Disclaimer - I am a 50+ year old Obama supporter who does NOT believe in "Political Correctness". I have been through the "New Left" and all that came later. If you are easily offended, stop here and go read something else. I have neither time nor patience for political niceties. This is Real Politic, if you can't get over it, go away. Also, it is a long one.
Can ANY president "Succeed" in the next four years? Looking at two terms is pointless if the first one is spectacularly unsuccessful, despite George’s current example.
Look at the America that the next president will inherit:
1 - Iraq
2 - Afghanistan
3 - Invigorated and soon to be nuclear Iran
4 - Oil at over $100 a barrel
5 - The dollar collapsing (tied to the higher oil prices - see below)
6 - The economy tanking
7 - Real estate collapsing
8 - We baby boomers wanting to step off the tread mills of our careers
Iraq
The war in Iraq will predominantly be ended in the next few years, regardless of who is in office. None of the three will have us REALLY out of there in less time. It is a matter of degree. RHC and BO both say "...about a year..." but they will both leave troops to support our embassy and businesses there, count on it. McC will take a bit longer, but it really is not that significant. He is (Ready? Flame on!) Softening his rhetoric already, but popular opinion will prevail; it is just too overwhelmingly against the war.
There will be a massacre over there when we pull out, it can not be avoided. You think the war between Clintonites and Obamanoids on this board are bad? Try 1700 years of religious and tribal hatred. Add to that a "country" that the British made where none existed. Iraq, historically, is NOT a country; it is a collection of tribal areas that had a line on a map drawn around them for colonial convenience. The tribe and then the religious sect are king, not the state, and certainly not the one the Brits wanted.
There is NO neat and clean way out, can't be done. There WILL be blood, and lots of it. It is just a matter of when, not if, not how to avoid it, not what coalition can be made for a stable Iraq, blood in the streets and lots of it. This is played as a zero sum game between the Sunnis and the Shia and the Kurds. You win and therefore I lose, so I will not lose. There is a reason Saddam and so many of the other Middle East rulers act so brutally. It works to keep them in power, and little else has been shown to. Genocide will result because we have put the formally oppressed folks in charge, with an army and national police, and they WILL remove the others. Ethnic cleansing and gorilla civil war will ensue as we leave, and the blame will go the commander-in-chief. The out of power party in this country will place the blood on the hands of the president, as many in their own party will too.
Afghanistan
Afghanistan also can not be "Won", certainly not in the short term, and not in any rational meaning of the word. Many of the same tribal issues exist here as in Iraq. There is also the issue of the lack of locally recognized country in the area where Afghanistan and Pakistan meet. We see a nice line going from peak to peak in the Hindu Kush that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan. The people who happen to have lived there for a few thousand years disagree. They win the debate. That is why the territories in western Pakistan are not governed by the Pakistani government. The more we meddle in their government, the worse it gets both here and in Pakistan. Afghanistan is a tribal society that historically has had significant inter-tribal trade. They basically have no national economy, excluding opium, and we do not like that business. If our goal is a stable, centralized government, we will fail in the short run (5 - 10 years). Most of our NATO allies know this and will not join us to any meaningfully extent. This puts in the business of nation building, again! How's THAT working in Iraq? Think it will work better in Afghanistan? Think again! Without a solid middle class, there are not enough stake holders to get a centralized democratic government off the ground. As in Iraq, it is seen as a zero sum game. We did not defeat the Taliban. We beat them in a series of battles, and then had the local warlords make a deal with them to go away and stop bothering us.
Where does that leave the next president? About the same as in Iraq. We either go in with real troop levels and beat the Taliban and put down the warlords and put in a popular central government (read this as kill most of their leaders and their families, and thereby transfer the cycle of "revenge" killings from between the tribes to us), get out, or try to keep up the policing we are currently doing. Bad political choices all around. Whichever is chosen, blame the President.
Invigorated and soon to be nuclear Iran
First, let me say that Iran has nuclear ambitions. You do not plan for and start to build 3600 centrifuges, and breeder reactors to produce electric power. You do this to make weapons. If you do not believe me, reread the NIE on Iran. They may (MAY) not have an active bomb making program now (right now) but can spool it up in a jiffy. They are simply concentrating on the fuel cycle right now. If they want nukes for power, it would be much cheaper and easier to buy them from France, and France would be more than willing to sell them to Iran. Iran’s nuclear weapons program is to counter Israel, us and the Saudis (Shia/Sunni again). Is it destabilizing? From our perspective, yes, from Iran’s...not so much. As the major beneficiary of the war in Iraq, they are now a regional power, and are addressing their national concerns. These happen to be in conflict with some of ours, but we can do better in our relations with them then GWB has. The Dems have a better chance than the Reps do, but we will be hard pressed to stop their arms program. What do we have to offer them? More sanctions will be harder to enforce over time as oil gets more valuable. More "Western style democracy"? It has lost some of its gloss over the last 5 years. Can we convince China and Russia (not to mention a lot of the EU) to live without 25% of worlds oil that goes through the straits of Hormuz? Doubt it. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle there, thanks to our friend Pakistan. We will have to learn to live with that one. Once they get the bomb, blame the President.
