Two links

I don't have much time today, so I'm basically going to point to two complementary posts.

The first is a Huffington post by TV guy Jon Robin Baitz, which I think captures as well as anything I've read lately what I've said before about Hillary Clinton. (I feel the need to reiterate that I have strong reservations about each of the three remaining candidates. I'm not sure any of them is truly ready to confront the problems that we face; if so, they certainly aren't willing to say that. McCain, to his credit, says some jobs aren't coming back, but he still believes new ones will appear. The mechanism for that has been left to the reader.)

Anyway, Baitz writes about the essential desperation of the Clinton campaign:

the cynical suggestion by Senator Clinton that Obama would be a fine VP while at the same time declaring how unready he is seems to me precisely the sort of cynical paranoid post-modern solipsism of people who will say anything whatsoever to get what they want and then act stung when called on it. It borders on sociopathy. And like all opportunists, those in Camp Clinton have reached the conclusion that even a scorched earth campaign which devastates the party, vulgarizes the discourse even more than it already is vulgarized, and alienates millions of people who actually have come to hope for real change in this country, is worth the cost of a possible win. Personally, I find it far more likely that the only beneficiary of the Clintonian ugliness will of course be none other than that half-mad proponent of hundred-year wars, John McCain.

The reality is that Obama's campaign does offer hope to many people, hope that we can transcend the system that has led to utter paralysis, an unwillingness to confront very real problems. The cynic in me is extremely skeptical that anyone who has come up within the system, who has profited from the system, can truly effect meaningful change. But that change won't happen without the understanding of the people, who need to get away from the assumptions that have informed their whole lives (Business creates jobs! Free market outcomes are right because the free market is, by definition, right! Government is invariably less efficient than private industry!).

Because those assumptions are now standing in our way. How blind acceptance may impede us is well expressed by James Howard Kunstler, whose Cluster**** Nation Chronicle is as passionate a description of our possible future dystopia as you will find. Can he be over the top? Perhaps. But his March 3rd entry (you'll have to go to his site and scroll down to read) is as fine a description of the potential challenges the next president may face as any I have seen:

Whoever wins on November 5 will wake up to preside over a different America than the schematic one he was debating about during the primaries and the election. The long campaign will beat a path straight into the long emergency. The new president will inherit a wrecked banking system, an economy in freefall, a wobbling world oil market, and an American public extremely ticked off by its startling, sudden impoverishment.

It is clear that Mr. Kunstler is not very positive about the immediate future.

I don't buy wholesale into the immediacy of "The Long Emergency." This nation still has a lot of momentum, and the aircraft carrier doesn't just turn on a dime. (I understand how the interlinked economic systems and modern technology speed up any and every trend, but I still don't see bread lines by November 2008 - let's not get into 2009 or '10.) But the issues are very real, one needs only to look around in the western suburbs of Chicago to see how disastrous the collapse of the oil economy would be.

I'll finish with a long quote from Mr. Kunstler:

Whoever wakes up as the next president on November 5 will have to preside over the comprehensive reorganization of American life. The big question is whether he can persuade the public to let go of its sunk costs, and all the sheer stuff that represents, and move ahead in a unified way that doesn't end up tearing the nation apart. The danger is that the public will want to mount a kind of last stand effort to defend a way of life that has no future under any circumstances, and they will ask the president to lead that last stand.

To avoid that deadly outcome, the new president will have to be
equipped with a realistic vision of what this society can actually do to survive the discontinuities that circumstances present. This will require him to confront the prevailing delusion that the US can become "energy independent" in the sense that we can run WalMart on something other than oil from foreign lands. The new president would have to carefully restate American expectations and goals -- for instance, not
to keep all the cars running at all costs, but to get us living in places where driving is not mandatory. I'm concerned that the American people will hate the new president if he tells them the truth: that an old way of life is over and a new one has to begin now. We're about to find out how much "change" the public can really stand.