Here's a look-ahead I wrote for CTV.ca on the Alberta provincial election, which goes down tomorrow.

From Maureen Dowd's column in the NYT:

Hillary and her aides urged reporters to learn from the “Saturday Night Live” skit about journalists having crushes on Obama.

“Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow,” she said tartly in the debate here Tuesday night. She peevishly and pointlessly complained about getting the first question too often, implying that the moderators of MSNBC -- a channel her campaign has complained has been sexist -- are giving Obama an easy ride.

Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do. It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender.

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Here's a feature I wrote for CTV.ca wrapping up Super Tuesday in the U.S. primaries and trying to look forward.

Update

I reworked the feature on Thursday to reflect the fact that Mitt Romney dropped out.

Today marks Sir John A. Macdonald Day, the possible birthday of our country's first prime minister, born in Glasgow, Scotland on Jan. 10 or 11, 1815.

I admire him in part because of the famous incident in which he was drunk at a political event and vomited.

He didn't slink off the stage or otherwise descend into absolute mortification. He didn't abjectly apologize. Instead, he said, "And that's what I think of my opponent's ideas!"

There are other versions of the story, but that's the myth I prefer.

In a 1989 appearance on CBC's Front Page Challenge, his great-grandson Hugh Gainsford said, "If that's all they can remember him for (drinking), he's better forgotten."

Panelist and legendary popularizer of Canadian history Pierre Berton said: "I kind of like the idea that the father of our Confederation wasn't the guy who couldn't tell a lie; he was a guy who liked to drink."

According to CBC Archives, historian Michael Bliss has written that Macdonald did enjoy long periods of sobriety and hard work.

Ever the wit, Macdonald, a Liberal-Conservative (Conservative in today's lingo), reportedly once said that Canadians preferred him drunk to Reform (an early name for Liberals -- oh, the irony!) leader George A. Brown (a fellow father of Confederation and founder of the Toronto Globe) sober. :)

Among Macdonald's achievements: Unifying and expanding Canada (B.C. and P.E.I. joined on his watch) and building a trans-national railroad to link the country from sea to sea -- the latter was something that many opposed at the time.

Among his controversies: The 1873 Pacific Rail scandal that forced him from power and the 1885 hanging of Louis Riel.

In 1875, Macdonald had this to say about dealing with life's travails:

"When fortune empties her chamberpot on your head, smile  --  and say 'we are going to have a summer shower'."

Liberal Wilfrid Laurier, himself a brilliant politician and prime minister, said this to Parliament about Macdonald following his predecessor's passing in 1891:

"The place of Sir John A. Macdonald in this country was so large and so absorbing that it is almost impossible to conceive that the politics of this country -- the fate of this country -- will continue without him. His loss overwhelms us. For my part, I say, with all truth, his loss overwhelms me, and that it also overwhelms this Parliament, as if indeed one of the institutions of the land had given way. Sir John A. Macdonald now belongs to the ages, and it can be said with certainty that the career which has just been closed is one of the most remarkable careers of this century ... As to his statesmanship, it is written in the history of Canada. It may be said without any exaggeration whatever, that the life of Sir John Macdonald, from the time he entered Parliament, is the history of Canada."

Historian J.D.M. Stewart wrote in today's Globe and Mail that some of Macdonald's qualities -- humour, but most notably, an absence of malice -- should be emulated by leaders today.

And yet Macdonald is slipping from the consciousness of Canadians. From a Nov. 9 Dominion Institute news release:

"Ten years ago, 54% (of Canadians) knew the name of Canada’s first Prime Minister, while just 46% now know that John A Macdonald held this position."*

*When I looked on the Government of Canada home page, there were two pictures of the current prime minister, but nothing to note that today is John A. Macdonald Day. Canadian Heritage did issue a news release on Thursday.

Well, sir, I remember you. And I would be pleased to raise a tot of Laphroiag in your honour this evening, and thank you for your contributions in building this great country.

If you ever finding yourself passing through Kingston, Ont. some day, Macdonald's grave is in the Catarqui cemetery, if you feel like paying your respects.

Addendum

Here's a link to the John A. Macdonald portal. Editor Alistair Sweeny sent it to me. (thank you, sir)!

In composing the above post, I linked to the I Got A Crush On Obama vid.

In it, I saw this image:

This is relevant because John Kerry endorsed Obama today.

That would be the same John Kerry who lost to Dubya in 2004.

The Globe and Mail had a story today that noted while the polls were very close on the Republican outcome of the New Hampshire primary, they apparently blew it on the Democratic race.

One major difference: In the Democratic race, one leading candidate was a black man, while the other was a white woman.

Or is that too simple an explanation?

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Off The Bus is a project conceived by NYU j-prof Jay Rosen, who runs the citizen journalism site NewAssignment.net, and executed in conjunction with the Huffington Post.

Here's how OJR describes it:

Late last year we told you about the Networked Journalism Summit, an all-day gathering of industry influencers with a collective sight set on a functional juxtaposition of citizen and traditional journalism.

The Huffington Post looks to create that with its new election-season site, Off The Bus, a mash-up digest of feature articles, opinion pieces, polls and videos solicited from a gamut of trad-pub newsies, grassroots bloggers and distributive data journalists. Since its September launch, Off The Bus has been among the most comprehensive pool of election fodder available on the Web, sifting hundreds of daily submissions for insightful "ground-level coverage," as they describe it, of the 2008 campaign season.

It's much more than an aggregator, and this project has some groundbreaking projects of its own. The work-in-progress Polling Project digs behind the scenes of the polls that dominate our spoon-fed MSM election coverage, encouraging pollees to spill the beans on that dinnertime phone call. Also on deck: an interactive map exploring campaign contributions by race and zip code and an exit-poll insider forum for staffers of losing campaigns.

The full article has an interview with Marc Cooper, a j-prof at USC's Annenberg School of Communications, who is the project's editorial co-ordinator.

Addendum

For tonight's purposes, trying to follow the New Hampshire primary online, I would say the NYT or MSNBC proved to be a better use of my time than On The Bus. The H-P home page provided breaking news; however, I find myself perplexed as to why that content wasn't duplicated at the On The Bus homepage.

I particularly liked Katherine Q. Seelye's live blog at nyt.com.

Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, a book about the 1988 race for the White House, stressed the notion of presidential contest as ordeal. It also promoted the formula that great candidate = great president.

Wrong, says Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

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