OBAMAOBAMAOBAMA. Canadiana?

A little overkill on the media coverage today (or yesterday I suppose, for you normal sleeping folks).

There's this clip where a teenager is screaming because she touched the president. Like, literally screaming, as if this were a Backstreet Boys concert circa 1999. Incredible.

The fact that this guy has something like an 87 per cent approval rating amongst Canadians is even more interesting to me. What is it about this country that loves him so much? Is it his charisma, which we are so completely unused to seeing from politicians? Are we simply pining for a Trudeau redux? Is it the fact that Jay-Z and Beyonce had front row seats to his inauguration, and that's just how Canada rolls?

It's crazy. Granted, our own guys are about as endearing as sacks of potatoes wearing Sears suits. But still... wow. And why? Well... isn't it obvious? Because Obama reminds us of... us. And that makes us feel good about ourselves.

I guess it's important to understand in all this how different we, as a country, still really are from our lovely neighbors to the south. To truly understand how amazing it is that Obama was elected president, just take a gander at stories like this one, from the Times.

Can you even imagine this ever occurring anywhere in Canada? I don't care if you're in the most wheat-covered corner of Saskatchewan, or the middle of an Albertan oil patch. Nobody is going to shoot down a high school edition of Rent because of questionable content. It just isn't going to happen. I mean, parents might oppose, but a high school of Canadian students would never stand for that kind of censorship. The play would go on. Guaranteed.

I think we forget that, unlike Canada, where the general populous is so often a diverse-yet-heterogenous cultural tapestry that just suffixes our ethnicity's after the word 'Canadian', there are still a whole whack-load of people in the states who think George W. Bush was a great president, and that Iraq is still going to nuke us.

We like to think we're liberal up here, but often we don't understand just how far we've evolved as a country in so little relative time. Even compared to a lot of Europe, where smokes, sex and booze are as common as Tim Horton's coffee, our standard cultural deviation on things like social welfare, rehab, immigration, gender and racial equality... we're right there, arguably tops in the world.

So yes, I love Obama. But I would never want to have to live in a country that NEEDS Obama.

Canadians love Obama basically because he wants to turn the US into Canada. He's the embodiment or our intrinsic inferiority complex, and we think he's amazing. This is the same reason nerds love him. And minorities in general now that I think about it.

So yes. I like the dude.

But if anything, he's just a reminder of how much I like living in Canada.

Maybe if people expressed as much enthusiasm about our own country as we do about the one below us, instead of living our lives being self-deprecating, we wouldn't be so star struck by guys like Barack.