Personally I'd put Brie on my mooseburger and alienate all key sectors of the U.S. electorate at once. For good measure I'd discuss U.S. politics right after a Canadian election call and annoy my countrypersons as well. But at least I'd know it. Contrast me with the hordes of commentators appalled that Sarah Palin can "field-dress" a moose without being sure what that procedure involves. Vegans can make principled objections. But when people who eat meat flinch at someone able to obtain it, you are up against snobbery rather than analysis. And if you can't understand why I like Sarah Palin, I don't much care why you think I shouldn't.

Perhaps my disdain for Canadian politics is a form of reverse snobbery. But I'd far rather deal with the entrails of a moose than with the political kind in this country. I mean, the other day I got an e-mail from the NDP saying, "For too long, Stephen Harper has listened to those sitting around the boardroom tables, not the kitchen tables." Phooey.

It's not that I don't believe the charge. It's that I don't believe NDPers believe it. It has plausibly been suggested that Stephen Harper only listens to himself. Or that such advice as he does take comes from careful polling of those at kitchen tables, to the virtual exclusion of principled conservatives. But does anyone believe Jack Layton believes Mr. Harper takes campaign and policy advice from captains of corporate Canada? And while I don't really mind Mr. Layton being wrong, it bothers me that he's being ridiculous without knowing it.

Likewise, Stéphane Dion just denounced "Stephen Harper's laissez-faire, I don't care approach" and repeated for good measure, "This is the Canada he wants to build, laissez-faire, I don't care." Oooh, that's hip, a rhyming slogan. Hit it, boys. Regrettably it's such absolute babble that, again, one cannot believe he believes it. This Tory government inherited spending of $209 billion a year, aimed to get it to $240 billion within three years and, as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation just noted, is way ahead of that extravagant target so far this year. This batch of Tories wouldn't know laissez-faire if the collected works of Adam Smith fell on their heads. Stéphane Dion is too smart not to know it, but too dumb to see how silly he looks saying it anyway.

As for the Tories having a computer-animated bird poop on Mr. Dion, it shows the dangers of giving youthful political zealots leeway -- and, again, of operating in a closed environment where you basically only talk to people who share not just your beliefs, but also your ethos.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin and her moosburgers. When John McCain picked her, the cognoscenti -- from journalists to journalists to journalists -- condemned it as a disastrous choice because, fundamentally, it was a vulgar one. Smart, determined, caring mother with successful career, mean shot with a rifle, won the high school basketball championship on a broken foot. What, exactly, is it about that resumé that so many supposed feminists find disgusting?

It seems to be that she's somehow tacky. Not "one of us." Worse yet, she's one of them. That great vulgar horde of self-reliant, resilient, practical Americans. You know. Hillbillies. Yuck.

To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., North American elites are forever yammering about other cultures, but generally seem surprised to find that there are any. And disgusted.

Lack of self-awareness is a tragic failing. Including that Canadian politics is far more sociologically exclusive than American, in everything from skin colour to family size. (Their four major candidates had seven, five, four and two kids; ours one, two, two and two.) Yet Canada was settled by people with a large dollop of frontier spirit of their own: anglos, francophones, allophones, aboriginals, practically any group you can name, with a formidable capacity to survive on their own, to endure hardship, do disgusting tasks, shoot to kill in this nation's wars and down on the farm and raise big families. So where's our Sarah Palin, instead of four guys you wouldn't want helping you change a tire? Even Mr. Dion's snowshoeing ads have "environmentally correct yuppie hobby" rather than "check the trapline" written all over them.

I say if you're going to be a snob you should at least know it, especially if you're a journalist or a politician. Remember John Kerry's major 2004 campaign gaffe when he asked for Swiss cheese on his Philly cheese steak? I'd prefer it myself; the classic fast-food Philly is actually disgusting. But if I were posing as a common man I'd at least understand why I'd better make a joke of putting Brie on my mooseburger.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

At the risk of stirring controversy I'd like to declare that Barack Obama would probably make an OK president. To his supporters this will sound outrageously tepid. Whereas many conservatives are passionately convinced the rookie Senator from Illinois is absolutely the worst imaginable candidate for the Oval Office since, um, the last guy the Democrats nominated. In this respect, at least, hard-core Republican and Democratic sympathizers are quite similar: Compare what the latter now say about John McCain with the way they used to praise his independence from George W. Bush, and ask yourself whether they, too, don't need either a reality check or an honesty transfusion.

The test I apply within my own social circles, such as they are, is to ask which Democratic nominee for president in the last 60 years they do not consider conspicuously unfit for that office. Not just potentially ineffective, lacking experience and/or liable to espouse bad polices, but offensively unsuited to it. I realize conservatives are likely not to support liberal candidates regardless of their personal qualities (and vice versa). But in a democracy, if your hair rises in panic at every nominee from the other party it is your judgment that is called into question, not theirs.

