I'm convinced that whomever wins the 2004 presidential election is pretty much screwed. The U.S. economy and American way of life is now being sucked into a perfect storm of uncontrollable oil prices, massive, unprecedented debt, and an islamic-fascist hornets' nest. Any one of these three problems by itself would be a handful. But all three at the same time? We're moving into unchartered waters. I don't envy the president or the political party that gets tagged with creating the mess we're in by 2008.

In general, I think we focus way too much on the president and the presidential elections. The election has become a year-long reality show that we might actually be better for turning off. All of the calls to get out and vote -- yes, voting is important. But pulling the lever once every four years in a presidential election is the absolute barest minimum of political participation a citizen can have. By the time the election rolls around, most of the big and little decisions have been made. You're simply choosing A or B -- it's like you're taking the world's easiest multiple choice quiz rather than delving into a meaty essay question. We need to turn off the Road to the White House reality TV show with all it's story-lines, plots and sub-plots. If we really want to change things and have impact, we can't wait until the presidiential election comes around. We've got to get into the game much earlier and much closer to home.

That being said, it's clear that these Bush guys aren't going to give up the White House easily. If they are good at one thing, it's power. They know how to seize it and wield it. It would not at all surprise me if the tricks are even dirtier in 2004, then they were in 2000.

The bottom line is that there are forces at work now, that no president can really control. It's easy not to notice, but our American Way of Life is remarkably dependent on a vast, steady flow of inexpensive oil. If no one in the world has extra capacity to pump the increasing amounts of oil that the world demands (and it increasingly looks like no one does) then oil can and will cost $80, $90, $120/barrel. As the world's greatest energy consumer, the US will be hit harder by this than anyone else. The result of high oil prices will be massive inflation (or deflation and a crash of the housing market, where most Americans store their wealth). With the sharpened guillotine of consumer and government debt hanging over us, we won't have a lot of options for dealing with this meltdown. Add to that, the nagging, persistent feeling that if a smart, focused, creative group of maniacal idiots want to commit acts of humongous attrocity in our midst, there probably isn't all that much we can do to stop them. At some point in the near future, they will likely be successful.

It's comforting to think that the President of the United States has enough power to prevent and control all these things. But he really doesn't. Neither Kerry nor Bush can stop this storm from coming. We've pretty much got to just try to navigate our way through it without being ripped to shreds. Perhaps Kerry would be better at managing the coming crises then Bush. But in today's shallow, mean, talk radio culture of litigous blame and rampant entitlement, it seems unlikely that Americans will be able to rally round, come together, and do the difficult things that need to be done. This isn't 1941 and we're not in Kansas anymore. Whomever sits in the Oval Office when the sh*t hits the fan will not be loved. He'll make Herbert Hoover look like a hero.

Truly, I believe we're gonna need an Abraham Lincoln of a president to do the difficult things that will need to be done to hold our world together. But I don't think we'll get her until 2008, when Americans ask Hillary Clinton takes over the wreckage of the Religious Right's eight years. You don't even want to hear my predictions about what happens after that...

All hands on deck! Batton down the hatches!!!


11:25 PM | Link |