Wild About Writing

The final hours … the last desperate appeals by both candidates. In another 40 hours (from time of writing) we’ll know whether it’s President Obama or President McCain. Gallup, the pre-eminent pollster, gives Obama an 11-point lead, even as polls in the states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio are reported tightening.

As early voters lined up in ever greater numbers, Obama’s Florida lead reportedly shrank to 2 per cent, perhaps on the strength of ads like this.

But let’s suppose, as most polls suggest and most observers predict, that Brack Obama is able to hold his lead and gain the Electoral College magic number of 270, thereby becoming President.

Obama will come to office filled with promise. Millions of Americans, especially blacks, will view his victory with such high expectations that he is bound to disappoint. Therein lies the peril of his presidency.

Consider the issues he will have to deal with in the next four years:

• Withdrawal from the costly, traumatic war in Iraq and a settlement, in one form or another, of the equally unwinnable military struggle in Afghanistan.
• Restoration of financial stability and economic order, at a time when the U.S. government’s $10 trillion dollar deficit suggests that its only recourse will be to print more money.
• The rising costs of Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, to say nothing of the need for comprehensive and fair health insurance across the board.
• The need to rebuild respect for America around the world, now at an almost irreducible minimum, the result of an out-of-control foreign policy and a blind refusal to act on the problem of global warming.

Bill Clinton, in his most prominent platform appearance with Obama, declared “Our country is hanging in the balance. And we have so much promise and so much peril.”

Supporters of John McCain see peril in Obama’s promise. Peril that he will raise taxes, encourage terrorism through a softer foreign strategy, and shape domestic policy with alien, unfamiliar ways.

David Gergan, White House advisor to both Presidents Reagan and Clinton, doesn’t put much stock in John McCain’s charge that Obama will be a “redistributor” of wealth. He points out that a great redistribution of wealth has been going on in the United States for the past 20 years. Except that it’s been a transfer from the bottom 80% to the top one percent. Perhaps it’s time to rebalance.

This run of wealth to the rich is just one of the ills of America as seen by John Tirman in his book, 100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World  (Harper Perennial 2006).

This book is a damning indictment of Bush-Cheney America and its recent predecessor administrations, a country that wages war against innocents abroad, demonizes its scientists and best thinkers, dumbs down its youth with ”intelligent design” propaganda, curbs civil liberties and wire taps its citizens, repeals laws that protect investors and consumers, and encourages selfish consumerism at the cost of public good.

The author of “Screwing Up the World” is Executive Director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It’s not a profound book. But it is on target when it dissects, in its hundred short essays, both domestic failings and such almost forgotten foreign misadventures as these: the “six splendid little wars” of Guatemala, 1954; Dominican Republic, 1965; Grenada, 1983; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1991; Somalia, 1992-3.

It is the promise of Barack Obama that he will begin, in everyday argot, to “turn the country around.”  And therein lies the peril, to the status quo with which so many millions of Americans are entirely comfortable, and to himself, as he sets out to bring to America the most dramatic change it has seen since the days of FDR and the New Deal.