I have more faith than you in the world’s willingness to declare Bush’s actions to have been Bush’s and not America’s, based on one man’s (and his cadre’s) lies rather than a fundamental change in national character, that the long generations of good will we had built up before him will mean much more ultimately.
The next President will have to earn our credibility back, sure - but will face a world that does want to give it.
You are an optimist Elvis - that’s a good thing. But please don’t underestimate the people out there who hate Americans because we are Americans. People who have hated us long before Bush Jr. was in power.
I do believe what you said though, that the world by in large does want to give us credibility back. I’m hoping there’s an up and coming fresh young face that’s going to make that happen.
Yes, I did use too broad a brush there. But ISTM the hatred we face in so many parts of the world isn’t because of who we are but of what we’ve done for so long in those parts of the world - we’ve acted imperialistically in many areas, let’s not kid ourselves otherwise, and the locals have come to resent us in the way imperialists get resented everywhere.
That is the underlying fallacy in Bush’s War on Terra - that the terr’ists are not actually people, not actually thinking humans who have come to their views by some process of reasoning (however shallow or even false), and that the problem’s solution lies in killing them all. If the next President just engages in some kind of good-faith dialogue, that will do quite a bit more than anything else.
Oh I can’t wait to get rid of him!
All that: Terr’ists - evil-doers - all uv um, we’ll hunt’um down…each and everyone…
Oh and my personal fav, if you can find out what he’s saying here I’d like to know.
George Bush:
I’ve seen news stories about greatly discounted starting salaries for Harvard MBA graduates, indicating a major loss in the degree’s perceived value, during the Bush Administration.
Who cares how strong America is in relation to the world? Plenty of nations are much weaker than America, but their citizens have comparable or even higher quality of life.
That’s what I want. I want less jet bombers and marines, and a better quality of life.
The next president will have to address a military budget that is absolutely insane. It’s going to cause serious political discomfort to reduce the size of the military, but the military is just not sustainable at the rate we’re currently at. Our military isn’t even particularly effective at what we want it to do, either. You don’t beat terrorists by bombing them.
I hope the next president realizes that we need a complete shift in our perspective on the role of the military. We need to drastically reduce the ability of the military to conquer and occupy foreign nations, and drastically increase the ability of the military to respond quickly to national crises and international interventions of the non-conquering variety, and our intelligence gathering infrastructure.
You’d have to have more faith in that that I, since I have none. I think that the world will remember the fact that we re-elected him for a long time. We had the chance to repudiate him; we endorsed him instead. So no, Bush’s actions were America’s, not just Bush’s.
And I don’t think that it will be regarded as a “fundamental change in national character”; we’ve spent many years proving just how arrogant, selfish, and ruthless we are to the world. Bush was just the culmination of that - so far, at least.
One of my favorite speeches. Just for reference.
The senate (Arlen Spector) wants to discuss the NE patriots stealing the Colt’s plays-while we have host of IMPORTANT issues (immigration, identity theft, chinese espionage)-and these fools care about a kid’s game!
Clearly, we are in decline!
Main issues will be:
1: Paying for the hefty load of entitlements for older people with a not so dynamic economy.
2: Making the inevitable move to universal health care of some kind. The current model is simply not sustainable.
3: Pulling our big throbbing and bruised American military presence out of Iraq and Afghanistan without losing face completely
4: Get back to being an engineering powerhouse . Make some really serious moves to look into new energy technologies.
5: Making some hard nosed realpolitik decisions about where our critical interests lie. We have far too may fingers in far too many pies worldwide.
6: Stop trying to be the world’s policeman. It’s expensive and it yields very few positive results morally or diplomatically relative to the blood and treasure expended.
I outlined a way this could occur in a recent B-Pit post. Simply, split the current military into a Defense Force; permitted uses defensive only: And an Offense Force, for wars of aggression & so forth.
