Primary Reaction: How Did We Get Here?

Now that Super Fat Tuesday is over I can unload some of how I have come to feel about this election and its implications for the future of the United States. But first some background:

• With the end of the Cold War the US was faced with a tremendous opportunity to unite the world in peace and prosperity. Arguably such an opportunity was unprecedented in all of human history.
• But George H. W. Bush, the president at the time, lacked “the Vision Thing” required to begin to take advantage of this opportunity and was kicked to the curb after one term in office.
• Unfortunately, due to early political missteps, reactionary pandering and an ultimate lack of a moral compass, the next president, Bill Clinton, managed to polarize the US political discourse, leaving the nation a political basket case as was demonstrated by the election of 2000 (anyone charging me with “blaming the victim” here needs to remember who was in charge at the time).
• Many US Democrats see Bill Clinton’s presidency as a near Utopian period that was only interrupted by term limits and his vice president’s inability to run a competent campaign. But these people generally lose sight of the fact that President Clinton was impeached, and while his crimes may not have arisen to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” he did lie under oath. President Clinton had a scandal-plagued administration and not all of it can be blamed on partisan Republicans creating something out of nothing.
• In addition, it should be noted that the economic revival of the late 90s that led to the first federal budget surpluses in decades, was primarily fueled by the end of the Cold War, the expansion of the Internet Bubble and Y2K-based expenditures, not by Clinton economic policies.
• The lasting legacy of President Clinton is that he made it easy for Republicans in general and conservatives in particular to see liberals and Democrats as not merely misguided, but as evil. This feeling was relatively one-sided until President Clinton’s successor was elected in 2000.
• The election and presidency of George W Bush made it easy for Democrats and liberals to demonize all things Republican, conservative and fundamentalist in return.
• The second President Bush upped the ante in his handling of the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. President Bush not only squandered another chance to unite the world in peace, he polarized the world stage in terms of “US versus Evil”. His so-called “War of Terror”, potentially ruinous Iraq policy and pandering to corporate interests run amok to the detriment of the shrinking US middle class have left the United States teetering on the edge of irrelevancy; the post-Cold War opportunity in tatters.