RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO . THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2024. Still in the middle of the summer of 2024.

The heat is starting to feel oppressive. In the US : “The National Weather Service predicts hotter-than-normal conditions almost everywhere. And … last year was the hottest … on record.”

I live in Canada. I should focus on Canadian public life. But the sudden shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris in the US presidential election this November 5 suddenly seems almost the only thing that seriously matters.

Closer to the ground, my private life is congenial. I am (mostly) retired, and do what I want. I have saved my money. I am reaping the reward — assuming I don’t live forever. I live with someone I like in a house of books and music. Who could ask for more? (Well not me …)

(1) Setting parameters for what the future can become

I live as well in what used to be called a “streetcar suburb.” It is still attached to an old-school civility that sometimes seems to linger less in a few other parts of the city.

Above all else, the most easterly of the North American Great Lakes is only a few hundred yards from my door. It regularly presents changing natural phenomena to watch. Just sitting on a park bench at the foot of my street, watching the lake, soothes my soul.

So … why should I care who is President of the United States? Or even Prime Minister of Canada? The short answer is just that I like politics, as others like sports. (Or automobiles.)

The longer answer is that we live in a world today where politics (and its main agent, government) increasingly sets parameters for what the future can become. (In the short to mid term at least.)

(2) Great battle of warring parameters of the American future in 2024 will be close contest

Voting is the one clear way we ordinary people can weigh in on what these future parameters will be. The earlier projected 2024 US election — with the convicted felon Trump in his late 70s on the one parametric side and the ancient Biden in his early 80s on the other — struck me as a sad joke, showing just how close the USA today is (or at least was) to hell in a hand cart.

I would have altogether certainly voted for Biden in any case. But now I am much more enthused about voting for Kamala Harris.

(Though of course while Canadians would usually vote Democratic in American elections, constitutionally and legally we do not actually vote for anyone in these cases.)

Whatever, as the almost hot Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has urged on TV, the great battle of the warring parameters of the American future in 2024 is going to be a close contest. Those who do not want a Trump Republican future still have a lot of hard work ahead — knocking on doors and on and on …

(3) What kind of president?

I have just read some skeptical views of Kamala Harris, from three new books on the Biden administration (as outlined in the London Review of Books). Among some Biden staffers Vice President Harris has been seen as no more than “a work in progress.”

I am nonetheless still impressed by Ms Harris’s obvious great admiration for Barack Obama. My bottom line is that a lamppost would be better than Donald Trump. And I think any President Harris would be much better than that.

She has already shown that she knows how to say the right thing at the right time. She has a long track record in government. She has shown some steely success in policy debate. And even if you don’t like her suits of various colours, she too is almost hot — and laughs a lot.

And then there is her 21st century cultural demography. She is the smart born-in-the-USA daughter of a smart Asian mother (originally from India) and a smart African father (from Jamaica). And she has a White Jewish husband and similarly inclined stepson and stepdaughter.

(4) She just may be the right first female president of the USA

On several understandings of the deep traditions of Democracy in America, all this might just be enough in the unusual year of 2024 to finally elect the first female president of the USA — in a close but unmistakably clear election.

All very optimistic, you might say, and you would certainly be right.

Yet my part of the North American political universe has been hungering for any kind of optimism for a while now. Let’s not give up on it just yet.

Let hope linger awhile for a first female African, Asian, European American president, who is also careful and even somewhat cautious in nailing down future parameters, that a solid majority of the American people today can finally wrap their minds and bodies around. O say can you see … in the land of the free and the home of the brave … at last …