Victory for mortals

Gerard Baker:

Victorious Roman generals were reminded of the fickleness of their glory by a slave carefully positioned in earshot on the triumphal parade route.

“Memento mori,” the hapless servant would whisper to the wreathed victor as his chariot rattled along Rome's jubilant streets: “Remember you are mortal.”

They don't have slaves in America any more but perhaps the winner of November's presidential election should consider having one of his lower-paid deputy-assistants mutter something similar in his ear as he takes the tribute on Inauguration Day next January.

It is highly probable that that moment, the very hour that he takes office, will be the high point of his presidency. Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century. When the votes are counted his people might ruefully conclude that the victor is not Barack Obama or John McCain. The real winner will be Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or some now happily anonymous figure whose star will rise in the next four turbulent years.

2008 may be the best year there has been to lose an election.

This sobering reality was startlingly underscored this week by none other than Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, the national co-chairman of Mr Obama's presidential campaign, and the likely White House chief of staff in an Obama administration. He told a Washington power breakfast that he thought the winner of the election would have a 50 per cent chance at best - at best - of winning a second term in 2012.

Consider the challenges.

The financial crisis and Washington's response to it have transformed the economic and fiscal environment in which the new president will take office.

The bailout/rescue plan/ socialisation of the banking system - whichever you prefer - has, in effect, already rendered null and void almost everything that the presidential candidates have been proposing for the past six months. It may not end up adding a straight $700 billion to the deficit over the next couple of years - the Treasury is surely right to insist that it will get some of that money back when the bad assets acquired from banks are sold off. But it would certainly not be prudent to expect there to be any room left over for promised tax cuts, spending increases on health, education or anything else.

The US already faced daunting fiscal challenges (admittedly smaller than those confronting most European and Asian countries). At some point reality will bite hard and politicians will discover that they simply cannot go on funding two wars, cutting taxes, creating vast new government health and pension programmes and doing the other essential things that the Federal Government does - all those bridges and roads and light-rail systems in parts of the country with closely fought congressional districts.

As some observers have noted, the bailout plan may simply have shifted the locus of the next financial crisis from the private to the public sector. This fiscal challenge is not just economic, but also geopolitical in nature. More government debt increases America's dependence on the financial interest of strangers; and not just any foreigners, but countries that hardly count as America's friends, such as China and Russia.

All this, and we almost certainly haven't even seen the worst of economic times yet.

...

There are opportunities in this crisis that could make the US even stronger and relieve the public debt in the process. The election will make a difference, because if Democrats are in charge they will spend that windfall on sinkhole investments in their constituents groups rather than invest it in paying off the debt and making Social Security more solvent. They will prevent energy exploration that will make our standard of living better and increase the revenue coming into the treasury.

We need a leader who will seize the opportunities and not waste them on Democrat programs that caused the mess to begin with.