You better watch out, you better not cry

You better not pout; I'm telling you why
The President is coming to town

Tomorrow, Barack Obama makes his first foreign visit as President of the United States - and he's following a loose tradition by making that visit to Canada.

However, this will not be his first major international test. For last night, the Superman of American politics had to survive a ten-minute interview with Peter Mansbridge.

The interview was surprisingly good. Like most Canadian politicians, Obama did whatever possible to avoid giving specific answers or do anything that didn't seem like a positive for Canada. Unlike most Canadian politicians, Obama actually answered the questions that were asked (the only time I noticed him not doing this was the first question on Afghanistan, and Mansbridge caught that one too).

At the end of the interview, Obama claims that he will eventually get to a hockey game. This worries me - Harper's from Toronto by way of Calgary, and residing in Ottawa. Ignatieff - who will be PM before long - is the same thing minus the Calgary. Nobody can resist becoming a hockey fan if their first game is in Montreal. The odds seem slim, so it'll take a grassroots effort. Habs fans, heed this call!

But back to tomorrow (paradoxical as that may be).

Live coverage on the major Canadian news networks begins at 10 AM, even though Obama's arrival is assumed to be somewhere around 11:30. I was originally planning on watching (and liveblogging) all the coverage, but this is now impractical for various reasons.

Not the least of those reasons is that we really won't see too much. The Prime Minister's Office has been doing whatever they can to scuttle media availability - as far as I understand it, a press conference might be the only glimpse we get of the President.

The visit is only five hours long - Obama gets off his plane and meets the Governor-General, Obama and Harper meet with their respective staffs present, a working lunch, Obama and Harper meet without their respective staffs present, the press conference, Obama and Michael Ignatieff meet at the airport, jilted lover Jack Layton mopes at home.

In some respects, this is a good thing. The press will try to make a lot of the relationship between the two leaders - Chretien and Bush weren't as friendly as, say, Reagan and Mulroney, who probably had a little too much to drink before deciding to sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.

I mean, could you imagine the Harperbot, fueled with alcohol and set to "Obama love-in"? "I want to kiss you. I couldn't care less about the economy strugg-a-ling."

I wouldn't expect much substantive work to be done at this meeting. The biggest question on my mind is if CNN knows more about our country now than they did when the Air France plane slid off the runway a few years ago, and one of Wolf Blitzer's questions was "is Toronto a safe place to land?".

Either way, it's Obama in Ottawa. Obamawa, if you will.

--Ryan