And why wouldn't Canada be excited by the ascension to power by the offspring of a former leader? The United States did so well under the most recent incarnation of the House of Bush, did it not? If Justin wins he can always start a club with George W. and Bashar Assad, two other dynastic products that weren't as smart as their fathers.
Much has been made of young Justin over the last several months. He's pretty! He has a cool name! He has a hipster beard sometimes! He beat the shit out of a guy who smokes two packs a day! He has fabulous hair! He flirts with treason sometimes! He equates government ministers with feces on the floor of the House of Commons! He is, as a partisan a Grit as BigCityLib calls him, "Teenage Jesus"!
All of those things more than qualify Justin Trudeau to be a Hollywood star, but I'm not aware of them ever having qualified someone to run a major political party - or a modern industrialized nation - before. But here we are. When a murderous, unprincipled cyborg like Stephen Harper can be elected three times, I suppose that anything's possible.
I'm of the opinion that this shithead media-blogosphere tizzy is just that, a shithead media-blogosphere tizzy. If you pay enough attention to predictions that are made during the summertime news cycle, you very quickly notice that they rarely come true. For example, everyone in North America didn't wind up either getting fucked to death by Gary Condit or eaten by sharks, as was predicted in the summer of 2001. Instead, we wound up with Arabs riding jet liners into buildings, like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
Justin has repeatedly said that he isn't going to be a candidate for the leadership, as he is unwilling to abandon his children for a cynical quest for power. And as inadvisable as taking the word of someone named Trudeau can be, I'm inclined to believe him. Not because of his kids, for chrissakes (every doomed politician uses his or her family as an excuse), but for several other good reasons, which I laid out for your friend and mine, the great Tiger on Politics, over the weekend. I thought that I'd also put them down here and expand upon them.
1) He’s got anger management issues to work on. Having him muse about becoming a traitor to his county every time he gets miffed at long-disproven "hidden agendas" or calling Cabinet ministers “a piece of shit” in the House is fine for a backbencher. However, it’s a lot more problematic for a party leader.
Christ, I don’t think that even Justin has ruled out the possibility that he could have an epic meltdown during the leadership debates, which would be fatal. If I were Rae, I’d be thinking of ways to goad the boy into a public tantrum even before he declares his intentions.
Trudeau's partisan-inspired comments regarding his possible sympathy for Quebec independence were a titanic fuck-up. And you only get one of those in politics, if you're lucky. Another outburst anywhere approaching that will kill him.
2) If he knows anything at all about his own party, he knows that he can’t play National Saviour while ensconced in never ending leadership wars unless he wins by a margin so unimaginably large as to silence his potential Bruti forever. And if he can’t play National Saviour, why bother?
Even If Trudeau were to win, the supporters of his rivals would do everything in their power to sabotage his leadership and election prospects. Such as it has always been. As Turner did to Pierre Trudeau, as Chretien did to Turner, as Martin did to Chretien, as Ignetieff did to Dion, and as Rae did to Igntieff, Rae and everybody else will do to Justin.
The Liberal leadership has been a poisoned chalice for much longer than most folks understand. The Grits have only won elections since 1975 because the opposition parties were either incompetent or divided. As we've seen over the last decade, that isn't the case anymore and the divisions within the LPC have rapidly destroyed them.
Bob Rae, if nothing else, is a well-known and established commodity in politics. He's been on Parliament Hill or Queens Park since the 1970s. He's run more campaigns than all of the other party leaders - and Grit leadership aspirants - combined. If Bob runs for and loses the Liberal leadership for the third time, he'll retire peacefully, knowing that he's had a long and distinguished career.
Before running in Montreal - one of the very few places left in Canada where Liberals are still allowed to roam free - Justin's life experience consisted entirely of being a school teacher. He's run nothing larger than a classroom in his entire life. Not only has he not even been Minister of Hipster Beards, we don't even know if he was Class Clown in school.
This gives him the same resume problem that Micheal Ignatieff had, but Ignatieff could at least position himself as a "public intellectual" who had written some seventeen books that nobody has read. Iggy was the first Liberal leader to win the leadership without considerable political experience behind him in my lifetime. I just don't see the Grits going back to that well anytime soon, at least not if they intend to be taken seriously.
Oh, and for the enemies of Bob Rae out there, none of you bitched when Ignatieff ran for the permanent leadership from the interim leader's office.
