Obama beats McCain: then what?

It appears that the Democratic elders have seen enough of the Obama/Clinton road show and are about to ring down the curtain. Fun while it lasted; if the superdelegates definitively side with the majority of the chosen delegates, then Barack will be the nominee. If Hillary persists in her "campaign" past that point in the hope that Obama implodes or dies or something, she will be seen as someone who simply went around the bend, and as a crazy person who needs restraining more than anything else. Maybe that will become Obama's strongest selling point; he is now the only viable candidate from the two major parties who is not clinically insane.

I notice that the latest California poll shows Obama leading Clinton by a vote of 51-38%, despite Hillary's 9% victory in February's primary. This appears to be a reliable marker of her depreciation in the public eye, given the variegated nature of the California electorate. McCain barely registers in the poll; Obama demolishes him. To this hopeful sign must be appended the caveat that California's 55 electoral votes will go to Obama no matter what, so the size of his margin doesn't really matter. But I think Obama will defeat McCain in the general election. For one thing, McCain is a terrible campaigner. He's boring and uninspiring. He doesn't look or sound like anyone who can lead the country out of serious problems that most thinking people see all around them. When people are spooked, they want a leader who seems resourceful and innovative, who can lead them out of the box canyon. George W. Bush in 2000 was helped along by the good years Clinton left behind, by the relative peace and quiet. And Bush was a much more talented campaigner than McCain, using his narcissistic, phony personality to convince Americans he was a good ol' boy, and not a prep school cheerleader with serious intellectual inadequacies. The irony being, as Americans have learned, that Bush's obnoxious personality has become one of the major sources of national insecurity for the country. I'm convinced that many national leaders work against our interests not out of an animus against the USA generally, but because they just can't stand him. That could be yet another singular distinction of the Bush presidency.

So Obama gets elected. This is where my predictive limits are certainly reached. I think the major, immediate difficulty he will encounter is the energy crisis, reflected in the "structural" high price of imported oil. He will succeed to the leadership of a country wholly consecrated and dedicated to the private automobile, where the living arrangements of suburban sprawl far from urban work centers are now a serious problem. Where the viability of commercial airlines is uncertain, and where the public transportation system is mostly haphazard and dilapidated. I've read his website and it's certainly progressive on energy efficiency, carbon abatement (cap& trade, e.g.), higher CAFE standards (which are now beginning to take care of themselves as many Americans have to choose between filling the tank and eating) and renewable energy, such as cellulosic ethanol, which shows a hip familiarity with work being done at the University of California at British Petroleum (UCB-P). But his ideas are almost too little, too late before he starts, and he will have to deal with an intractable Congress protecting the corn-for-ethanol-growing Midwest and other irrationalities.

And the affordability of food, which is related. Maybe Barack will urge, as a matter of government transparency, reinstatement of the CPI standards which existed during the Reagan years, instead of all this Greenspan malarkey about "hedonic enhancement" and substitution of Spam when ground beef becomes too pricey. If so, Americans will see in print what they already feel, that inflation is currently running at 11% or so.

Not to mention the solvency of the entitlement programs. As the turnaround date for Social Security, 2017, nears (and that's if there is no serious recession), surely it's impossible to keep talking about using the Social Security "surplus" as general tax revenue and replacing it with a fictitious "trust fund." The bill has come due, and there is no money to pay it with. And the health care system is simply DOA at this point.

If Barack Obama is honest in his first State of the Union, there will be very little talk about national security in terms of foreign "wars" (in Iraq, on terror), other than the recognition they have to end immediately. His speech should sound like a FDR radio address in the depths of the Great Depression. An honest call to serious action before it is entirely too late.