Recently, on the editorial pages of the New York Times, William Kristol argued that the biographies of candidates will play only an ancillary role in determining the next President of the United States this fall. [i] Reading his editorial, my thoughts turned to the central role that biography is currently playing in determining the Democratic nominee. Absent a meaningful divergence between the candidates on a substantive policy issue, the media (induced by the candidates themselves) has turned Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton into living symbols of the aspirations of a race and gender respectively. Voters, however, seeking to evaluate whether these candidates are truly capable of representing these communities, have turned to their autobiographies, hoping to find stories within that commune with their own tales of hardship.

“I believe in peacekeeping, not policing.” Those words, made famous by Molson Breweries, resonate with Canadians. For nearly half a century, they have informed our military policy, our smug sense of superiority to Americans and our unwavering belief in our international significance.

What do the daughter of a Grantham grocer, the daughter of a Prussian pastor, and the son of a Hungarian heir have in common? According to the received wisdom proffered by the Fourth Estate, potentially quite a bit. In the wake of the installation of Angela Merkel as the Chancellor of Germany, and the recent election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the Presidency in France, gallons of ink have been spilt on the subject of whether either of these conservatives possess the political skills and determination required to achieve Thatcheresque reform of their moribund economies. There is considerable optimism that the national economies critical to the continental European economy, boasting unemployment rates of 12.6% and 10.2% respectively, will shortly benefit from some revolutionary restructuring.

There are those in my gown town who believe that every political idea expressed in the Anglosphere originates in the United Kingdom. This belief draws indignation from the city’s colonial contingent, which champions the contributions of non-Britons from Rand to Kymlicka. However, we colonials are forced to admit that, particularly over the past thirty years, it has typically been in Britain where global shifts in political attitudes have first been fully expressed in political platforms.