All fluff and rhetoric about ‘defense spending’ ‘serving your country’ &etc can then be poured into the first branch. And an administration who uses the Offense Force is denuded of any of the usual cover. Similarly swinging cuts to the Military Budget can ensue by reference to the lack of attacks and threats. Correspondingly any Offense Force spending requires a frank acknowledgment of its aggressive purpose.
In a word, all it would need is integrity. Tall order, I know.
Dealing with terrorism and the Iraqi war, of course. It’s been a major issue for the past 7 years, I’m sure will still be an issue for the new president.
And health care… Hillary’s plan sounds horrifying.
Menopause?
(Were I American, I’d vote Clinton)
Our corporations have made it possible for China to become the most powerful nation in the world. I do not think it can be unmade. We have no moral high ground on which to engage them and they and other nations own much of our property and debt. Wheres our hammer?
The thrust of our economic well being has to be in South America ,but this administration has made so many enemies I think it is impossible We are in a huge hole. We can only hope a new prez will get a pass for a while and manage to make friends and allies.
Grappling with American’s diminishing status in the world sounds like a good answer and will come in time but I don’t think the next POTUS will have to really tackle it. I can see the next several Presidents doing everything in their power to reassert it, albeit maybe in less physically blatant ways than our current leader. See Bill Clinton.
Healthcare and immigration are those perennial issues which don’t really matter, they’re just out there to talk about to get certain segments of the voting population riled up.
Global Warming will soon join the ranks of the above, especially since actual solutions as far as I can see are not top down and tend to result in more harm than good when they are.
No one cares about Iraq anymore.
I’m gonna go ahead and say the economy, especially if it gets a little worse bit by bit under the next administration’s “watch.” Everyone talks about it and it’s impossible to ignore and it actually affects a lot of people unlike other issues. That’s not to say anything will be (or should be) done one way or another, but a lot of negative talk in this area could certainly make someone a one termer so they would certainly spend a lot of their time trying to massage the public’s perceptions on this.
I found wading through it difficult due to the dense jingoism and blatant American exceptionalism, but that’s par for the course for a POTUS candidate I suppose.
Barack Obama:
Bingo. Having this vast, increasingly growing infrastructure sure is beneficial to a whole lot of influential people. My favorite theme of the text is how he kept referring to vague “dangers” and “enemies” which are always lurking beyond the shadows which naturally justifies our insane world posture, always followed by some faint caveat so he doesn’t sound exactly like George W. Bush. But hey, there’s always a placeholder for the next great evil. Maybe we’ll go after those sneaky Buddhists next.
You’re living in the wrong country if you’re waiting for that to happen.
Barack Obama, from E-Sabbath’s link (not that this is breaking news or anything…):
I don’t know how McCain and Obama would handle it differently, but the biggest elephant-in-the-bedroom issue the next POTUS will have to deal with is the price/supply of oil. Because this isn’t an artificial cartel-induced shortage like in the '70s. We’ve probably now passed the all-time peak of global oil production; from here on out it just gets worse. And alternative technologies aren’t gonna make everything all better, not nearly fast enough.
BrainGlutton: Wanna bet it’s not (at least partially) artificial? I think a good portion of it is speculators, a second good portion is inflation/dollar issues, and a final good portion of it is, ah, Cheney and Bush being real good friends to their buddies in the oil business.
You thought that having an oilman in the White House meant cheap oil? Hah. Fat chance.
If it really was a Great Depression and global war, I think that a few more people than 300 million would be inadequately prepared to deal. 
waits for BrainGlutton to quote large sections of James Howard Kunstler
1 & 2 are basically health care reform (because the social security crisis is not exactly a crisis, while the medicare/medicaid crisis really is).
3,5, and 6 are basically foreign/military policy.
4 long term is economic policy.
I know an oil guy in Oklahoma who’s father made a killing in oil back during the 70’s and is making even more money recently. The way oil seems to work is that you make nothing until the price of oil reaches a certain price and then it all profit from there.