Living in the country adjacent to the United States it's only natural that Canadians would take at least a passing interest in the American political process. Most of us did one year of American history somewhere along the way through our secondary school education and know all about your three levels of government; the checks and balances that were supposedly built in to ensure none of those levels would gain too much power.
There's also no denying the impact that American policy and leadership have on Canada, given our economic and social connections. John F. Kennedy was as inspiring to a generation of politically and socially active people in Canada as he was to Americans of the same period and Canadians mourned his and brother Bobby's murders as if we had lost two of our own. Of course not all of America's leadership have had as positive an impression on Canadians with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Jr. all managing to raise the hackles of the public at large up here for one reason or another.
It was Richard Nixon who first aroused my interest in American politics, specifically his fall from grace with the Watergate scandal. The first book that I read dealing about American politics was Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstien's All The President's Men, the book that detailed the opening days of their inquiries into a burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate apartment/hotel complex and their subsequent investigations. But the book that really hooked me on American politics was Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
In 1972 Rolling Stone Magazine sent Hunter out to cover the American presidential campaign, starting with the primary season. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is a collection of all of the articles Thompson wrote during his time traipsing across the country after politicians. Taken together like that they present one of the clearest pictures of life on the campaign trail that will ever be written. Given today's political climate there is no chance that any reporter will ever gain the access to the candidates and his or her people that Hunter had when he wrote his articles.
Fear and Loathing on Tthe Campaign Trail also taught me something else - American politics can be addictive, habit forming, and injurious to your social life. People tend to get a glazed look in their eyes when you start analysing the results of the Iowa caucuses at parties, discoursing on how you think they are going to impact the voting in New Hampshire. They really start looking for the exits when you invite them to start making predictions for "Super Tuesday's" results based on analysis's of voting trends in New Hampshire and Iowa.
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