It seems these days there is a surplus of "hope" on both sides, and, sadly, as with most movements based on hope backed up with nothing else, these two movements are driving us towards disaster.

On the left we have Senator Obama, who appears to stand for nothing but "hope" and "change". From time to time he offers a vague liberal platitude such as "health care for all" or "talking to our enemies", but in general he has refused to take a real stand on anything. Instead, his supporters ignore his extremely liberal voting record, his incredible lack of experience, and his penchant for embracing left wing causes, and insist that he is so charismatic that everyone will fall in love with him and come together as one wonderful liberal nation.

I am not holding my breath.

In reality there are two possible outcomes, Obama could follow one of two historical models, both of them liberal Democrats who sold people on "hope" and little else. Obama could turn out to be the next Jimmy Carter, a hopeful amateur who brought us gas lines, the revolution in Iran and the misery index. And, sadly, that is the better outcome. The other possibility is that Obama could prove to be the next Bill Clinton, a man nowhere near an naive as he seems, destined to stain the office with stories of corruption and opportunism. In either case, the nation will take some time to recover from the mistake of electing a President Obama.

On the other side of the aisle are the "hopeful" Republicans. Well, not exactly hopeful. In reality, I am speaking about the depressed and disaffected conservatives who continue to insist they will never vote for McCain and constantly threaten to pick up their balls and go home.

So, why do I call such a despondent group "hopeful"? Simple. They insist that when they sit out the election to "send a message" that it will do no harm. No matter how bad the Democrat elected as a result, they insist, the country will recover. That is the hope to which they cling, and it is a misguided one.

Again, we need look no farther than Jimmy Carter to see how much damage a bad president can do in only four years. True, Nixon's price controls set the stage for the oil crisis, and Nixon's Smithsonian Accords helped us into hyperinflation, but without Carter there is no way the outcomes of those policies would have been as awful as they were. Only Carter would try to inflate his way out of inflation, or to get us out of the oil crisis by showing the Arab states how weak we were while simultaneously telling people to learn to live with less. Only Carter could try to give a pep talk including the word "malaise". And beyond the crises he inherited and made worse, Carter also created new problems for which he alone is to blame. From giving away the Panama Canal, to allowing the revolution to go on in Iran, from his fiasco of a rescue of the Iranian hostages, to his policies of appeasing the Soviet Union, Carter managed to take any good situation and turn it bad, any bad situation and make it worse.

Even thirty odd years later, we still feel the results of Carter's incompetence. So, do not tell me no one can destroy the US in 4 years. Many have come quite close, and I am sure both Obama and Clinton  are up to the challenge.

And G-d forbid that Obama wins a second term. Think of how we still feel the sting of reforms enacted by FDR after 70 years ,and even Wilson nearly a century later. That fear we feel as April 15th approaches is the legacy of a president almost 100 years ago. So, pardon me if I do worry that a bad president really can inflict pain that will last for generations.

Nor do these hopeful conservatives take into account one of the biggest forces of our time. As we move away from deciding by legislation to deciding by litigation, those judicial legislators on the supreme court become more and more important. I know that many conservatives argue that McCain will appoint people just as bad as Obama or Clinton, but that is anger speaking. There is no way a sane individual can think McCain will appoint the outright leftists that the other candidates would.

I am sorry, but hope is deluding both sides. The Democrats who are buying a promise with nothing behind it and the Republicans who think throwing away their party will do no harm.

It is time for us to take a hard look at "hope" and ask ourselves whether there is anything backing the "hope" we are being offered.


UPDATED 02/19/2008

After writing this I realized that some may take me to task for my characterization of Carter. Since there are only two criteria by which one could claim Carter was a good president, let me take each individually and explain why I don't credit him with any successes in this his four years:

1. Camp David - First, Carter was not the architect behind Camp David, Sadat and Begin were. Egypt was relatively stable by middle eastern standards, and no longer needed to play on anti-Israeli propaganda to prop up its regime. Also, with the Moslem Brotherhood being such a problem in Egypt, any conflict with Israel would actually help to destabilize the regime. (Even were Israel and Egypt inclined to continue fighting, I think the Sinai campaigns had convinced both sides they could bog the other side down in a long war of attrition, but the chances of real success were very slim due to long, difficult supply lines.) Had Carter not intervened and given the two nations the forum of Camp David, most likely Israel and Egypt would have reached a quiet detente akin to the one that evolved between Israel and Jordan around the same time. Militant opposition to Israel, and support for anti-Israeli terrorists was common only among the more aggressive middle eastern states (Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Iran) after the mid-70's. Pro forma anti-Israel rhetoric continued in other states, and some private support for terrorists continued, but only a few states continued to truly believe their own propaganda. So, while Carter did give Israel and Egypt a forum for a formal peace, and took a lot of credit for something that would have happened anyway, I just don't see Carter as playing a significant role in the entire process.

2. SALT treaties - While many at the time, and since, seem to view the SALT agreements as a step toward peace, they were, if anything, a move toward more warfare, as well as agreements designed to favor the Soviet Union. "How?", you may ask. Simple. The existence of a massive nuclear arsenal was what kept the cold war from turning into a real military conflict. The more likely nuclear war seemed, the less likely any military conflict involving the US and the USSR was. So, by eliminating missiles, we actually moved toward making armed conflict more likely, not less. In addition, as the Soviets had a larger conventional army, and were more inclined to invade other nations, the SALT treaties actually favored the Soviets by making it safer for them to invade other nations. Worse still, by freeing Soviet monies that would have been tied up in nuclear weapons, SALT actually reduced stresses on the Soviet economy, stresses of the very sort which eventually led to the fall of the regime. It is quite logical to say that the SALT treaties prolonged the lifespan of the USSR.

 As I said at the start, I really see nothing Carter did as worthy of praise. At best, he signed some treaties which made the peaceniks feel good but set the stage for future Soviet aggression as well as reducing the economic pressures on the USSR, at the same time he took credit for a peace between two nations which were no longer inclined to fight.

Given all the other misadventures of his single term in office, his is not a record of which anyone should be proud.