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Trudeau followed up the pot stand with positions the Tories may have actually admired, but which they continued to maintain would be his undoing. He came out in favour of pipelines, and took a hard line against Quebec independence. His voters didn’t abandon him.

To be sure there were genuine blunders. Trudeau’s crass comparison of the deployment of our warplanes to men bragging of their penis size alienated even those inclined to agree with him. His embrace of former Conservative Eve Adams was cringe-worthy. His “budgets balance themselves” line and remarks about China lent themselves all too easily to devious distortions by his opponents.

But his critics made an error of greater proportion in assuming these were flashes of his core rather than a few unforced errors.

As the campaign drew to a close, those partisans who tend to reject evidence and instead trumpet the outcomes they hope for turned up the noise to drown out the growing thrum of a Trudeaumania 2.0. “Just watch” they said, “the polling is all wrong.” Some even embraced bogus polls such as one showing Trudeau was losing his own seat by nine points. He shellacked his NDP opponent 52 per cent to 26 per cent.

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In the end, with Trudeau winning a commanding majority, the narrative turned to his having merely been swept to power on an anti-Harper wave. It’s a nice thought, but the anti-Harper crowd had two choices, and they chose the Liberals. Big time.

Justin Trudeau may be untested as a prime minister, but he has taken a bankrupt third-place party written off as irredeemable, and ridden it to the biggest majority government since Brian Mulroney beat the one Pierre Trudeau left behind after his walk in the snow.

It may well turn out that Justin Trudeau is “not ready” for all that the job of prime minister will bring. But some might want to stop trying stake their careers on underestimating him.

National Post

John Moore is host of Moore in the Morning on NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto.