American presidents who seek re-election when the economy is weak almost always lose. Badly. To buck that trend, the Obama campaign is trying a new and challenging strategy.

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a frightening claim about Iran. "I look at the rhetoric and the kind of philosophy that drives the Iranian regime, the kind of threats they have made to others in the world," he said, "and my deep concern about this regime is that, for the first time in history, we are facing a regime that not only wants to attain nuclear weapons but a regime that has, compared to virtually all other holders of nuclear weapons in the past, far less fear of using them."

In conventional political classification, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan are in quite different categories. But still there are remarkable parallels between the two.

The United States of America is in trouble. The mammoth deficit. The gargantuan debt. The moribund economy and appalling unemployment. It's hard times in the land of plenty - as anyone could see with just a glance at the thin, exhausted face of President Barack Obama as he addressed a joint session of Congress last week.

But how did it come to this? That's the $64,000 question, as Americans said in a more optimistic time. It's also the question we must answer if we are to learn from our neighbours' brutal experience.

Americans may have celebrated July 4th with the usual hotdogs and fireworks, but Uncle Sam was a sick old man on his 235th birthday. Deficits and debt. A moribund economy. Appalling unemployment. Crumbling infrastructure. Endless foreign wars. We all know the litany of ills. It's long and grim and the question for most observers is not whether Uncle Sam will continue to decline, but how far, and how fast.

Are the Harper Conservatives changing Canada or is Canada changing the Harper Conservatives? Much as I like to complain about the government, I tend to think the answer is closer to the latter. One big reason? I follow American politics closely and so I inevitably find myself comparing Conservatives and Republicans. And from that limited perspective our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate - which is to say, sweetly Canadian - and are getting steadily more so.

Consider two important conservatives who just got new jobs.

Mounting deficits. Economic stagnation, high unemployment, and fears of worsening inflation. Peak oil. Calls for a return to the gold standard. Declining American power. Deepening pessimism and an unpopular president.

And what's with the shaggy hair? High school students look like the cast of That 70s Show.

Which is fitting, I suppose, because it increasingly feels as though we've been whisked back more than 30 years and we're re-living the decade of bad news and bad fashion. True, there are important differences. Today, inflation is only a threat. It's not the Soviets fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. And the crook who left the White House didn't have to be pardoned to escape responsibility for his crimes. But still, this era has a lot more in common with the '70s than bad hair.

For the government of the United States of America, the status quo is not sustainable. About that, there can be no debate.

The latest Congressional Budget Office projections see federal debt hitting 90 per cent of Gross Domestic Product within 10 years. That's approaching triple the long-term historical average. But many observers actually think the CBO is too optimistic. An International Monetary Fund paper concluded American debt could be the same size as the economy by 2015.

After that, things will only get worse. A financial crisis that sinks the American dollar and forces the U.S. government to impose the sort of severe austerity measures familiar to third-world defaulters will become increasingly likely.

But projections like these are often self-negating. People see them. They get scared. They act. And in acting, they change the future. Disaster is averted. Will that happen now?

In psychology, the "von Restorff Effect" is a basic insight into human cognition: We tend to notice and remember what is unusual or what has changed, while paying much less attention to what is usual and unchanged. We saw a mass demonstration of the "von Restorff Effect" this week, as political commentators waved their hands and shouted excitedly about the midterm elections in the United States.

"This was not an ordinary midterm congressional election," the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David Shribman wrote in the Globe and Mail. "This time, the American people pushed the 'shift' key and left almost nothing unchanged."

It was a political earthquake. A tsunami. Nothing will ever be the same! And so on.

This was the standard line of observers and it marked the culmination of a narrative the media had been developing for months. The people are angry. Incumbents are running scared. The Tea Party is coming to Washington to throw the bums out. It will be nothing less than a revolution.

And so the election brought a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion: The Republicans won control of the House of Representatives by grabbing 60 seats. It was the biggest such shift since 1948. Even the rate at which incumbents were re-elected was the lowest since 1948. Wow. Spectacular. It really was a revolution and everything has changed. Right?

Not quite. Remember the von Restorff Effect.

Omar Khadr, meet John Walker Lindh. John, Omar.

I probably don't need to tell John about you, Omar. You've been all over the news lately. But it's been many years since John made headlines.

In November, 2001, John Walker Lindh, an all-American guy from San Francisco, was captured while fighting Northern Alliance troops with the Taliban. "The American Taliban" had gone to Afghanistan months before 9/11, but still he was a real, live traitor. Righteous anger focused on one skinny, bearded man.

Omar, you're probably wondering why I've made this introduction since, in a sense, your situation couldn't be more different than John's. He was an adult who made a choice. You were a child, compelled to join the al-Qaeda death cult by your appalling father.

But there are important similarities in your cases, too. You were both barely alive when you were captured, for one. And you were both horribly abused.