Nervous thoughts on the penultimate Monday...
"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."
-Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was wrong back in 1974: America had successfully purged Richard Nixon and his cronies from government, but a long national nightmare was just entering its third act. Today, it would be just as wrong to assume that our next national nightmare is even close to over.
Tomorrow, we can almost safely assume, Barack Obama will return to Chicago to put his signature on the biggest story in the modern history of American elections. I will watch it on TV, and I will be one of the millions of Americans who will be cheering, laughing, jumping, and perhaps crying. After eight years in the wilderness, we will have finally taken our government back from a mercenary cabal of Republican ideologues, whose mission in life was to enrich themselves while diminishing the power and prestige of American government and driving millions of its most vulnerable constituents closer to financial ruin.
We will have elected our country's first president of color.
We will have - hopefully - delivered a death-blow to the political viability of the religious right.
Tomorrow night, our efforts and our votes will culminate in one of the greatest moments in American history. It will take a greater effort to ensure that, in fifty years, that moment is not thought of as our country's last gasp of greatness.
We are heading into the first real recession in my generation's experience, and the consensus of economic opinion is that it will take at least two years before the country emerges from it. In the meantime, we can expect the financial contagion that has swept the world's developed economies to continue spreading throughout the developing world, inhibiting growth and development, fomenting poverty, and contributing to a global climate of political instability. America's economy is weak, and our military is overextended; the scope of our power and influence is contracting, and there are a number of players on the world stage trying to fill the void it leaves. The incoming administration will have a diminished array of options available to it to counter the moves that these players are preparing to make, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.
I believe that historians will judge the Obama administration by asking the following question: under President Obama, was America able to re-establish and apply the legitimacy of American leadership, both domestically and internationally? Did it restore confidence in the financial system? Did it prevent the global financial turmoil from wiping out the hard-won gains of developing economies? Did it craft a diplomatic strategy that established it as the leader of the developed world, allowing the world's democracies to confront the challenges posed by extremism and an oncoming global energy crisis?
What will our country, and the world, look like in 2012, and how will that affect the course of our country's history? No one should expect things to get better before they get measurably worse. I expect that Barack Obama will prove to be one of the most intelligent and capable men who has ever served as President of the United States, but I fear that his promises of change and his message of hope will take more time to fulfill than he will have time for. He will not assume his office in circumstances that lend themselves to transformational policy initiatives; in all likelihood, his administration will spend its first term in office troubleshooting the problems created by his predecessor's.
I worry about all of these things, but I do not despair - not yet, at least. Thanks to the current political climate, American democracy may well be on the verge of one of its greatest triumphs: President Obama will be able to claim a broad mandate, and if everything goes right for him tomorrow, he will have the legislative support needed to back it up. He will have a brief window in the next two years to position his government as a trustworthy domestic and international leader, and he possesses the poise and political instinct he needs to pull it off.
What he will not have is room for mistakes. If the consensus economic predictions are right, Americans will go to the polls in two years with very little reason to be happy with the ruling party, and anything the Obama administration does wrong will be ammunition for Republicans in the mid-term elections. Obama must gamble on taking bold, but considered, steps, and rely on his rhetorical genius to help him sell them to the American electorate, which may be judging his leadership for the first time before he actually has a chance to demonstrate it.
This is, therefore, a time for those of us who have supported and believed in Barack Obama to celebrate but for the briefest of moments before we start the real work. The task of restoring our country has only begun, and it will prove more difficult than any moment we endured during the last eight years.
This time, it will be our responsibility.
-Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford was wrong back in 1974: America had successfully purged Richard Nixon and his cronies from government, but a long national nightmare was just entering its third act. Today, it would be just as wrong to assume that our next national nightmare is even close to over.
Tomorrow, we can almost safely assume, Barack Obama will return to Chicago to put his signature on the biggest story in the modern history of American elections. I will watch it on TV, and I will be one of the millions of Americans who will be cheering, laughing, jumping, and perhaps crying. After eight years in the wilderness, we will have finally taken our government back from a mercenary cabal of Republican ideologues, whose mission in life was to enrich themselves while diminishing the power and prestige of American government and driving millions of its most vulnerable constituents closer to financial ruin.
We will have elected our country's first president of color.
We will have - hopefully - delivered a death-blow to the political viability of the religious right.
Tomorrow night, our efforts and our votes will culminate in one of the greatest moments in American history. It will take a greater effort to ensure that, in fifty years, that moment is not thought of as our country's last gasp of greatness.
We are heading into the first real recession in my generation's experience, and the consensus of economic opinion is that it will take at least two years before the country emerges from it. In the meantime, we can expect the financial contagion that has swept the world's developed economies to continue spreading throughout the developing world, inhibiting growth and development, fomenting poverty, and contributing to a global climate of political instability. America's economy is weak, and our military is overextended; the scope of our power and influence is contracting, and there are a number of players on the world stage trying to fill the void it leaves. The incoming administration will have a diminished array of options available to it to counter the moves that these players are preparing to make, especially in the Middle East and South Asia.
I believe that historians will judge the Obama administration by asking the following question: under President Obama, was America able to re-establish and apply the legitimacy of American leadership, both domestically and internationally? Did it restore confidence in the financial system? Did it prevent the global financial turmoil from wiping out the hard-won gains of developing economies? Did it craft a diplomatic strategy that established it as the leader of the developed world, allowing the world's democracies to confront the challenges posed by extremism and an oncoming global energy crisis?
What will our country, and the world, look like in 2012, and how will that affect the course of our country's history? No one should expect things to get better before they get measurably worse. I expect that Barack Obama will prove to be one of the most intelligent and capable men who has ever served as President of the United States, but I fear that his promises of change and his message of hope will take more time to fulfill than he will have time for. He will not assume his office in circumstances that lend themselves to transformational policy initiatives; in all likelihood, his administration will spend its first term in office troubleshooting the problems created by his predecessor's.
I worry about all of these things, but I do not despair - not yet, at least. Thanks to the current political climate, American democracy may well be on the verge of one of its greatest triumphs: President Obama will be able to claim a broad mandate, and if everything goes right for him tomorrow, he will have the legislative support needed to back it up. He will have a brief window in the next two years to position his government as a trustworthy domestic and international leader, and he possesses the poise and political instinct he needs to pull it off.
What he will not have is room for mistakes. If the consensus economic predictions are right, Americans will go to the polls in two years with very little reason to be happy with the ruling party, and anything the Obama administration does wrong will be ammunition for Republicans in the mid-term elections. Obama must gamble on taking bold, but considered, steps, and rely on his rhetorical genius to help him sell them to the American electorate, which may be judging his leadership for the first time before he actually has a chance to demonstrate it.
This is, therefore, a time for those of us who have supported and believed in Barack Obama to celebrate but for the briefest of moments before we start the real work. The task of restoring our country has only begun, and it will prove more difficult than any moment we endured during the last eight years.
This time, it will be our responsibility.
posted by Dr. Chuck | 2:10 PM
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