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One day. And yet it displayed so much of the signature O’Leary style: the casual disregard for the rules that others live by, the adolescent taste for shock, the carelessness with the facts, the failure to do the most basic homework, and above all the open, brazen contempt for the party he lazily hopes to lead.

There will be many more such days. There are hundreds of hours of video of O’Leary online, and it doesn’t take more than about five minutes to find him saying and doing all sorts of ignorant, nutty, clownishly reactionary things. And while he can try to wave all of these off as “good TV,” the utterances of a character he had created, he cannot disavow the things he says and does on the campaign trail. That is, when he bothers to go on it.

It’s hard to see why O’Leary would need a private plane to get to campaign events. He’s hardly been to any. Of eleven debates since the first week in November, he has participated in three. He has spent most of the campaign, in fact, in the United States, attending to his various business interests, returning to Canada only intermittently. Should he be elected leader he has not only refused to commit to run for a seat in Parliament — he has refused even to say he would live full-time in Canada. What, and give up show business?

Has any other candidate for leader of a national party in a mature democracy ever campaigned for the job from outside the country? It was unusual enough for Michael Ignatieff to aspire for high office in a country he had spent most of his life avoiding. But if “he didn’t come back for you,” at least he came back. By contrast, the unique selling proposition O’Leary — the Boston Stranger, the Eyewash Rover — is presenting to the Conservatives is: elect me and maybe I’ll mention you on Shark Tank.