Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, June 05, 2008 2:42:38 PM
Can we survive an Obama presidency? In the short term, of course we can. No one is contesting that. No matter how bad the next 4 years are that is insufficient time to completely destroy the United States, even the Civil war took more than 4 years and still did not destroy us. We will doubtless survive in some form the presidency of Obama, should it come to that.
But I still cannot agree with those who oppose McCain with the logic "
we survived Carter, we will survive Obama": It just does not make sense. Yes, we will doubtless survive Obama, but the damage done will be massive, and, in the long run, we may not survive Obama. Just because we are standing in 4 years it does not mean that Obama did not sow the seeds of our eventual destruction.
Don't believe me? Look at our current crisis and ask yourself, why are we worried about a nuclear Iran? Because Carter failed to support the Shah, and, afterward, failed to oppose the ayatollahs. He then allowed Iranians to hold hostages for over a year, making the rest of the world think that America was hopelessly weak. So, if we do eventually find a mushroom cloud rising over an American city, we can thank that president Carter whose single term we "survived".
And that is the problem with this "principled" opposition to McCain, it looks at immediate effects and not at the long term. Carter rules four years, but the pain still continues. Not only did he set up an Iran that continues to be one of our more prominent threats, and in the process created the impression of American weakness, he did much more. When OPEC began to flex its muscles, rather than encouraging domestic exploration, or removing the disastrous Nixon price caps, he caved in and allowed OPEC to exert ever stronger control over world oil supplies. Worse still, he prohibited nuclear fuel reprocessing, hampering future nuclear development and creating the nuclear waste problems we facer today. (Not to mention effectively ending nuclear power as an alternative energy source.)
And it goes on and on. His disastrous inflation led directly to the eventual collapse of the Savings and Loan industry, as well as creating a crisis mindset which hampered investment well into the next decade. And, of course, the inevitable crash which followed his "stagflation" slowed economic growth throughout the first half of the 1980's.
It is simply wrong to argue that any one president cannot do that much harm, or to say that since we survived one bad president we can survive another. Think of all the changes to our economy wrought by a single president. FDR changed the entire way we look at government, Wilson gave us the income tax, and Nixon's disastrous economics policies gave us the groundwork upon which Carter built both his eventual oil crisis and his disastrous inflation*.
I have
argued before,
more than once, that
our situation does not allow us to allow an
Obama presidency to "
send a message" or so "
Obama gets the blame" for any bad policies. McCain may be far from ideal, but Obama is worse, and right now we cannot afford the luxury of feeling superior by "
refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils".
If we want a conservative candidate, the primaries are the time for that fight. The general election is the time to close ranks and keep the worse candidate from taking office, even if it means voting for a candidate we find less than ideal.
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* Nixon did damage enough in
closing the gold window and
placing price caps afterward, but it was Carter's inept follow up that turned small crises into true disasters. One need only look at Reagan's first term to see how those Nixon mistakes could have been easily remedied by a competent president.
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POSTSCRIPT
Yet again, Thomas Sowell has
written an essay on this very topic, making a much more concise argument, but saying essentially the same thing I did.
Also, for a more thorough look at our former president turned terrorist spokesman, read my old post "
Memories of Jimmy".