Introduction

Abstract

It is not uncommon for a US election to be qualified as historic. Indeed, the choice of a leader in the most powerful country in the world is always consequential and most presidents do eventually manage to write a few pages, if not a whole chapter, of the world's history. But in the case of the 2008 election, it was clear long before voting day that this one was going to be very special.Throughout a long series of primaries that attracted unprecedented levels of attention, the Democrats knew they were going to write a page of history by nominating either the first woman or the first African- American as their candidate. They chose the young junior senator from Illinois with an unusual name and an even more unusual background, Barack Obama, to oppose the Republican John McCain, a war hero and an experienced senator with a reputation as a maverick in his own party - perhaps the only Republican who could manage the improbable feat of campaigning credibly against an incumbent of his own party.Indeed, there was much to campaign against after the two consecutive administrations of President George W. Bush. The popularity of the outgoing Republican president, which had reached nearly unprecedented heights in the wake of the n September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, gradually went down thereafter, to reach dismal levels, around 20 percent, in the last months of his administration.For a while, it looked like the Arizona senator might have a chance to pull it off and achieve the impossible but, in spite of his desperate attempt to reenergize his campaign with the nomination of Sarah Palin as his running mate, there wasn't much McCain could do to erase the heavy burden of the Bush administration's legacy from the voters' memories.This portion of International Journal is based on a conference held at the Universite de Montreal just a few days before 4 November 2008, when the election of Barack Ob a ma had become all but a fait accompli. The conference was held 30-31 October and organized by the chair in American political and economic studies (Chaire d'etudes politiques et economiques americaines; CEPEA) and the Centre of International Studies (Centre d'etudes et de recherches internationales de l'Universite de Montreal; CERIUM), both at the Universite de Montreal, and by the Network for North American Studies in Canada (NNASC). As director of the CEPEA, I organized this conference with Jean-Francois Lisee, executive director of the CERIUM, and Michael Hawes, director of the NNASC and executive director of the Canada-US Fulbright program.1At that point, except perhaps for the hardcore supporters of John McCain, the results of the election were all but a foregone conclusion. For conference participants, therefore, the challenge was not to forecast the election's results but rather to reflect on why the policies of the Bush administration had been so harshly judged by the electorate, what difference the election of a new Democratic president would make in important policy areas, and what this all meant for Canada and for Canadians.We chose to approach this election from the point of view of public policy, identifying four issue-areas that were central to public debates throughout months of primary and general election campaigns: the economy; health and social policy; energy and the environment; and, of course, international security. The choice must have been judicious, as these issues were boldly highlighted in passages of Barack Obama's own victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park on the night of 4 November:For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. …