I apply my 60-year test to Republicans because I want to be sure my net is large enough to catch Harry Truman. He had his failings, but his temperament was well suited to the difficult job of U.S. president, and particularly in foreign affairs he is now vindicated as thoroughly as he was pilloried at the time. The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson opined on Tuesday, expressly respecting George W. Bush, that "Almost every North American politician who leaves office unpopular hopes for a Truman. Alas for them, Mr. Truman's rehabilitation was unique." Oh really? What about Ronald Reagan? Or Richard Nixon? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Shall I go on naming Republicans or is the point clear?

I know it's hard to rally the troops with a dramatic cry that while your own candidate is uninspiring the other guy is liable, on balance, to be marginally worse. But even active partisans should try to remember which of their utterances are deliberate exaggerations or outright lies. Those who merely follow politics with passion have no excuse for plunging into the bile so enthusiastically as to splash it about. I don't expect Democrats to prefer Republican candidates or vice versa but I do expect them to keep a little perspective.

A number of essentially mediocre Democratic candidates in the past half-century might have made a dangerous mess of Soviet-American relations. But that doesn't make Walter Mondale a leftist menace like Al Gore, or a cad like Bill Clinton. Democrats should be ashamed of the enthusiastic welcome they gave Mr. Clinton at their convention 10 years after he was impeached; Richard Nixon was not even at the 1984 RNC a decade after resigning. But honestly, would conservatives, or Americans, be worse off today if Michael Dukakis had defeated George Bush Sr. in 1992? And if Sarah Palin were a Democrat, would the Globe editorially demand her resignation from the ticket and peddle rumours of a "shotgun" wedding for her pregnant daughter?

Some of my Republican friends tell me Sen. Obama is bitter, radical and dangerous. I don't believe it. Yes, he inhaled some noxious vapours from the left-wing fringe of black American politics but I don't think they poisoned him. Indeed the one extravagant expectation of his supporters that I think he could meet is to help heal America's deep and ancient racial wounds, simply by raising his right hand and repeating the oath of office.

I grant that on foreign policy he seems to vacillate rhetorically between appeasement and belligerence and if he were to do so in office we'd all regret it. But honestly, what true Republican liked John McCain before the campaign started? And if the Democrats are going to win, would you rather it be with Hillary Clinton? Or Al Gore? They can't all be worse than one another. Membership in the Democratic Party may indicate poor judgment, but unless you're willing openly to call it proof of imbecility, depravity or both you can't treat every nominee as confirmation of that claim. And by the way, if liberals would extend the same courtesy to conservatives, in Canada as well, it might not harm political discourse there or here.

In the end, I tell my conservative friends that, if elected, Barack Obama will either do a decent job, which would be good, or be a comically catastrophic bust like Jimmy Carter and push the country back to the right, which would also be good. So we have nothing to lose but our sense of proportion.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Barack Obama has done the right thing in the right way by dumping America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright. True, he did it at the wrong time, but in politics you take what you can get. When I read about Rev. Wright's self-immolating performance at Washington's National Press Club on Monday, my immediate reaction was that, whatever else might be said about this man, his theology is fatally flawed because he peddles hate. And Barack Obama singled out precisely that failing the next day. He didn't just call himself "outraged" and "saddened." He described Rev. Wright's comments as "giving comfort to those who prey on hate."

Exactly right. But years, even decades too late. So what is left of Barack Obama's political appeal as a healer, especially of racial divisions? (Which, parenthetically, he'd better be after his outburst of snobbery about God, gays and guns left him an extremely dubious healer of cultural ones.) Here I would caution against the unreasonable expectations habitually raised in politics by partisans, commentators and candidates including Mr. Obama himself.

When people said he could heal racial divisions, were they expecting a miraculous laying on of hands and an instant, complete national cure? For some of his more star-struck supporters the answer seems to have been yes. But it was, and is, fatuous to think anyone could heal America's racial divisions with a couple of soaring speeches and an inspiring book. On such a serious problem we should have reasonable expectations.

Indeed, Rev. Wright is correct on one key point: The depth of bitterness among black Americans about historical injustices and their lingering effects is extremely deep. But he is dangerously wrong on another key point, namely that it is the appropriate role of leaders in the black community to foster and nurture that bitterness. It does no good to anyone, least of all his congregation.

If there's a worse sin for a pastor than peddling hate, it's peddling despair. So let me cite another black preacher in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "We must not," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958, "let the fact that we are the victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives." It would be weird and tone-deaf to ignore the ongoing impact of that ghastly injustice. But to tell black Americans in 2008 they are still the victims of a giant conspiracy, where the CIA unleashes AIDS on them in a country run by the KKK, is to encourage lethal feelings of helplessness.

Rev. Wright is stepping down anyway and one hopes we've pretty much heard the last of him. But the larger issue will not go away nearly so easily. What is most troubling and important about the Obama/Wright affair is that for decades the politician heard this kind of thing from the pastor and, as far as we know, didn't find it odd.

Possibly Sen. Obama sat stone-faced through the weirder bits; possibly he rolled his eyes; possibly he objected; possibly he nodded politely; possibly he nodded enthusiastically. We cannot now tell. Anything anyone suddenly "recalls" about any man who is odds-on favourite to win not just a major party nomination but the presidency of the United States must be treated with profound skepticism. But we can be sure he heard the weirder bits. Just weeks ago Sen. Obama said Rev. Wright was "like family" and the reverend is not a man shy about his opinions.

