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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Everyone underestimated him and the voters

Empire of the Son


That Justin Trudeau will usher in 2016 as freshly minted prime minister of virtually unprecedented adulation has confounded all the grinches and surprised exactly nobody else.

While the cerebral sourpuss set and the purveyors of leftover Rebel t-shirts stew in their corners, everyone else in the country is partying like it’s 1999.
Canada doesn’t need reminding that Trudeau is not preternaturally gifted in the way Obama, JFK, and his own father were.
The country never gave a hoot—he’s got the royal jelly, the right stuff. Like the conquering hero Napoleon, Trudeau’s ascendance seemed pre-ordained by fate and the circumstances that preceded him.

"Courage cannot be counterfeited. It is the one virtue that escapes hypocrisy.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

When Canadian pundits by the score drew the obvious contrast between Trudeau the Elder's blazing intellectual powers and his son's more prosaic mind, they overlooked what had always been there, hiding in plain sight.
More than anything, the two men share a spine of steel and the will to win.
In Stephen Harper, Canadians had a prime minister possessed of a first-rate mind and a formidable instinct for power. That the people he governed shared an equally resolute determination to be rid of him was frequently scorned by a (too often) cowed and captive media that consistently underestimated Justin Trudeau until the last votes were counted.
Coltish and sometimes uncertain as he was then and occasionally remains, Justin Trudeau still bears the unmistakable outlines of a thoroughbred bred from a champion.

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