November 03, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative
Francis Fukuyama
I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.
McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was highly irresponsible; we have suffered under the current president who entered office without much knowledge of the world and was easily captured by the wrong advisers. McCain’s lurching from Reaganite free- marketer to populist tribune makes one wonder whether he has any underlying principles at all.
America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.
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That is pretty wow.
...Party should reap the destruction they have sown. Whoever is in the White House in the next few years will have to take the responsibility for what had happened in the last eight years. It is too soon for the Democratic Party to inherit this mess. Let McCain deal with it. Then we may see Sarah Palin with Joe the Plumber as her VP vs. Hillary Clinton or Obama with Bill or Colin Powell as his/her VP. More Americans will be ready for a Democratic President in 2012 than they are right now. We will need more unemployment before a Democratic President will have the numbers to undo all the damage done. And McCain (with the support of the far right) will provide that opportunity.