There are events that make your brain “explode.”
My colleague Alexandre Pratt sometimes uses this expression when he talks about sporting performances that are so out of the ordinary that we find them hard to believe.
Whether you’re following the race for the White House these days—closely or from afar—you probably understand the feeling.
Your brain may be on the verge of exploding too.
Mine too, by the way.
This is perfectly normal.
Joe Biden has just withdrawn his candidacy for the White House.
It’s a spectacular turnaround.
And here we are… less than four months from the election. This is unprecedented! In 1968, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson also announced late that he would not run again, but that was in late March. Not in the middle of July.
Oh, and there’s no indication yet that Kamala Harris will be crowned without anyone else challenging her among the Democrats! Even though she’s endorsed by Joe Biden, several party leaders have so far remained very quiet.
I write about American politics for The Press for nearly a quarter of a century – I was a Washington correspondent when George W. Bush was president. I have never seen anything like what is happening.
And I’m not just talking about the Democrats having to start over – we wipe the slate clean and start over, and God knows what the outcome will be.
No, what is happening is even more exceptional.
A week before Joe Biden withdrew, a young man armed with an AR-15 attempted to assassinate the Republican candidate for the White House. He came close. You have to go back to 1981, when Republican President Ronald Reagan was shot, to find an event equivalent to this tragedy in American history.
That’s not all.
Even before these dramatic twists and turns, we were not going to witness a normal presidential election.
With a vengeful Donald Trump, with uninhibited authoritarian tendencies, everything indicated that we were in the front row of a new battle for the soul of the United States.
With the future of democracy in the balance.
This, it must be said, has not changed.
Some on this side of the border think there is too much talk about the American presidential campaign.
An article from the Duty A few days ago, it pointed out that “American politics occupies a central, sometimes predominant, place in our media space.” It asked the question: “Are the Quebec media too Americanized?”
The question is not far-fetched, the coverage is indeed abundant.
My short answer: well, let’s see!
My long answer is in two parts.
First of all, have you experienced many election campaigns as breathtaking as the one currently taking place in the United States?
I mean, except in a movie or a TV series, where literally anything is possible and filmmakers like Tim Burton allow themselves to imagine aliens attacking the White House?
Not giving the current race a prominent place in our media would be the journalistic equivalent of ignoring the eruption of a volcano in an area that was hit by a historic earthquake the previous week!
Am I exaggerating? Not that much, I assure you.
Second, I will quote Pierre Elliott Trudeau who told Americans: “Being your neighbor is like sleeping with an elephant; however gentle and placid the beast may be, you are subjected to its every movement and grunt.”
Not only is this campaign dizzying, it takes place in an empire rocked by brutal turbulence, which often has major repercussions on this side of the border – and elsewhere in the world.
Was the calm of the last four years a precursor to a new storm of indefinite duration for Canada? Perhaps.
Not giving such a significant event a prominent place in our media would be the journalistic equivalent of showing no interest in climate change.
Am I exaggerating? No, no, not so much, I assure you.
The list of pressing questions to which no one, for the moment, has a satisfactory answer is long.
Will there be an open Democratic convention next month?
Will Kamala Harris become the party’s nominee for the November ballot?
If not Kamala Harris, who will be selected?
Will the Democrats succeed in choosing Donald Trump’s rival without tearing each other apart (I have in mind the year 1980, when Democratic President Jimmy Carter was challenged by Senator Ted Kennedy, that intra-party confrontation ended in animosity and was followed in November by a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan)?
Do Kamala Harris and the other Democratic contenders have a real chance of defeating Donald Trump?
And the cherry on the cake: if Donald Trump ever lost the election, would he admit defeat?
Of course we will have to follow this closely.
Getting the answers to these questions is essential to predicting what comes next.
Just as it is important to continue to be interested in the ideas defended by the Republican candidate and his new faithful companion, the national-populist senator JD Vance. As colleague Yves Boisvert rightly noted, “it is a completely new relationship between American power and the rest of the world that is emerging.”1.
Just as it will be necessary to evaluate the positions displayed by the person (or person?) who will succeed Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
What would a Harris presidency look like, for example? What would it mean for Canada and, more broadly, the world?
The least we can do, under the circumstances, is try to predict the direction in which the American elephant will go in the coming years.
1. Read Yves Boisvert’s column
What do you think? Join the dialogue