If Trudeau runs and loses, he's done. Celebrity mystique is a fantastic thing if you win on your first try. If you don't, it dissipates so quickly that you may as well have never had it in the first place.
4) Beating Bob Rae is going to be very, very hard. Rae has the money, organization, momentum and political experience that give him a profound advantage in a hypothetical head-to-head with Trudeau. Bob also knows things abut public policy, caucus relations and campaigns that Justin can't be expected to. These are all things that the Grits are going to need if they plan on having a life-expectancy of more than three years.
Giving the leadership to a pre-teen novelty would be every bit as desperate as it looks, by a party that needs to be seen as anything other than desperate. And the Liberals are nothing if not pragmatic. It might not have worked out the way they wanted, but there actually was a rationale for getting behind Dion and Ignatieff that there isn’t for Trudeau, other than his surname. Naming Trudeau as leader will be telegraphing to the other parties that the Liberals are officially out of tricks and are going for a Sarah Palin-style Hail Mary that's doomed to failure.
5) Given that I don't think he's not an utter mouth-breather, I’m pretty sure that Justin has considered the very real possibility that the Liberal Party only has one more election in it. What do you suppose that his formally presiding over the death of the Most Successful Party in the History of Democracy will do to the family legacy?
If dear old dad’s eternal term of office teaches us anything, it’s that the Trudeaus care a whole lot more about the family name than they do the Liberal Party. Pierre so hobbled his rival and successor, John Turner, that he essentially handed over the government to Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in 1984. The elder Trudeau destroyed the party brand west of Manitoba and crippled it in Quebec. Were it not for the fracturing of the Mulroney coalition, Pierre likely would've been the last elected Liberal prime minister.
If Justin runs a general election in 2015 and the Liberals lose even more seats (which seems an entirely reasonable prospect at this point), the party is finished forever. And so too will be his political future, even though he'll only be not quite 44 years old.
6) Even a wildly unpopular Harper would disembowel Justin in public. But Stephen Harper isn’t going to be around forever, and all of his potential successors are laughable ward-heeling hacks or genetic fuckheads. The Tories have the shallowest bench imaginable. Always remember, a misfit like Vic Towes is in Cabinet because everyone else in caucus is actually worse.
It's hard to see a scenario where Trudeau beats Harper (assuming that Harper stays in the leadership for another election.) But – with a united Progressive Party behind him – seeing him lose to a bloated hack like Jason Kenney in 2019 strains the power of my imagination. And I’m a pretty imaginative cat.
Let's get one silly notion out of the way right now. There isn't going to be a great Progressive merger. The NDP are smart enough to understand that the Liberals are dead and that they only have to wait for them to fall down before eating the carcass. Even the Grits that favour a merger are still so impossibly arrogant as to think that they can dictate the terms of one, which they can't, having only slightly more than a third of the NDP's seats in Parliament and polling that consistently shows them a distant third in public preference.
Because the LPC's public support is so pathetic, they aren't going to have money or credible candidates in the next election. Donors are fickle and the desire to serve the public isn't necessarily the same as a masochistic need for public humiliation. That means that the few remaining Liberal bastions in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are going to divvied up between the Tories and Dippers (with the Dippers probably getting the majority of them.)
Justin Trudeau is sufficiently left wing, and his celebrity strong enough, that he could win the leadership of a newly dominant NDP (or United Progressive Party, or whatever the fuck else they'd call it) after the final fall of the Liberals. Like Harper, Tom Muclair isn't going to be around forever, and he's already started bringing the NDP close enough to the middle that Trudeau could take it over when he's gone. If Boy Justin focuses all of his energy on being the best constituent-service MP for the people of Papineau possible, raising shit-tons of money and quietly making nice with Dipper power players, he could probably survive the apocalypse. As the last national Liberal standing, he could bring together and lead a new Progressive movement. But he won't be able to do that as a failed Liberal leadership candidate or as the last fully discredited Liberal leader.
Justin Trudeau is a young man and the LPC is about as close to a political funeral as you can get. Being a pallbearer is no fun, but it sure as shit beats being the guy in the box. That being the case, he has a much better shot at running an NDP that swallows the remains of the Grits whole after the flood than he does being the Last Liberal Leader, so why not wait? Right now he has everything to lose and nothing to realistically gain.
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