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election international view
President Obama's re-election is crucial because it removes the opportunity for cynics, those who refused to believe in the promise behind his election in 2008, from being able to say "I told you so."
Mitt Romney was never going to be a candidate for Mount Rushmore, but barely 40 years after he warned of it, America has become, in Richard Nixon's eerie phrase, "a pitiful, helpless, giant." It is almost irrelevant to the world, except as an engine of fiscal incontinence.
In the three U.S. presidential candidates' debates, and in one vice presidential candidates' debate, Canada came up frequently. But in the final debate of this election season -- the one devoted nominally to foreign policy -- Canada did not come up at all. Is this cause for alarm or indignation? No.
Obama has somehow managed to come across as a socialist during this election -- a man who believes in subsidizing insurance companies, who is consistently violating international and domestic law by killing people via drones, and only recently came to the epiphany that all people should be free to choose the person they marry.More alarmingly, however, is the ease in which the Conservative base in Canada has managed to sympathize with Romney. This of course brings a very important debate to the forefront: is the Harper government much further to the right than they would like to let on? After all, it seems rather odd that Canadian Conservatives could find anything in common with the current Republican Party of today.
