Calgary-bound

Got to Vancouver’s airport at 5:30 for a flight to Calgary and more interviews. Folks were gathered around TVs, quiet, watching Sandy coverage, shaking their heads. Reminded me of walking through LAX the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing: travelers watching TVs, utterly silent.

At the speech at Cap College last night, we took a moment to send a prayer or good wishes in the direction of the East Coast. Afterwards, quite a few of those in attendance asked me what I thought Sandy’s impact would be on the US election campaign.

“Romney will now effectively disappear, he’s irrelevant,” I said. “But Obama has been given a chance to show us that calm, reassuring guy we first met in 2008, and we haven’t seen much of since. Sandy could help him win an election that, for a few days, he has been losing.”


In today’s Sun: women rule

VANCOUVER — The conclusion to the interminable U.S. election campaign is within sight. After a myriad number of primaries and debates — and after the expenditure of in excess of a billion dollars in political ads — we will all soon be blessed with an outcome, and a relative return to sanity.

Up here, at least. Up in the Great White North, we’re pretty lucky.

For, if the U.S. election cycle has shown us anything, it is that our politics is strikingly different, and better. Take gender politics, for instance.
In the U.S., several conservative politicians have made statements about women, and women’s issues, that are impossible to imagine happening in Canada.

There has been a Republican who mused out loud about how some rapes are “legitimate.” There was another GOP stalwart who stated that pregnancies that result from rape are God’s “intention.”

And there have been several pronouncements about birth control, too. Some Republicans want to ban birth control, because they think it is contrary to God’s will.

To a Canadian observing U.S. politics, all of this is beyond crazy. While we have had our fair share of nutbars, it is hard to imagine many of them ever proclaiming rape as divinely ordained, or working to render birth control pills a controlled substance.


Campaign Yoda

There is no campaign try.

There is only campaign do.

Arrived in Van last night, and talked politics late into the night with Bjorn and Babs. They gave me Yoda, who I plan to bring with me to Cap College tonight.

I said to them a book tour seemed kind of trivial, what with Sandy battering one coast, and earth quakes battering this coast. But I figure it might be interesting to discuss, at various media outlets in Van and Calgary, how various politicians are handling this Act of God.

Of such things, Yoda might say, are Presidents made.

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