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A big speech about small things

It's just after eight o'clock in Des Moines, Iowa, the night before the U.S. presidential election. The New York Times' Nate Silver says there is an 86 per cent chance Barack Obama is going to win a second term in the White House.

It's just after eight o'clock in Des Moines, Iowa, the night before the U.S. presidential election.

The New York Times' Nate Silver says there is an 86 per cent chance Barack Obama is going to win a second term in the White House.

He's a lonely guy and he's being pummeled like a Bill Clinton pinata by right-wing pundits who insist Republican challenger Mitt Romney is going to pummel the Unemployment President.

Much of America, heck, much of the world - including folks in Canada and Prince George - are worried about the same thing, chewing their knuckles like Canuck fans wondering how the Democrats managed to get it so screwed up again.

It shouldn't matter - Canada, despite wishful thinking by those on the left and right, holds exactly zero votes in the electoral college system that elects the president of the United States.

But it does. The next day, in Ottawa, in the House of Commons, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews lambasted NDP leader Thomas Mulcair for not caring enough for the victims of crime because Mulcair had the temerity to ask the government why a teenaged girl named Ashley Smith was duct-taped and drugged to the point of suicide while in a federal prison.

Toews' guttural, wrongheaded, penny-ante partisan attack says all that needs to be said about the state of this country's politics and a Conservative government that marinates in cynicism, viciousness and ignorance.

They peddle the same brand of Tea Party, Goldwater trickle-down holy-than-thou pap Romney did; Canadians are forced to swallow it and that Monday many crossed their fingers Americans wouldn't opt again to do the same.

We know what happened today. And it's nice to be able to paraphrase Republican senate candidate Todd Akin and say to Romney and his smiling flinty-eyed friend Paul Ryan: if it's a legitimate defeat, the Republican Party has ways to try and shut the whole thing down.

And to their ilk who make faith perform in the public square like a costumed monkey to a hurdy gurdy, perhaps they can take comfort in the words of another GOP stalwart, Richard

E. Mourdock, and say an Obama victory is "something that God intended to

happen."

But in Des Moines it was like the night before the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali and Foreman in Zaire. Ali can say he's wrestled all the alligators he wants, but Foreman looks tougher, fresher, more fierce while the champ comes off as weak, soft and spent. How many punches does the president have left?

Obama Springsteens to the stage to make the final campaign speech of his presidential career, but it starts off literally all over the place, in the granite of New Hampshire, somewhere in Virginia, stumbling in a valley in Ohio.

He's off on one of the lyrical flights of fancy that so thrilled when he started in the same town, on the same street in Iowa in 2007 when he took on Hillary Clinton to eventually win the Democratic nomination. But the rhetorical flourish comes off as a little hokey, a lot off, like a hooking Tiger Woods' drive.

But he went on to deliver probably the second greatest political speech I've ever heard (I was two at the time but the first is hearing later in life Pierre Elliot Trudeau thundering "They want to break it down? NO. That's what I am answering."

Whether your last name is Clarke or Levesque, I dare you to hear it and not feel a chill).

He fought tears a couple of times, remembering teachers and nurses

coming in after work to volunteer at his first campaign headquarters in Des Moines or when he wrapped up a long anecdote of how volunteer Edith Child fired him up five years ago in South Carolina and how she couldn't be there that night because she was taking a crew of volunteers into North Carolina to

doorknock for the president.

He talked about building sturdy ladders to bring people into the middle class, how Osama bin Laden was dead and how people needed a champion because the rich and influential "always have a seat at the table."

He lamented at how the future never has as many lobbyists as the status quo and that he wasn't going to turn Medicare into a voucher program just to pay for another millionaire's tax cut.

He said compromising to the backroom blackmail deals of Congressional Republicans wasn't bipartisanship, wasn't change, but surrender.

"What the protectors of the status quo in Washington are counting on now is that you'll get worn down by all the squabbling, you'll get fed up with the dysfunction, you'll give up on the change we fought for, you'll walk away and leave them to make decisions that affect every American," said Obama that night.

"In other words, their bet is on

cynicism."

There were a lot of people who would have taken that bet on Monday.

But somehow enough Americans saw through Romney's pseudonomics, the Tea Party's attempt to True the Vote, and Karl Rove-style waterboard

campaigning to re-elect Barack Obama.

This U.S. election was Hobbesian in all but size - nasty, brutish and long.

But the president summed it up with one last big speech about small things, about how progress and change comes painfully, in dribs and drabs, house-by-house, phone call-by-phone call, from an idea, to a march to a campaign to a presidency.

And God bless America for that.