What Standards, These?

It's more than a little interesting, looking in from the outside, reading newspaper reports in our Canadian papers about the ongoing presidential nominations leading up to 2009's U.S. election. That's a very, an extremely long campaign the Democrats and the Republicans entertain as lead-ups to the final selection process. More than a little interesting, as well. Taxing and tedious to the principles, no doubt.

That religion appears to play so significant a role in the process is also interesting. In Canadian politics religion is not really an issue; while it may be in some measure, it's not out there front and centre. It's held to be a private matter and it is treated as such for the most part. Although Canadians are just as susceptible as Americans of making an issue of just about anything during election campaigns.

We're not above making potential or leading candidates very uncomfortable about their particular brand of religion when it's of a type that goes beyond a simple declaration of accepted faith, when it's of a fundamentalist variety, which has a tendency to make the electorate skittish. That's when our news hounds and our pundits and comedians resort to a nasty bit of taunting.

We've never but once had a woman candidate for Prime Minister. We did once, for a few short months, have a female prime minister through redundancy when a despised and discredited sitting prime minister stepped down, but she did not realize success through the democratic vote. Now here is a woman in the United States, trying out for the top job. Geraldine Ferraro, after all, only ran for vice-president.

Hillary Clinton has some outstanding qualifications for the job, not the least of which is her determination. Added to her experience as "wife of", a hands-on wife-of, at that. And, of course, her years in the Senate. She has a social conscience, and amply demonstrated that through her attempts during her husband's first mandate, to bring the U.S. into a badly needed universal health care system.

It's understood she has her detractors, those who resent her "pushiness", her obvious desire to succeed. She is criticized as being politically robotic, too determined, lacking warmth and humanity. Now how ridiculous is that, that an accomplished, highly intelligent, capable and experienced politician has been pushed by public opinion to demonstrate credentials as a good and decent human being?

Shouldn't her record speak for itself? If she wasn't a fighter, a highly motivated individual she would never have committed herself to attempt to achieve high office. Does the fact she is a woman make her potentially less capable than a man might be in that office? Other women elsewhere in the world have more than sufficiently demonstrated their capability; from Israel, to Pakistan, Ireland to Ukraine, Philippines to England and Spain, to name a few.

Yet she has to trot out personal friends to provide media testimonials regarding her capacity for human warmth, her credentials as a caring, responsive human being. If she's seen as cute and cuddly will that help her or harm her? The answer to that is fairly obvious. If she is a personally private individual in the public sphere she is not alone in so being, and it is to her credit that she is capable of performing as she does.

Charisma offers no guarantees of respectable performance as a prime administrator and legislator. Integrity, intelligence and courage do, and she has amply demonstrated those qualities.

Not that Barak Obama isn't an attractive candidate.