Oil at over $100 a barrel
Not too good for our economy, all in all. Can the president do much about it in the next few years? Not much! Can cutting big profits lower our fuel prices? Some, but oil is priced in a global market and India, the EU and China consume a lot of it. We produce 25% or so of what we use, there is not much we can do to replace the other 75% in the near term. Conservation is the fastest way to cut consumption. Solar, wind and Geothermal is a drop in the bucket now and need big funding, but these are long term projects and will not make much difference if we do not cut our appetite. If we want to be able to afford to eat like we do now, we cannot "bio-fuel" our way out. Look at the price of wheat and corn when we use 6% ethanol nationally. Our cars and factories are competing with us for our food! We need to start to cut our gas consumption and replace petroleum with renewables, and plan on a 25 year term before we see real improvements. We also will need to give up many things that are considered by many as part of life. Use mass transit - once it is built, give up some of those nice jaunts to those nice vacation places, live in smaller homes, drive smaller, less powerful cars (you can not argue with physics, more mass=more fuel to accelerate it), eat less meat, reuse and recycle like never before. These changes will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow. Blame the president!
The dollar collapsing
As we all know, the Dollar is at record lows against most other currencies. This is the one thing that has kept our balance of trade from being completely toxic. That is not to say it is not harming us, it just has not killed our economy, yet. One of the reasons it is in the dumpster is that oil is sold in dollars. As oil goes up, the dollar sinks. This is one reason that you hear less gnashing of teeth over the cost of energy in the EU. It has not gone up so much because the dollar has gone down. This has lessened the pressure for foreign banks to prop up the dollar, and we are paying the price. Other circumstances depressing the dollar are the collapse of the real estate market, the prospect of inflation over the horizon and the lowering of the interest rate without the corresponding change in Europe and the east. This will have a detrimental effect on the cost of living here, on the amount of foreign ownership of US companies and land (got to put those trillions of dollars SOMEPLACE and they do not buy much over there these days), and over time will force interests rates up.
The government’s policy is to support a "Strong Dollar", but this is seen over a 15 to 20 year span, not the next few years. For reasons that I have stated, foreign governments and banks will do little to prop up the dollar short of a free fall. Unless the next administration is willing to risk significant shortfalls in exports, we get to live with a falling dollar and increasing import costs, lower standard of living and lower expectations for the next generations.
The economy tanking
The President affects the economy like the captain of a boat using it's wheel. They steer it by moving their rudder, and in a bit the boat responds and changes course, if the wind is not too strong, and the current is not too swift, and the waves are not too high. Unfortunately for the president, the ship called the Economy is really big and the rudder is really small. Rate changes that the Fed makes take six to nine months to be felt. What the President does is not that effective. One of the strongest tools that they have is tax policy. Basically, you "pay" companies to do what the administration wants and "charge" it extra if they want to do something else. Again, it is loosely effective and takes a while to have an effect. Not to worry, our benevolent government has agreed to enact a Stimulus Package. This will put a few hundred dollars in the hands of a bunch of folks. Most of us are in debt and polls show we will use this windfall to lessen that condition.
How will this help the roots of our economic morass?
High priced energy.
Unavailable credit.
The average person’s main source of long term wealth (their home) losing value to the point of being under water relative to their mortgage.
Job creation in the red. When you hear the job numbers remember that the US needs to create 130,000 new jobs per month to keep up with population growth. Anything less is JOB LOSS.
Middle class jobs going away and being replaced by service jobs.
It won’t.
We are being hit with a perfect storm of economic woes.
Blame the President
Real estate collapsing
A significant portion of the economic growth we have enjoyed for the past 8 years has been based on the real estate bubble. How you ask? Around 20% of America’s disposable income has been generated by people removing equity from their homed through refinancing. That source is done, and we now have a mighty hangover from how drunk we have gotten on the money. We have pulled the capital gains from our homes and now carry mortgages on the inflated value that we deluded ourselves into thinking would keep on going indefinitely.
Makes you just sit back and blink.
We saw this with tech stocks and learned nothing. Greed is a cruel teacher, and Americans are slow learners. Wait till the oil and gold bubble burst.
The next president can either bail out the banks or the home owners.
Want to guess where the money will go?
Just look at Bear Sterns for a clue.
Blame the president for all those bankrupt former home owners and the ever decreasing home values.
We baby boomers wanting to step off the tread mills of our careers
Many of us have good jobs that we like enough to keep going to, or they pay too much to stop. Few of us have jobs that fulfill us to the point that we would do it for free or forever. We baby boomers are starting to want to get off the treadmill and retire/do "meaningful" work/relax etc. This will dole out multiple whacks to the economy.
1 – We will pay fewer taxes to the states and fed
2 – We will want more services from the states and fed
3 – We will start to expect to reap the "savings" we paid into the Social Security slush fund
Too bad! We have let our politicians use the SS funds to pay for our national debt. We "invested" the SS surplus into government bonds. This is borrowing money from the right pocket and putting it into the left pocket, spending the money in the left pocket and than expecting to find money to pay back the right. There is no money to pay out the bonds that SS "invested" into. They are simply rolled over into new bonds. They are never truly cashed out. The SS surplus has been spent and is gone. There will be less and less money to pay SS benefits, Medicare, and anything else.
This will start to be unavoidable by the middle of the next president’s second term.
As I see it, this is the domestic world that the next president will inherit. Perhaps it IS time to lose an election.
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Added 3/16/08 @ 20:15 EDT
Well, I expected the abuse and flames and outrage that this post generated. I am glad to see some intelligent comments. I do not see the point of sitting around and telling ourselves how correct and righteous we are.
