Explaining Justin Trudeau

No matter what the Liberal leader says or does, his popularity ranks at a consistently high level. While part of the explanation for his standings in the polls surely lies in the Canadian people's weariness with the Harper regime, a regime that has shown itself, through its practices of division, neoliberal politics and fear/hate-mongering, to be unworthy of public office, there must be more to it than that.

Rick Salutin, writing in The Star, offers up an interesting perspective in a piece entitled Paradoxical public art of seeming human. His thesis is that the more a person appears like one of us, i.e., flawed and fallible, the more we will identify with him or her.

He uses as an example the televised debate between Kathleen Wynne, Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath. Young Tim pretended to be just an ordinary, folksy kind of guy:

“Look, I’m not gonna be the best actor on the stage. I’m not gonna get up here and give a great performance.” It was a rehearsed shtick, a shucks/shtick. He did it with the rictus grin that others — NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, U.S. neo-con Bill Kristol — paste on, presumably because experts tell them they look too stern.

Contrasting that studied 'ordinariness' was Kathleen Wynne, who

sounded bad and looked flustered answering questions on corruption in that debate, but flustered is human, so she also made ground, by contrast with the “human” effects well-prepped by her opponents.

Salutin then examines Trudeau, pere et fils:

Human is human. There’s no formula. Pierre Trudeau looked human by not seeming to give a crap whether anyone cared if he looked human. It was effective.

Now Justin is pulling off the same thing though not in his dad’s way, which would be fatal. He’s warm, ebullient, spontaneous. It seems real, which is as much as we’ll ever know. When he apparently improvised a new anti-abortion policy at a scrum, he looked befuddled by the questions. “Uh, that is an issue that, uh” — then he takes a really long pause as if lost in thought, remembers the press are there, tries again: “I’ve committed in my . . . ” Then cheerily gives up: “Well, it is a tough one.” Says he’ll give it more thought.

While this apparent ineptitude should be reflected in poll results, it is not. Salutin's explanation?

Faced with candidates none of whom is discernibly human, voters will look for something to judge on: sunniness, mellifluousness, square jaw. What the candidates say is never enough since it’s all obviously calculated. But faced with one candidate who’s discernibly human, they’ll tilt in that direction for, well, human reasons. It’s like spying a fellow creature in the wilderness. It may not suffice but it’s a sizable advantage.

The adorable thing about that abortion clip is it could appear in Conservative or Liberal ads: as proof the guy’s in over his head or that he’s a certifiable human.

While electoral behaviour, like all human behaviour, will likely never give up all of its mysteries, Rick Salutin has perhaps provided us with one more tool by which to analyse it.