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Think of it as Politics Envy.

In this corner we have Canada, a country where, given the choice between one leader who can't get Canadians to like him and one leader who can't get Canadians to notice him, neither can crank public opinion to a point where they could be the majority choice.

In the other corner we have the United States, where public opinion is so cranked up at the moment it is equally impossible to determine the people's choice.

But there the similarities end.

In this barren winter of Canadian federal politics, the differences in leadership possibilities have likewise never seemed so stark.

The American system of choosing a president may be obscenely expensive - it's

somehow counted a victory for democracy when contributions pass the $100-million mark for Hillary Clinton - and 12 months of continuous campaigning is beyond exhausting. But do not let those two negatives override the several positives Canadians see in the American way.

There is clear choice of candidates with very real issues separating most of them. There is, regardless of what you might think of the individual candidates and parties, charisma (Barack Obama), substance (John McCain), progress (Hillary Clinton), caution (Mitt Romney), freshness (John Edwards), novelty (Mike Huckabee) and good humour (Bill Richardson, who, sadly, dropped out after New Hampshire).

Most of those attributes, alas, are currently lacking in the Canadian corner.

Most striking of all, for those Canadians who have been peeking in, are the debates. Political debates in Canada have become, unfortunately, a farce in recent years, with script and bad manners eroding any possibility of real measure.

The American debates, on the other hand, have been civilized, even patient. While the Canadian debate has come to revolve around not making a mistake, the American debates are, for the most part, about actually making a point.

It is not easy to admit to all this. The natural Canadian stance is superiority when staring south down our collective nose. And the difficulties of the past eight years have raised that snotty northern nose considerably.

Yet we have been here before. A long generation ago there was an American president just as unpopular as George W. Bush and a war even more unsavoury than Iraq. The late Walter Stewart, a journalist who came as close to being our national conscience as anyone, wrote at the time of Richard Nixon and Vietnam that "smugness has become a national religion, a national disease" among Canadians.

Instead of looking down the nose, perhaps we should be looking at our own politics to see what lessons might be picked up.

One feature to avoid, however, would be the celebrity endorsement. Hillary has Billie Jean King and Barry Manilow; Obama has Oprah and Brad Pitt; Romney has the Osmonds; Edwards has Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins; McCain has Henry Kissinger and baseball's Curt Schilling; Rudy Giuliani has former footballer John Elway and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon; and Huckabee has rocker Ted Nugent and fake wrestler Ric Flair.

Such endorsements in Canada are simply impossible to imagine. Don Cherry for Harper? Red Green for Dion?

(Though, mind you, Dion could likely use some duct tape in coming days over the mouth of bumped Liberal candidate David Orchard.)

However, the overwhelming stress on "change" in the U.S. primaries - the word was used 120 times in last week's debate, according to The Economist - is something that Canadians do appreciate.

Let the pundits ridicule this buzzword as lacking in substance - they were wrong, after all, in New Hampshire and were wrong 60 years ago when they dismissed Harry Truman, who later wryly noted "The 'C' students run the world."

It is the mere promise of change that works - as new Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall discovered this fall - not the specifics of change, as Ontario Conservative leader John Tory recently found out.

People simply want to look ahead with some hope, as Obama demonstrated in Iowa and as Bill Clinton proved back in 1992 when he adopted as his campaign theme song Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

And there you have the essential difference between the political environment in the United States of 2008 and in the Canada of 2008.

Americans, with good reason, are looking forward - forward to moving beyond Bush, forward to coming to terms with a war and an economy gone bad, forward with that resilient optimism that has always been the hallmark of America.

Canadian politics, sadly, has become so wrapped up in the past - $1,000 bills in unmarked envelopes, debating missed environmental opportunities, seeking revenge for past political transgressions - that it begs for a theme song called Please Stop Obsessing About Yesterday.

It's time for Canada to move on.

As the various candidates for president of the United States headed for Las Vegas and Florida over this past weekend, they were all - no matter what their personal pluses or minuses - looking toward tomorrow and what needs to be done, not what was done or not done in the past.

Canadians needs to turn that haughty collective nose in the same direction.