Are Our Politicians Now Merely Celebrities?

Henry Srebrnik [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

A recent exchange between Democratic Party rivals Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton about which of them had the “qualifications” to be president of the United States came after Sanders, when being interviewed by the New York Daily News editorial board, struggled to outline his policies on Wall Street and foreign affairs.

But this was silly, really, because obviously no politician has the depth of knowledge about specific events or countries that tens of thousands of historians and political scientists with PhDs have. So what. That’s not why we elect them.

Look at Justin Trudeau -- this is a man who spent most of his life as a dilettante; his only “jobs” were as a substitute drama high school teacher and snowboarding instructor. 

Yet he won a resounding victory in last year’s federal election, bringing the Liberal Party back from the dead (or – the same thing for our natural governing party -- third place in the House of Commons). 

He not only bested our dour Conservative prime minister but also, in the NDP’s Tom Mulcair, an excellent debater and very competent politician, whose own party has now cast him aside.

Trudeau’s two Liberal Party predecessors, he might remind people, were both accomplished academics and intellectuals. But Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, the latter probably the best-known Canadian public intellectual in the world right now, almost brought the party to ruin.

Perhaps politicians have become merely celebrities. This hit home to me while watching television news clips of the recent visit to India by the royals Will and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. 

They were shown playing with children, opening venues, visiting temples and iconic landmarks, and so on. But how different, really, is this from Justin Trudeau taking pictures with people and practicing yoga with his wife Sophie? (In December, they also recorded themselves singing “Jingle Bells” in a clip posted on YouTube.)

Trudeau has been called, among other things, “vapid,” “emotionally manipulative,” “a rich-kid pretty-boy,”  “an airhead,”  “a flake,” “PM Selfie,” and a “faux feminist.” Given his “sunny ways,” though, this doesn’t faze him; he just keeps on smiling. 

And why not? As an April 16 article by Niraj Chokshi in the Washington Post, “Watch Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Charming Quantum Computing Lesson,” observed, “The Internet’s love of Justin Trudeau knows no bounds. And it grows greater still.” 

His “all-around handsomeness” has made him the focus of “countless viral memes.”

In fact, “Trudeau’s one true asset as a politician is his talent for performance,” noted Jen Gerson in her April 19 National Post commentary, “The Talented Mr. Trudeau.”

In “A Liberal Government Styled by Dorian Gray,” National Post, April 20, Andrew Coyne concurs. He describes Trudeau as being “dimpled of smile and tousled of hair,” the embodiment of “eternal youth.”

He is “on every magazine cover, in every news cycle, opening this and announcing that. Occasionally he even shows up in Parliament.” Has any teenager ever had this much fun?

And now this: The men’s magazine GQ board has named Trudeau “the most stylish politician alive right now,” and he has made Time magazine’s  list of the 100 most influential people in the world. 

Time also noted that Trudeau visited Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn April 21 and sparred with young boxers, before signing a climate change accord at the United Nations. The magazine added that the outing “wasn’t that unusual for Trudeau, who boxes regularly.” 

Talk of virility! The Liberals have certainly been, in the words of Joni Mitchell, “stoking the star maker machinery.”

While Trudeau traipses around the world, the darling of the media in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, others are doing the actual work of governing. Because it’s 2016!