Those looking for evidence of American decline need not look much further than the difficulty the Republicans are having finding a presidential candidate who generates any excitement. It is a party that seems to oscillate between formidable vote-getters (Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan), and four-letter non-exciters (Ford, Dole and the Bushes).
Barack Obama won in 2008 though he was unqualified for the office, mouthed worrisomely socialistic platitudes and was actually outperformed in the primaries by Hillary Clinton. He did this with an unspoken offer to relieve the altruistic white American majority of its guilty feelings regarding 250 years of slavery followed by a century of segregation, by electing him president. And as a (valuable) bonus, he threw into the bargain an implicit guarantee that the country would no longer have to listen to charlatan African-American race-card politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Obama became the first respectable black American leader since Martin Luther King.
At all previous times in American history, when the country faced a severe crisis, leadership was on the horizon by this point in the cycle. In the worst trials, the threat of civil war in 1860 and the Great Depression of 1932, Lincoln and Roosevelt, though few saw what epochal figures they would become, promised something a good deal more purposeful and uplifting than the then-incumbents (Buchanan and Hoover). President Obama, by contrast, is now reduced to truckling to the Wall Street "occupiers" (along with Hollywood phonies such as Roseanne Barr) and the troops-home-now isolationists.
In 1968, the country was wracked by assassinations, race and anti-war riots, and 200 to 400 body bags returning every week from Vietnam, where over 500,000 draftees were fighting an undeclared jungle war for a vague objective, according to an impossible strategic plan. Men such as Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller all ran to replace President Lyndon Johnson.
Today, debt has the whole country in its grip. Annual federal deficits almost as large as the entire money supply, several times as large as those George W. left the country, are piling up each year and are forecast to continue, while the President dreams of increased spending and "green jobs." It is a skull-cracking task for the bipartisan 12-member Deficit Budget Committee to effect even a 10% reduction in the next decade's projected deficits, despite having a legislated mandate to do so.
Student loans, which are notoriously hard to collect and are the liabilities of the trustees of the nation's future, now total over $1-trillion. Underemployment afflicts nearly 20% of the work force, and inflation in those areas that have not been flattened by deflation, like housing, is in double digits. All economic forecasts, dismal though they are, are matched against absurdly optimistic suppositions of an economic revival that cannot take place until the U.S. economy is reoriented away from excessive reliance on unsustainable service industries that don't add much value to anything.
The country's economic weakness backs into other strategic areas. The United States has combated terrorism with commendable vigor and efficacy, but still risks being out-manoeuvred by the terrorism-sponsoring states. Nothing has been done to reduce oil imports; and as long as the United States imports $250-billion of oil annually from countries that finance international Islamist activities (especially Saudi Arabia), it is effectively on both sides of the War on Terror. And as long as the United States is nominally allied with Pakistan (through 800 miles of which, it supplies NATO forces in Afghanistan) — a nation that sponsors the murderous Haqqani network, and allows the Taliban and its allies rent-fee accommodations in Waziristan — it will be on both sides of the Afghan War, too. None of this is consistent with the normal conduct of a Great Power.
The mystery is the arid firmament of the Republicans. Mitt Romney is chiefly known for a health plan in Massachusetts that didn't work, and for favouring abortion until he opposed it. He is a successful private equity financier, but this is not necessarily a vote-winner, as it consists essentially of breaking up businesses and selling them — financial shuffles that feed the velocity of money but don't create jobs or add value (a skill but not a naturally popular activity). Though he effectively managed the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he is bland and unconvincing. He won't frighten independent voters, but he has been struggling since 2007 to excite the Reaganite Republican bedrock without conspicuous success. He would be an adequate nominee, and probably a competent president, but the country wants radical reform and lashings of panache.
When Texan governor Rick Perry entered the race speaking darkly of treason at the Federal Reserve, of jogging with a handgun in his sweats, and of receiving a vasectomy from his father-in-law (a doctor at least), a great many people, in and outside the United States, were reminded of how tired they were of big-talking, syntactically challenged Texans. Perry rose on entry and sank on audition (but his 20% flat-tax plan may help him back up the ladder; Romney, having disparaged a flat tax, naturally is rethinking that, too).
Just the rumour of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's candidacy put him into contention in the polls, but he declined to enter the race. Otherwise, the most attractive candidates are too young or not interested and have also declined (Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan).
But, as I suggested last week here, there is a chance of excitement. Herman Cain is a self-made African-American, well-educated, keyed to opportunity and not victimhood, a successful fast-food executive and management buy-out financier, and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He is a likeable and even stirring speaker, though slightly unserious at times, and he has transformed the race with his advocacy of a 9-9-9 tax (a 9% tax on each of personal income, corporate income and retail sales).
After such a sequence of GOP fade-outs, it would be premature to conclude that the man the office seeks has been found, but a counter-chippy African-American with his background could be a dynamite candidate and an effective president (and could split the African-American vote with the incumbent). The American public is so (justifiably) disgusted with its political leadership — executive and legislative — that Cain's lack of political experience could be a political plus point.
Only two months from the start of the state caucuses and the delegate selection process, such an important election (which will cost $2-billion to party contributors on both sides to carry out), should be a good deal more interesting than it has been. The United States and the world are waiting for some leadership.