Amidst the rhetoric, the celebration, and the flourish of the phrasing, Obama can always look back and say, `I told you so.' He is lowering American expectations; he stated it in his acceptance speech. Most people will miss this key point in the joy that they feel tonight but he said it loud and clear. Obama is planning to take eight years to accomplish his plans on the scale of an FDR.
Given the seriousness of the issues confronting the next President I wonder if it is realistic to expect much at all.
Roosevelt had four months to come up with programs to address the Great Depression before he took office in 1933; Obama gets just 2 1/2 months to put a government in place.
Unemployment is at 6.1% and predicted to rise as high as 7.5% next year; worried consumers have curtailed borrowing and spending; home foreclosures are common; Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security face huge financial overdrafts; government debt is at its highest point in American history, debts are owed to Japan, China, and Middle Eastern banks flush with cash; and, 152,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq more than five years after the initial action, while an additional 32,000 are in Afghanistan in the sixth year of the war against Islamofascism.
Obama will be pulled politically from the left and from the right. He will face demands for a quicker pullout from Iraq, if he does so, the security issues remain, the sacrifices made by our military will be in vain, and Americans will be no safer, enemies of the U.S. will see this withdrawal as a huge victory as they have proclaimed in the past, and another military return, following this Iraq War, as the Coalition had to return after the First Persian Gulf War may be necessary.
From the acceptance speech, Obama reached for high aspirations, but he is really tempering Americans for lowering their expectations.
Obama certainly has not outlined how he will deal with the recession; its in his lap now.
A huge electoral victory is not change, nor does it indicate success.
LBJ won with 61% of the vote in 1964: an overwhelming Presidential victory. He enacted his Great Society programs in his first two years but his administration essentially folded with as he described it, "That damn war," the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Currently, Obama has offered few specifics on how he would govern.
The economy can certainly provide a powerful motivator. It certainly worked for Hitler.
If I recall my history correctly though, things didn't work out too well then.
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