Okay, just one !*$% week left of this misery, or roughly 700 more Obama ads (McCain is essentially out of money, don't forget).  I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted by this whole ridiculous election.  Really?  It takes two and half years and a couple billion bucks just to decide who gets to straddle, Slim Pickins-style, the descending cluster-f that America has become?  I've got news for all the Obama-maniacs out there.  Enjoy November 5th through January 19th.  Because once Obama takes office, hope and change become dead currency, and will be replaced by much starker nouns like desperation and despair.  That interim period between the election and the inauguration will likely be the giddiest time of the entire first Obama term, and his supporters should certainly revel in his historic victory.  But then it becomes put-up or shut-up time, and he better have a helluva first 100 days planned, or we could be squinting hard to even see the receding opening of the economic abyss into which we have plunged. 

I guess I may be jinxing things a bit, talking about an Obama first term before the actual election.  But I just can't see how McCain can win, at this point.  As we discussed in earlier posts, McCain was the wrong guy at the wrong time, and he ran a terrible campaign.  I can't imagine being a Republican right now, looking back at that impressive slate of early contenders: Giuliani, Thompson, Romney, Huckabee, and the best of them all, Ron Paul.  And then fairly suddenly, you look up and realize you're stuck with an over-the-hill, erratic egomaniac who refuses to see that times have passed him by.  Consider that the core of his campaign was this:

• Obama hangs out with terrorists
• McCain is a maverick, but an experienced, wizened, reliable one
• Palin is qualified and/or fresh (I was never sure how this uneasy dichotomy fit together)
• Bad things have been happening because certain people are bad (greedy, lazy, corrupt, or, gasp, socialist), not because there are any titanic systemic faults
• McCain was a POW for a few years

There really wasn't much more to the whole thing than that.  And in the best of times, it might have been a tough sell.  But with things going the way they are, McCain didn't stand a chance.  Really, at bottom, there were just too many internal contradictions.  McCain would blast waste, pork, and earmarks until the cows came home, but then he would turn around and promise everything under the sun, like any typical Democratic candidate (including support for bank bailouts, continued war, and the government's buying of imperiled mortgages).  He would bash "Washington," and then tout his long record of bipartisanship and cooperation (Note to future candidates: to run as an Outsider, it helps to actually be from the outside).  And most strangely to me, he was constantly talking about how tough he's been, bucking the GOP party line, and taking the lead on this and that, much to the consternation of the entrenched Washington elite.  But even after all of that Maverickness and Uber-gumption, what was the end result?  A profound transformation of the United States into an utter plutocracy under McCain & Co's tenure.  Despite all his great leadership through the years, do we have equitable distribution of wealth?  Nope.  Affordable health care?  Negatory.  Improved natural environment (even in the US?)?  No way.  For all McCain and his colleagues' efforts, we've got f'-all to show for it, which is really another way of saying that the entire American political experiment over the last three or four decades has been a total bust. 

Think about it.  Think about American politics over the last 40 years or so.  All the campaigns, all the rallies, all the money spent.  Marches, civil rights carved out, speeches, buttons, streamers, attack ads.  Just consider all of the energy, money, and emotion spilled out in the last few decades, with true believers on all sides fighting against the tides of apathy and inertia.  What is the takeaway, as of 2008?

• More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States is now confined in jail or prison, the highest incarceration rate in the world
• The top 1% of the population controls more wealth than the bottom 90%
• Almost a fifth of US households have a negative net worth (although this is probably much higher at this moment, since the latest stats don't take into account the last few months of catastrophe)
• Every major natural system on the planet is in decline
• Official unemployment stands at 6.1%, but more realistic measures (like actually counting people who work part-time but want full-time, or who have not explicitly looked for work in the last four weeks because they are long-term discouraged unemployed folks) put it over 10%.  And if we threw in some or part of the prison population, we're looking at something approaching 13 or 14%
• National debt is on its way to $11 trillion

Nice work if you can get it, working in US politics.  Spend tons of dough, promise the world, and then watch it all go down in flames. 

So I do wish Obama well.  He is by far the best man for the job; and deep down, I do believe he is very serious about the task at hand.  And I realize that he had to strike a sober balance between alarmism and optimism during the campaign, because the last thing that Americans want to hear before election time is bad stuff about themselves or their lifestyles.  But once he takes office, he better be ready to tell the American public some uncomfortable things, and he should resign himself right away to being a one-term President.  If he obsesses about his legacy and his re-election right out of the gate, we're finished.  But if he can suck it up, and lay it on the line for us, we just might be able to craft some kind of national vehicle for traversing the Long Emergency.