Larry Wilson: Two of the three North American leaders may soon be women
As an optimistic Norteamericano who actually liked mostly disrespected commercial and diplomatic successes such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, I still have a good feeling for the future about the enormous economic and cultural possibilities of the three nations of our continent.
Despite the succinct and geographically correct name, you’d be surprised how many Americans — um, citizens of the United States of America — think that the country to our south, the United States of Mexico, is actually in Central America, that fairly continentless, ambiguous, connective, serpentine place.
It’s not. It’s NA.
Beauty-wise, diversity-wise, crazy politics-wise, you could hardly ask for a better place than North America.
As the big cheese here in the middle, we’re pretty well-known, if not particularly well-liked, in your global diplomatic circles. It can be hard for us proud Yanquis to fully understand exactly why we are not better-loved, even, by the rest of the world.
Simply put, we are essentially the Los Angeles Dodgers of the planet: We homies love them, the greatest team ever put together through trades and massive payrolls and wildly expensive beers at the concession stands to pay for your Shoheis and Mookies. But that doesn’t stop the boo-birds in your smaller-media-market stadiums from hating on our big-footing your Milwaukees and Kansas Cities. Envy, so unattractive.
Who couldn’t love Ohtani’s fancy Dutch dog Decoy throwing out the ceremonial first pitch Wednesday to his boss on his bobblehead night, or Shohei going yard on his own first pitch in the very first inning?
Every non-Angeleno, that’s who. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
But I’ve been thinking, optimistically, about the renewed combined North American possibilities that potentially await us in the very near future.
Mexico, a complex, vastly rich and vastly poor, only very recently actually democratic nation that I love with a passion second only to that for Scotland and my own country, has just accomplished a very un-macho thing: Electing its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
They beat us to the punch, but there’s an exceedingly good chance, thanks to the opera bouffe comic ineptness and sheer meanness of her opponent, that come November we in the queso grande of the continent will also elect our first woman president in Kamala Harris.
For those who don’t think that’s a big deal, I give you: the state of the mostly male-run world.
The truly weird thing is that the by all accounts most egalitarian, politest, deferential, meritocratic country among the three in our continent has only by the oddest of short-term flukes ever been run by a woman.
Kim Campbell became Canada’s first woman prime minister in June 1993. A few months later, in November, her Progressive Conservative party — great name, by the way — suffered an overwhelming electoral defeat, winning only two parliamentary seats nationwide, with Campbell herself failing to carry her own Vancouver, B.C. district, and that was that. She is entirely forgotten, not that the insular rest of us in North America ever knew about her in the first place.
So get with the zeitgeist, Canada, while the getting is good. Given the Svengali-like reputation of her soon-to-be-predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the perfectly awful head of her upstart Morena party, it is to be seen if Sheinbaum can break away and govern on her own. Harris? No Svengali worries, given Sleepy Joe.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group’s editorial board. lwilson@scng.com