To the Big Picture, Does the White House Matter?

A substantial majority of Canadians want to see Barack Obama re-elected.  Why?

To be sure, the Republican offerings of late have been unpopular here and pretty much around the world, Israel perhaps excepted.  It could be that Ike was last truly popular conservative president of the United States on the world stage.

Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II - slim pickings at best.  Anyone believe that gang left the world a better place than they found it?  (Hint - if you do, seek help)

The other team put forward Kennedy, Johnson (don't undervalue his civil rights achievements), Carter, Clinton and Obama.  Of course they struck out often enough but, remember, you're comparing them against Team Republican.   Enough said.

The comparison plainly justifies Canadians' preference for Obama over the slash and burn Republican contender but does it really matter?  To my mind, that's a clear "no."

Why doesn't it matter?   Because we're using the wrong metrics, that's why.   We measure one side against the other and that's like choosing one dwarf over another in Olympic high-jumping.   You have to look at the bar first.   Only once you see what they have to clear can you get a real measure of the contenders.

It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.   It's not just what's going on in Washington.  It's a global problem.  It's a Canadian problem.

In the six decades of the post-war period, politics has atrophied and become the preserve of "baby step" technocrats.   They're tweakers at best.   They tinker with tax rates and trade arrangements and they sometimes launch small (or even large) indecisive wars that everyone quickly enough tries to forget.   They're stuck in economic, social and geopolitical models that often pre-date manned flight and are of increasingly marginal utility in a world of 7+ billion human beings en route to 9+ billion.

Liberals used to contend this this sort of technocratic backwardness was an affliction of Conservatives.   Liberals still like to think of themselves as progressives.   They're not.   Don't get smug, Dippers.  You're in the same boat.   You're not progressive if you still believe in a future of economic growth.   You're not progressive if you believe in a petro-economy.   You're not progressive, you're something else.   You're obsolete.

Progressives don't fixate on the dwarfs.   They study the bar and try to figure just how they might possibly clear it.   They know what's at stake if we don't clear that bar and they know that only progressivism can do it.

The bar has never been higher.  It has risen and risen and risen steadily over the past several decades but we didn't notice because, well before then, we stopped bothering to try to jump over it.  We were too busy tinkering, tweaking, and taking the measure of our equally diminutive rivals.   We adopted the baby step as our mode of conveyance.

The bar today represents all the challenges our civilization faces that will determine how mankind and how many of us get through this century.   The Big Three - global warming, overpopulation and the freshwater crisis - have to be met and mastered as best we can.  The dwarfs no longer get to set the agenda for us.   Their agenda can no longer be ours because it remains immersed in 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics.

Which brings us back to Obama versus Romney, the contest to determine who will be the mightiest dwarf on Earth.   In these presidential elections we delude ourselves that one of the candidates will soon chart a new course for his country, for the world.  It's a preposterous chimera, something last seen, albeit imperfectly, in the 40's.  Democracy has yielded to corporatism and oligarchy.   Of the vaunted three branches of government, at any given time, each seems mainly preoccupied with fettering rather than balancing the other two.

Does it matter whether we have a dysfunctional president Obama or a dysfunctional president Romney beset by an even more dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress and a shamelessly corporatist Supreme Court?   It is a plateau fit solely for dwarfs that will never clear the bar.

The challenges of the 21st century will not be met by political progression because the dwarf beast cannot evolve nearly fast enough for that.  The very nature of these challenges - rapidly growing in size and power, intractable, destructive - defies solution by our outmoded institutions locked in the past.

The last twenty years, the last ten in particular, have revealed that change in this 21st century will not be had from baby-steppers no longer capable of clearing the bar.   If there is any sign of life coming from today's political class it is the sound of shoveling as they dig in to try to preserve their privileged past. 

Soon enough today's youth and the generation that follows them will realize the party apparatus of Republicans and Democrats; Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats; is tightly integrated in a broken machine that itself has to be swept aside if they're to stand much chance.   And so they will. 

We give them no other choice.  We continue to advance an agenda tailored for dwarfs even as events rapidly overtake us.   Our agenda is to preserve our comforts from the past.   Their agenda, the one we quite wilfully ignore, is to survive into an increasingly unpredictable future.   You cannot reconcile the two.