Border patrol

I haven't posted anything about Barack Obama's electoral victory last week yet. Although the real reason might be something closer to laziness, I'm going to say it's because there was an oversaturation of Obama-praise throughout the blogosphere and the rest of the media, and I wanted to offer something else. Sound good?

Something's been grating on my nerves quite a bit since last Tuesday. In the buildup to the election, the storyline was that an Obama win would prove that race no longer matters in the US. Since the election, I've seen story after article after roundtable discussion about the future of race relations in the America, what Obama's victory might signify, how history will remember this election...

...but all of that has been in the international media - BBC, CBC, TVO and the like. On CNN, in other major American outlets, the talk's been on policy, on the economic crisis, on the usual irrelevant celebrity news. Looks to me like America's gotten over their race problem just fine, it's the rest of the West that's still fixated on it.

Meanwhile, Canadian left-wingers have their own stories to follow, as the Liberal leadership race is heating up. Sort of. The big story over the weekend was that the methodology for picking the next leader has been determined. Now, I've recently become a fairly-serious political junkie, but even I find this "story" ridiculously dry.

A few weeks ago, I heard CTV-reporter-turned-filmmaker-and-occasional-Laurier-professor Rick Gamble talk about how the news media gets most of its stories through press releases, and how he once joked to his assignment editor that "if some kid opened up a lemonade stand and put out a press release, you'd have me cover it" (which did actually happen a couple of years later).

I think the same thing's going on here - the people who decide what the news is going to be see a Liberal Party press release, and think "Canada's natural governing party? Leadership? We're there!" - giving no thought to the idea that the few people who actually care about this news care enough to search it out on their own.

As for who the next Liberal leader will be, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae still look like the front-runners. That's not necessarily as bad as some people are making it out to be when they complain that we need an Obama of our own. In fact, each of the last four times there was a Democrat elected in Washington while we had a Conservative PM, our next election was a Liberal victory (King, Pearson, Trudeau, Chretien).

What the Liberals need now is somebody who's a good speaker, able to win over more centrist Canadians, and move the party slightly to the right. Michael Ignatieff would probably fit this bill best, even if he's not the most exciting personality, and then he can hand off to Kennedy or Trudeau or LeBlanc or whomever to take the party in an exciting new direction.

Or at least, that's how I see it.

--Ryan