Forget for a moment about Election Day and stop to listen to the noises in the old house that is America. Look far into the distance toward the political horizon, too, when you can get the first hint of what will be racing toward you before too long.
What do you hear and what do you see?
First, you hear buzzing hornets, one of nature’s most ominous and disturbing portents. Think of them as Social Security, crime, social policy and immigration, festering behind the siding, waiting for the chance to break out and cause big trouble.
And what is on the political horizon? Could be recession, an inevitable part of the formula of capitalism and, some would argue, growing a little overdue so many months into a boom. Or is it foreign policy?
Taxes are out there somewhere too. Hardly anyone in the civilized world pays lower taxes than Americans. Taxes have to go up at some point. No one likes to admit that, but the nation faces expensive problems, and someone has to pay for them.
All of this is what Election Day is really about.
It is not a question of President Clinton’s ethics or sleight of tongue or whether First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is too aggressive. Neither is it a question of Bob Dole’s vintage and the fact that he has been unable to make two happy campaign trail days fall beside one another in a long time.
No matter who is president, the waning days of the 20th Century present a collection of serious challenges, delayed responses to problems that have been growing for years. These are the price a nation pays for not paying close enough attention to the house or keeping a good eye on the weather.
From the perspective of these problems, it doesn’t really matter what happens on Election Day. They will arrive nonetheless, unaffected by White House occupancy. So, the deeper question for Election Day is not who are you going to vote for, but what are you going to do about all of this?
Congressional Quarterly spent weeks and weeks worrying about these problems, had some meetings, talked it through and, in good think-tank fashion, packaged them all into one big, troubling bundle.
The biggest question mark for the next president is the economy, something he can do very little about but that will affect how his presidency is measured and whether he will have the chance to do anything about the rest of the challenges that await him.
If he makes it through the whole term without an economic downturn, that would mean the economy has escaped recession for a whole decade. If he doesn’t, the electorate will get another look at just how powerless a president can be in the face of vast economic forces.
People suddenly will come to realize how important the Federal Reserve Board is. Interest rates will go up. Lots of vibrant parts of the economy like home building and its related industries will go into the tank, and the whole distressing array of developments related to recession will arrive, once again.
On the federal budget front, the time for handling the long-term problem of Social Security is ticking away. Early in the next century, all those Baby Boomers who changed the demographics of just about everything will start to retire.
It is fashionable in some circles to announce that you plan to work forever, but it is not likely that the Baby Boomers will buy into that formula. There won’t be enough money in Social Security to pay out benefits unless some big changes take place soon. It will be an expensive fix, politically and economically. If it doesn’t happen, entitlements for the aging will gobble up vast chunks of the federal budget and push up the deficit.
Everyone is worried about crime these days, even though the numbers it is measured by are dropping. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved.
One school of thought predicts a crime boom that will make that of the 1980s and 1990s look meek by comparison. The argument is that crime goes up when the number of impoverished teenagers goes up, and the nation is about to move into a population boom of impoverished teenagers.
What to do? If the theory is right, having a lot less impoverished teenagers would be one way to address the problem. It is clear at this point that there is no such thing as building enough prisons to deter crime. They get filled up, and then you need to build more.
Conservatives say get tough with criminals. That argument is getting tired and is constructed on a flawed piece of logic, that the time to do something about crime is after it creates a victim.
Progressives argue that intervention is needed before a problem develops. That seems to make sense, but the nation has never had much tolerance for social programs for those who aren’t solidly middle class. It will buy a welfare program like Social Security, but it won’t buy a welfare program like, well, welfare.
No one really knows what to do about crime, other than to try to contain it. Decades after politics decided to address a vaguely defined and poorly understood drug problem, for example, what it has created is a well-measured, well-understood and clearly documented drug problem. Knowing with great precision exactly how bad off we are is small consolation.
Foreign policy has not been discussed much in the campaign this year, quite a surprise given the dangerous state of much of the world.
The U.S. spent so much of the 20th Century dealing with Germany and the Soviet Union that it is not very surprising it is ready to take a breather as the century ends. But it is not time to rest.
What about Asia?
China is a big question mark. Korea is a big question mark. Taiwan is a big question mark. And so on. What will happen in the politics and economics of these places is impossible to predict. There are those who paint China as the new Soviet Union, and those who say it wants nothing more than to live peacefully in a world full of trading partners.
North Korea continues downward on the slide to economic and political Hades. The closer it gets to the bottom, the greater the fears grow of another war with South Korea, into which the U.S. inevitably would be drawn.
And what does the president do if China actually decides to swallow Taiwan? How far will the president elected Tuesday be willing to go to safeguard the island?
For that matter, what about the Middle East, Central and South America, Africa, and the emerging economies and political realities in the former Soviet sphere?
Pat Buchanan will not be president, but that doesn’t mean the longing for a wall around the America has passed. The next president will have to confront growing political turmoil over immigration.
The immigration question is the most delicate of political issues, and there is no small amount of hypocrisy at work around it. It is not at all about what language someone speaks, although it is often expressed in those terms.
It is easy to argue that this nation of immigrants should always keep its doors wide open. But it never really has. The same formula is at work as the one a century ago. Despite flag waving and anthem singing, illegal immigrants are a terrific source of dirt cheap labor.
The only way to stop the flow is to stop the demand, which could mean national ID cards and strong penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants.
Although defense spending always draws a lot of gabbing in political circles, the matter is largely resolved. The Democrats and the Republicans are not a hair’s distance apart on their long-term budgets. The question now is what is the president is going to do with the $260 billion or so the Pentagon will be spending a year?
Tanks to face the anticipated Soviet assault justified fat defense budgets only a decade ago but clearly are passe these days. Little geopolitical problems are likely to pop up with increasing frequency. Occasionally, someone who doesn’t have one now will show up with a nuclear bomb and will require some diplomatic or military handling.
Finally, taxes. Clinton and the Republican Congress have done an admirable job of cutting the deficit, but that is a short-term game. Entitlements will continue to drive up the cost of government, and taxes will have to increase to take care of them.
The great shifting of responsibility to state governments is most likely to continue, although the great shifting of money to help cover the cost is not.
That is likely to mean that one of the distant clouds on the horizon is higher state and local taxes. What a twist it would be for the president to deliver on the promise of that blessed “middle class tax cut,” only to see its benefits disappear at the state and local level.
