to give to a politician, but Justin Trudeau has had a very unusual campaign. The standard rules don’t apply.

Oh, and the sun shining out of his keester?

Team Trudeau have no comment.

Comments (22)

Here.

Great news if you’re Brad Wall, not so good if you’re Christy Clark.

Across the aisle? Adrian Dix is a very popular Opposition leader, seems. It’s why most people think he’ll be Premier.

But look at who exactly matches his number in Ontario! Does the same outcome await Andrea Horwath?

Polls are fun!

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Long piece. I was nodding until the author tried to set up Jan Wong, who is scum, as a victim. She isn’t.

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This seems about right, to me.

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I really enjoy the way he summarizes the news over at Maclean’s.  (And I like the fact that he doesn’t clumsily try and drive an agenda all the time, like that asshole who was there previously.)

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Right here.

Um, except:

1. Alf Apps? Alf Apps, he of Ornge fame, is the voice of renewal? Seriously? Can we get Chris Mazza in to oversee fundraising, now?

2. The “no old factions” stuff isn’t, well, true. I was told that one camp’s senior guys are very involved – and I know that another camp aren’t, so much. A choice has been made, which they’re entitled to do. But don’t pretend a choice hasn’t been made.

3. My old pal Ibbitson wrote this to be nice. He doesn’t believe it for a minute. The Big Shift, etc.

You’re welcome.

Comments (26)

The good news: You do it online, which meant I could wear my Star Trek housecoat, skull jammies and people’s revolution T-shirt, and no one cared.

The bad news: You do it online, which makes it super boring. I mean, is that all there is? That’s it? Yawn.

Oh, and how did I vote?

With my head.

Comments (24)

The news that the Conservatives are planning attack ads against Justin Trudeau isn’t news. It’s what Stephen Harper’s party does, and they do it well.

If the Harper Conservatives are to be remembered for anything, it will be their brutal efficiency in dispatching Liberal opponents. In 2006, 2008 and 2011, the Conservatives haven’t won as much as they have beaten Liberals. It’s a critical distinction.

While each of the Conservatives’ anti-Liberal ad campaigns are qualitatively different in some way, there is a thread that runs through all of them. It is the notion that Harper is the Tim Hortons-loving hockey dad, the everyman.

While his Liberal adversaries are out-of-touch elitists and (quite literally, in one case) aliens.

Paul Martin? Conservative campaign advertising suggested Martin, a multi-millionaire who owned ships flying Liberian flags, was indifferent to serial scandals, and — most critically — wasn’t at all “like them.”

Stephane Dion? Martin’s successor was a weakling and “not worth the risk.” (The fact he possessed French citizenship, and an inability to speak English well, was an unexpected bonus.)

Michael Ignatieff? A geeky foreigner. The Conservative barrage reminded viewers that Ignatieff, like Dion, was a pointy-headed academic — and that he had spent decades abroad and was “just visiting” Canada. “He didn’t come back for you,” either, they hissed.

Past political behaviour is the best predictor of future political behaviour. If it worked once, it could work again. So we can reasonably expect the forthcoming anti-Trudeau smears will focus on his other-worldliness: His privileged background, his perceived dilettantism, his unfamiliarity with the everyday lives of everyday Canadians.

The “not like you” theme is as simple as it is effective. Thus, Conservatives have been busily scrutinizing focus group data for months, zeroing in on one or two things about Justin Trudeau’s personality that can be exaggerated into gaping fatal flaws.

But two can play that game. If the Trudeau Liberals are smart — and if they figure out how to get Trudeau to rescind his recent foolish “no negative ads” pledge — they will quickly familiarize themselves with the Conservative advertising playbook.

Developing a campaign that suggests Harper isn’t an all-Canadian regular guy is a waste of time.

After nearly a decade, Harper’s persona is familiar to millions of Canadians. They feel he is the leader most likely to understand their lives.

But that doesn’t mean they like him, however. Polls reveal vulnerabilities in the Conservative leader’s populist armour. A recent Angus Reid poll, for instance, found nearly 70% of all Canadians still feel he has a hidden agenda.

An earlier Angus Reid poll found that almost a third of Canadians feel he has been the worst prime minister in decades, and fully half of them “dislike” Harper.

An Ipsos poll at the start of the year found that, outside Alberta, most Canadians do not feel a kinship with Harper’s values. Indeed, the same poll found about 60% of them don’t even want him to run again in 2015. On the policy front, Harper is vulnerable on the economy, taxes, the environment and (particularly) health care.

Successive polls have shown Canadians feel their lives have worsened during Harper’s reign – and that he harbours a not-so-secret desire to gut the environment and privatize health care.

To offset the coming anti-Trudeau torrent, then, the Liberals need to put together ads that turn the tables on Harper. He, in fact, is the one who is “just visiting” — he’s angry, he’s aloof and his values are un-Canadian. And, however much he runs the country, he still does not seem to like the country.

The Conservative attack ads are coming. Will Justin Trudeau turn the other cheek, or respond in kind?

If they are to have any hope at all, Liberals should pray it’s the latter.

Comments (78)

To wit:

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his successor John Turner increased public spending as a share of GDP by 40%, while the more recent Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin decreased it by 32%.

The message is clear: The idea that the left is more spendthrift and the right is more thrifty just does not stand up to scrutiny. A major study from the early 1990s looking at 15 industrialized countries over a period of 28 years draws a similar conclusion.

Wow, eh? I’m tweeting this!

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Ras Ritalin Boy (guitar), Jah Davey Snot (skins) and Sly Winkie (disembodied left hand, and frightening full frontal at the 2:30 mark) try to sound less white.  Punk rock, begone! Jah Strummer, behold!

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