Be Careful What You Wish For...

The more I ponder the elections, the more it feels like 1976. That's just far back enough for many to forget, and for many more too far back to have even been born. The country had been through Vietnam, Watergate, and was yearning for a change to something new. As a young man in the same demographic as those now putting in Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress, I remember that I was tired of politics as usual. I was tired of the corruption and a bad war in which the government lied to us about. We needed a fresh start, and Jimmy Carter was it. Hey, he was new, an outsider not connected to Vietnam or Watergate or a Nixon pardon. Looking back, its easy to see the mistake I made in voting for him. In his inauguration speech he said,

"We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems."

I should have know then what we were in for. Yeah, more is not necessarily better, but our nation has its 'recognized limits'? And, we can only do so much, so don't even try. What I got was a guy wearing sweaters on TV to lead us out of an energy crisis. What I got was a guy that the Iranians toyed with because they could. What I got was 12% inflation and home mortgage rates in the high teens. In short, a disaster in policies foreign and domestic. Not every thing Carter did was bad. True to his Christian roots, there was a lot of good along the humantarian front. Its never all or none when assessing a president's effectiveness considering the complexity of the office. However, he was ineffective enough, and he lasted only one term. Seeing what's happened with Mr. Carter, and the things he's done and said since then makes me wonder...

"What was I thinking?"

Maybe we had to experience the wrong kind of president to understand what to look for in the right kind, the 'can't appreciate the light until you've experienced pitch black' type of thing. I don't know. What I do know is this election looks alot like the same thing. Change and Hope was the mantra and enough people embraced it to bring Mr. Obama to office, just like Carter.

Now we've got big big problems in this country. Its not the Civil War, and its not the Great Depression. There's no comparison there, in spite of what the media (oh yeah, no understanding, much less sense of history) might put out or parrot from the coming administration. Its bad enough though. At this juncture, we now owe more in debt (if you include the estimated cost of Social Security and Medicare going forward) than we're worth as a country. Its not about bailing out or rescuing banks or Wall Street, or the Big 3. Who's going to bail out the United States?
We're also engaged in a 21st century struggle between Good and Evil that rivals Fascism and Communism of the 20th Century. As a society that embraces Relativism and Moral Equivalency, we're ill equipped to fight it. Unlike our past struggles, Islamism isn't something that's going to die out with victory in war or economic collapse of a socialistic empire. We don't have the Thatchers or Churchills of times past to stand firm. We can only hope others with that unwavering sense of right and wrong to come along side us in a meaningful way.

So, where does that leave us and President Elect Obama? He got what he wished for. A majority of voters, just like me in 1976, got what they wished for. From what I can see, he's not Jimmy Carter in many respects. He's certainly not a Christian if he actually embraces the kind of theology 'reverend' Wright has expoused some 20 years. I think him more pragmatic and calculating than Carter in that the street is littered with victims he's thrown under the bus when they no longer provided him cover or a political advantage. Being brilliant intellectually, eloquent in controlled settings, and politically astute in getting elected to the office are all attributes that will serve him well.

But...

We have yet to see the measure of this man in a real crisis where things will have to be done and not just talked about. My concern is that there is no 'there' there and we're dealing with a pure pragmatist not concerned with core values, or when those values are revealed, we'll be suffering from buyer's remorse. Pure Pragmatism deals only with expediency and creating advantage for oneself. Core values that run counter to what this country was built on are dangerous to our freedoms, our prosperity, and our progeny.

Pray.

Alot.