Canada and Other Matters of Opinion by Rex Murphy

teeth, muscle and cunning of Clinton Inc.
    He should be person of the year—of the decade—just for that. But it might also be useful to hold in mind, while the hymns to The One as he approaches Inauguration Day increase in volume and fervour, that that’s all he’s done. His Senate record is an empty suitcase. His national achievement is—outside the nomination—precisely nil. Sarah Palin’s resumé is, objectively, much more substantial.
    Hillary was right when she jibed that Mr. Obama was just one speech—the address he gave to the Democratic convention that loosed John Kerry on the American electorate. Off the platform, he’s a great “um-er” and “ah-er” who stumbles with a sentence in a manner that hails to mind the image of George W. Bush on one of the latter’s many desperate safaris to link a cowering subject to its about-to-be mauled predicate.
    If Mr. Obama were a standard politician, the empty resumé would have done him in. But this is precisely the point about Mr. Obama, that he has blasted free of thatcategory. Recall that string of losses he endured toward the end of the eternal primary campaign. Hillary was beating him state after state after state. And, yet, it hardly seemed to matter. Any other politician would have worn that serial trouncing like a wound. Mr. Obama walked on stage after each successive loss as though he’d just woken up from a comforting nap. The composure he sometimes displays, as many have noted, is almost unearthly: he possesses a centred confidence so strong that it almost deflects reality.
    The Obama persona confounds politics as we have known it for at least a generation. His person summons the wish that politics be better. There was not a little intuitive genius in founding his campaign on the most frequently abused concept in politics: hope. That there is a profound desire for improvement in the conduct of public life in America is too obvious to need statement. (The same is true in our country. Oh Lord, how true.)
    On some days, U.S. politics appears to be a frightful compound of graft, mismanagement, incompetence, cronyism, sexual misconduct, mediocrity, avarice and feral partisanship. The people who love America fear for her, not from apprehension over her enemies, but from despair over her putative leaders.
    Barack Obama, by some gift of personality, sent out a flash of inspiration that called the exiled strain of idealism back into U.S. politics. It was not so much that he made politics exciting as that he gave some warrant for the thought it could be worthy.
    He is not Lincoln. He is not, despite
Time
’s saccharine innuendo, better than the guy from the manger. But he’s the one who’s given the process of politics a second chance in our time. Person of the year. Easily.
BARACKWATCH | January 3, 2009
    “It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France … and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.”
    That’s Edmund Burke reflecting on the fate of Marie Antoinette. He was, as we should say today, a fan. “I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.”
    The prose has a touch of that Chris Matthews “thrill up my leg” quality, although of course infinitely more refined than anything produced to date, either above or below, the host of
Hardball
’s knee: “I thought 10,000 swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone …”
    Prophetic Burke. He was right about the age of chivalry. But the age of powdered encomium, what we would call the “puff piece,” is still very much with us.
    Celebrity reportage, witlessness in full genuflection to tackiness, has exploded the meanings of flattery andself-abasement. Entertainment reporters, as they deliriously regard