So we also know, unfortunately, that whatever reaction Sen. Obama had to what he now calls "appalling" and "ridiculous," he didn't find it walk-out-of-the-room outrageous. He may have found it plausible or implausible, true or false, right or wrong, but he didn't think it lunatic-fringe rubbish. And in this he was far from alone. Millions of black Americans routinely listen to this kind of thing from professors, activists, even spiritual leaders, and while some may disagree, far too few find it nutty. Indeed, one measure of the depth of the two American solitudes is that Rev. Wright seems to have had no idea what impact his National Press Club performance would have on his own credibility.

It is against this backdrop that one must judge Barack Obama's conduct now and in the future. Of course his sudden emergency deep-sixing of Rev. Wright was both long overdue and transparently political. But remember: He is a politician. So remember also Henry Kissinger's memorable assessment of his colleague Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's defence secretary, as "a devious man but, when cornered, a patriot."

Right now Sen. Obama is looking like a devious man but, when cornered, a healer. I'll take it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Start practising the phrase “President Barack Obama.” It’s not so bad. Except as in “President Barack Obama denied today that his naive and spineless foreign policy has encouraged terrorism.” It’s annoying when pundits intone that it’s come down to Obama v McCain as they easily could have predicted. But I did predict it, on CFRA radio in December. Possibly I hedged my bets, but I said both parties would take their least unattractive option, and both have. Republicans don’t nominate pro-abortion candidates, which only left the Mormon, the creationist, the asleep guy and the obnoxious hyperactive maverick whom they chose. Meanwhile the Democrats are rationally opting for inexperienced over horrible.

Trust me, folks. It’s over. The collapse of Hillary Rodham Clinton has surprised many people including her. But if revenge is a dish best served cold, I’m having ice cream here. Democrats who applauded Bill Clinton’s filthy tactics against Republicans were repulsed when he turned them on his own party in South Carolina, and she’s lost nine straight primaries since. Yum yum.

I certainly worry that Senator Clinton is way further left than she admits, on foreign and domestic policy. But my primary concern is character. Whatever the Clintons were caught doing, however sordid, they always dismissed with “We’ve moved on” or words to that effect. It won’t do. The human mind, like the life of a nation, organizes itself around stories or sinks into chaos. The fundamental truth of our mortal existence, bounded by time, is that it hinges on choices and consequences. Persistently to excuse villainy, even as you pocket the benefits, just because “that was then” is to deny any possibility of moral coherence. That Ms. Clinton should belatedly sit down to a banquet of devastating consequences is delicious irony.

For some of my friends the taste is spoiled by fears that Barack Obama is a far-left babe in the foreign policy woods. He may be. Almost no Democratic presidential candidate since Harry Truman has been fit to serve as commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful free nation. But it is intellectual partisanship to declare any Democrat ipso facto unworthy of office (or any Republican, I remind colleagues on both sides of the border). Besides, many conservatives are too concerned with how the Republicans might win in November and not enough about why we want them to.

I do not consider George W. Bush a total disaster. Journalists and academics tend to describe any incumbent Republican as among the worst presidents ever, from Reagan to Coolidge and beyond. Even Lincoln got some horrible press in his day. Later, commentators tend to give them some credit if only to draw invidious comparisons with their successors, and I suspect this president’s foreign policy will be praised in retrospect, like Truman’s, for its resolve and clarity on basic issues. But not his domestic policy. In early 2000 I asked then-candidate George Bush if there was any area from which government should simply withdraw. In response, I wrote in an April 21, 2000 Citizen column, “he stared at me as though he’d never heard such an idea before, pressed his hand to his temple in perplexity and eventually stammered that he’d have to get back to me. (He didn’t.)” Still hasn’t. And as there’s no reason to suppose John McCain would be better domestically, surely we could live with Barack Obama as an alternative.

Especially since he seems to be an honest, decent man. Oh, and he’s um uh you know ... black. And while I don’t care what colour you are, race can have political consequences and does here. If Barack Obama’s skin tone helped undermine Hillary Clinton’s gender-based appeal to Democrats, well, those who live by identity politics cannot complain if they perish by it. But a black U.S. president would draw positive attention abroad to the marvellous openness of American society. Even more important, his political success with all sorts of voters, as a candidate who is black rather than a “black candidate,” not only symbolizes but actively contributes to healing America’s ancient racial wounds. You could do a lot worse in a Democrat. So why not send the GOP to the minors for a bit?

The answer may hinge on whether you’d elect a president who can’t comb his own hair. John McCain can’t, because he was so brutally tortured by communists as a POW in Vietnam. When Barack Obama debates such a man on national security, a couple of careless cheap shots or conspicuously daffy policy statements would lose him an election that is, at this point, his to lose.

So say after me “President Barack Obama.” And while you’re at it, practice “Carteresque.”

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]