Sunny ways and the shadow in the men’s room over a softball question
Did you hear the one about Justin Trudeau’s policy dude threatening a reporter in the men’s room?
Chances are you didn’t, unless you made it to the millionth word of last weekend’s Globe and Mail puff piece on Trudeau and his photographer. The piece (takeaway: image is everything) closed with Michael McNair, Trudeau’s policy chief, taking offence to the reporter chucking a single, solitary question his boss’s way at the end of the day.
The offending probe? “What’s it like to be the most photographed person in the country?” Woodward and Bernstein it wasn’t, but that didn’t stop the prime minister’s man from wielding his shiv in the gents, where he told the Globe and Mail to consider its “relationship” with the Prime Minister’s Office before using Trudeau’s answer.
Where to begin? First, it’s not policy’s job to threaten reporters, it’s the press team’s. Second, you don’t threaten them for lobbing a softball. You knock it out of the park (which Trudeau did). Third, why did the paper bury the lede? If image is everything, and you have a substance guy threatening you for asking about substance(ish), surely that’s substantive? Fourth, why hasn’t the entire Parliamentary Press Gallery gone crazy about PMO media thuggery?
The short answer: sunny ways. Justin Trudeau promised ‘em and he’s always smiling, so anything that doesn’t jibe with it is written off or explained away. Meet the power of the narrative frame; we’re 10 months into the Trudeau Era and the Conservatives and NDP have yet to figure out how to warp Trudeau’s.
A strong narrative lets a politician off the hook where others would be charged for murder. The same bathroom incident in Harper’s PMO would have kicked off a round of press moaning that would have outdone Sally Albright. But that’s because the Harper PMO operated in a notoriously combative fashion. A joust in the john would have fit the bill.
The Trudeau operation is unforgivably good at framing their boss. They put him in a position to succeed, even if that means stuffing him shirtless in a cave in Gatineau Park.
They are calculating and relentless with his image; as calculating and relentless as we were with Harper. The difference? Harper dug the strategy and tolerated (at best) the execution. Trudeau loves both.
It used to be that politicians would gobble every microphone they saw; now the gluttonous pol mugs for every camera, especially the smart ones held by ordinary folks. Pictures used to be worth a thousand words, now it’s thousands of votes.
Unless a charisma tanker runs aground near Conservative and NDP HQs and, even then, it is unlikely their next leaders will be able to out-image Trudeau. And so the narrative frame around their picture will need to be constructed out of sturdy and substantive wood.
There are two frames for the opposition to build: their own, and the one they try to hang around the government’s neck. Given it will be some time before leaders are chosen and party policy decided, negative will be the first to be fashioned.
Here, the Conservatives in particular need to be careful their attacks on Trudeau don’t reinforce their own negatives. Now I love a milk carton joke as much as the next man, but sticking Trudeau on one, as CPC HQ did this week, smacks to people as nasty, and distracts from the intended message: that Trudeau is missing in action as the Canadian economy sheds jobs this summer.
The Conservatives mustn’t be blinded by Trudeau. It bears repeating: Knocking him out with a single blow — no matter how witty or pithy — ain’t gonna happen, so they should stop trying. People love him. Like it or not, they think he’s entitled to a topless August vacation. And two taxpayer-funded nannies. And a $5,700 diving board in his renovated official residence. So be it. Fortunately, the Trudeau government is more than Trudeau, so the focus can and should remain on the (many) failings of the latter.
Right now, busting Bill Morneau for a cruddy economy, Judy Foote for a Phoenix that won’t rise, and Jody Wilson-Raybould for selling access to government lands more blows. Land enough, and you’ll weaken the Liberal body enough to take that coveted Trudeau head shot. But it needn’t happen until 2019, so until then don’t fall for the PMO’s rope-a-dope strategy.
The Liberals must howl when the Tories take a swing at Trudeau, whose soft visage sits atop a steel foundation of stratospheric personal popularity. There’s certainly a case to be made for attacking your enemy’s strength; the Liberals did it on middle-class tax policy and deficits in the last election.
But by then the Tories had absorbed many Duffy-sized blows.
Attacking Trudeau’s strength at this point in his mandate isn’t pluck, it’s barmy behaviour that will only bust Tory knuckles.