Politics and Press

A tale of two elections – Part 2

Among the many interesting but not earthshaking side effects of the Obama election is an overdue tempering of a kind of understood superiority that had taken over the Canadian view of their way of governing when compared to that of the US for the last decade. After all about ten years ago, US politics was completely dominated by a grotesquely overblown miserable little sex scandal of the old kind that ruined the final years of an otherwise apparently more than capable president, only to be followed by a most curious piece of vote counting that brought to power an obviously incapable president who was even re-elected. During the same period Canada was governed by a series of mediocre leaders who made everyone wish for just a touch of the intelligence, charm and cold determination of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. But when the same people looked south, it was clear that Ottawa was a centre of charisma and excellence when compared to whoever was sitting in the White House.

It may well turn out that Barack Obama will not be able to fulfill the great hopes that have inevitably been placed on him (probably nobody could), but he’s already done a great deal just by winning this election. Now the world can stop dumping on the Americans for not even being able to run their own fair elections while telling every one else to become democratic, and Canadian commentators can stop preaching to them about their lack of benevolence towards the downtrodden, while ignoring the often scandalous state of their own aboriginal communities. Because while the Americans, against all odds, voted for someone named Barack Obama to be their leader, a smaller percentage of eligible Canadian voters confirmed, in the most boring election in memory, the re-election of a prime minister whose name they could scarcely remember after his first term in office.