‘Hottie’ PM in vogue on the world stage

By the attention he’s getting, Justin Trudeau brings back international Trudeaumania

The image mavens in the Prime Minister’s Office must be over the moon these days.

And Oscar Wilde, who believed the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about, would have almost certainly approved.

It seems people near and far simply can’t get enough of new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Just two weeks in office and globetrotting on his world debut, the country’s famously well-coiffed prime minister seems to be everywhere.

He is reportedly appearing in a forthcoming spread in Vogue magazine, a publication that has already hailed him as “Canada’s Feminist Prime Minister.” He has prompted a #ThanksTrudeau hashtag in which people blame him, tongue in cheek, for everything from broken fingernails to ketchupless french fries.

“Traffic is still nuts at this hour. Is this what we get under the new government?” #ThanksTrudeau.

“Tim’s only has four varieties of Timbits. Liberals have been in power for a week and Canada is already falling apart.” #ThanksTrudeau.

In Trudeau’s line of work, it’s pretty much all good.

Reports by Maclean’s magazine that Vogue last week dispatched photographers to snap Trudeau and his wife, Sophie, in the Library of Parliament drew immediate snorts of derision from the right this week on social media as the ongoing vanities of a leader bereft of gravitas and bound for a bonfire. But it was a thin argument. Trudeau will make his bones with world leaders on how he performs in their company and how he delivers in terms of policy. Star play in major publications does him little if any harm.

As Patrick Gossage, former press secretary to Trudeau’s father, Pierre, recently told the Star, “the camera loves him,” as women of all ages hungry for selfies make abundantly clear.

It’s been more than a half century since the power of image was made clear to both politicians and journalists in a presidential debate that Richard Nixon was said to have won by those who listened on radio, but judged overwhelmingly to have lost by those who saw the dust-up with rival John F. Kennedy on television.

In 1984, American broadcaster Lesley Stahl had the lesson reaffirmed after she delivered a long, critical report on former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s record, running a montage of photos of the president on screen as she spoke.

She expected grief from the White House. Instead, Reagan strategists loved it. One later explained to Stahl that “pictures are powerful and emotional and they override if not completely drown out the sound.”

And pictures of Justin Trudeau tend to cast him as, well, gorgeous. Or, as the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer had it when the prime minister arrived in Manila for the APEC summit, a “hottie.”

Studies have consistently shown that good-looking men and women are regarded to be more talented, kind, honest and intelligent than their less-attractive counterparts. And this bias translates into tangible benefit. They get hired and promoted faster, get paid better and are listened to more intently.

For Trudeau, not even the #Thanks Trudeau fad is apt to do him any harm. In fact, the contrary.

The spoofy nature of the complaints really makes the point that political leaders can only do so much about anything, and to blame them for absolutely everything is absurd. As Stephen Harper must these days be thinking.

The risk the new prime minister runs on his round-the-world cavalcade is that he may seem out of sync with a world made sombre by recent events in Paris.

And the inevitability that, even for beautiful people, honeymoons end.