Last month Canada elected a leader who largely matches Don DeLillo’s description of John F. Kennedy: the waggish, photogenic Justin Trudeau, his country’s 23rd Prime Minister and, by some measure, its most charming.
Like Kennedy, Mr. Trudeau is an exemplar of public magnetism, his wit sharp, his teeth gleaming. (He even went to McGill, the Harvard of Canada).
Conservative criticism
His international reception has been duly effusive — particularly on social media, where photographs of the self-professed fitness enthusiast posing shirtless aroused an unprecedented global interest in Canadian politics. At home, meanwhile, the traditionalists are unnamed.
Conservative voters are irritated, indignant — quite fed up, a month into his tenancy, with all that energy and charisma. It grates on them to just to look at him.
Mr. Trudeau’s appearance has long been under scrutiny. He endured a campaign of disparagement during the recent federal election, one that seized upon his youthfulness as proof of professional inadequacy. But this particular line of censure never seemed directed at Mr. Trudeau’s inexperience specifically.
The trouble seemed more to do with optics: the prospective Prime Minister looked and sounded like a young person. He boxed and snowboarded. He called himself a proud feminist. He was good-looking and stylish. His arms bore tattoos.
A sensible person sees these things and thinks: that sounds like a person I might like to vote for. But among a certain class of old-fashioned conservatives, such foppish trivialities are as transgressive as a heroin addiction. Youthfulness isn’t proper. It isn’t any way for a Prime Minister to be.
Upon election, Mr. Trudeau at once confirmed the suspicions of the right. The morning after being sworn into office — by tradition a private ceremony but at his behest opened for the first time to the public, a symbol of his commitment to transparency —Mr. Trudeau met in private with a journalist from Vogue.
Naturally the conservative response was swift and fierce. “Those who believe Prime Minister Justin Trudeau puts style over substance are directed to the forthcoming issue of Vogue,” wrote a political reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, later chiding in a tweet that he “wasn’t elected to be a spokes-model”.
The humorlessness of the anti-Trudeau contingent reached an embarrassing zenith in the matter of selfies. “Call him Prime Minister Selfie,” the Sun declared after Trudeau’s first week in office.
Stephen Harper, Canada’s former Prime Minister, was a vacuous, anodyne nothing, as magnetic on the public stage as the podium he spoke from.
Ironically, though perhaps not so surprisingly, this anti-talent for charm is precisely what so endeared Mr. Harper to his loyal voters.
The appeal of Stephen Harper, I think, was founded in his apparent sobriety and stability — in the colorless mediocrity that, if not exactly winsome, could nevertheless be relied upon.
The warmth and geniality Trudeau projects so effortlessly are not, at least to the incurious or unimaginative, easily reconciled with the demands of the Prime Minister’s office. But leadership isn’t merely bookkeeping. And there is much to be said for galvanizing the public.
