This week’s Democratic Party TV debates are something of an argument against holding such events at all. Americans need urgency, not 10 candidates talking over each other on Tuesday and another 10 on Wednesday, some of them more or less people who wandered in off the street.

Isn’t it pleasant to be Canadian and have a little book club of three or four. Each politician is given the time to make a good point or several. But Andrew Scheer won’t come to meetings at the CBC’s house because Justin Trudeau read all the books and he didn’t.

A normal politician would show up and emphatically state something fuzzy, like the plot being hard to follow but the ending was good. Just wing it, Andrew. But he knows his limitations.

Scheer is perhaps too timid for debates, but his main problem is that he has no plan. Politicians need a plan. Trudeau’s is to fight global heating but also to help Canadians cope with it. Any politician anywhere who promises that nobody will bake, freeze, or drown by 2025 has a winning platform.

Scheer can’t even do that. The Conservative Party book report on lowering carbon output is formlessly hopeful but has few specifics.

You can imagine the meeting that produced it. Let’s put the word “green” on every page. Let’s mislead by saying “tax” a lot. Let Scheer announce it in front of some trees. (Isn’t it odd how Scheer is rarely seen outdoors. He always looks like he just used eye drops. Maybe it’s allergies.) Green, green, tax, tax. And then they adjourned.

Back to the Americans. The Democrats are panicking and it shows. The debates are a reality show, an incoherent meme-seeking display that represents a central problem: Americans have too much choice.

“I don’t want more choice, I want nicer things,” a comedian once wailed, and I think of this line often. Shopping is Americans’ favourite pastime and what did it get them? A shelf of try-harders, as opposed to a new Obama.

It is peculiar and sad that they can’t find another Obama. Elizabeth Warren, smart, relatable and fierce, is easily the best candidate but I cannot believe Americans will elect a woman. Dislike of women — by both women and men — runs too deep in human history to be overcome. This frantic era will not permit the alteration.

The courageous Pete Buttigieg is too bookish, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are sadly deteriorating men of a bygone era, and the rest have made little impression. In this complicated world, whoever speaks loudest with the most cartoonishly simple message on Tuesday and Wednesday will be declared a winner by a cartoonishly credulous basket of media.

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But it is unfair to even put these people, most of them sincere, through this electoral sieve. Any one of these candidates would be a better president than Trump.

They are up against a mean, filthy-minded bigot whose mind is clearly deteriorating. He’s a joke, one that American democracy may not survive. Happily, Trump will not win re-election — though it’s hard to find anyone who agrees with me — but it’s doubtful he will leave without a war, possibly of a nuclear nature.

How could Trump walk offstage without declaring the biggest war in the history of wars? Is there anything in him or his terrified Republican chorus that would resist the urge? A childish nation elected this large child and handed him the toys.

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Back to Canada. Scheer seems like a decent but malleable person under pressure from questionable associates. He’s like the nice teenage boy who’s hanging out with a bad crowd but all you can do is send him to summer camp and hope for the best.

Climate will probably be the central issue of this campaign but the unspoken one, immigration, is a worry. One of the things that keeps Canadians mostly polite on this issue is their horror at what fighting over immigration has done to the U.S.

The biggest issue in Britain has always been class. In American, it is race. Canadians realize that a small population in a huge country can’t survive without immigrants. I hope we will respect that.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs.

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