The banking crisis is affecting the country in ways that no one predicted, except for the government regulators who were forced from their jobs for warning about the consequences of deregulation. America has gambled with Wall Street and lost, yet neither presidential candidate sees fit to discuss the causes of the catastrophe. Political campaigns are not a time for reflection. Just as Americans express frustration with the war in Iraq when they should be angry with themselves for supporting it on the flimsiest of evidence, so it is with the economy. Neither McCain nor Obama has the slightest idea of what to do, and neither dares to acknowledge that substantial taxes may be necessary to pay for such massive spending. This election is, like so many others, a study in systematic evasion.

In foreign affairs, the choice between McCain and Obama is the choice between the frying pan and the fire. One aspirant to the presidency is happy to see America stay in Iraq for even a hundred years. The other would pull American troops out of Iraq in order to leap into Afghanistan, a land of pot growers, bandits, Taliban zealots, jihadist training camps, and ferocious Pashtun fighters that neither the British empire nor the Soviet Union could subdue.

Whoever wins the White House may carry on the cynical tradition of the Republican Party. In the ’50s, candidate Eisenhower promised he knew what to do about the Korean War. Americans expected a military solution, only to discover that the general aimed to withdraw. In the ’70s, Nixon and Kissinger charged the Democrats with losing Vietnam and assured us that they had turned the war around by leaving South Vietnam stable and militarily strong—only for the whole country to fall to communism weeks after America departed. In the ’80s, Reagan withdrew from Lebanon with the same rationale: even though 241 Marines had been slaughtered in their barracks, the task force succeeded in doing the “job it was sent to do in Beirut.”

Republicans have no trouble losing a war and calling it a victory, and some of them are voting for McCain for that reason. Obama, in contrast, is stuck with a war he opposed, and politics may force him to stay the course. Still, I prefer the professor to the warrior. McCain claims he is thinking only about the good of the country, then chooses as his running mate a gun-happy huntress who supported the Alaskan independence movement, which advocates secession from the United States. No wonder she is idolized by those who disdain the very federal government that built the Alaskan Highway. As Orwell observed, those receiving benefits always hate the benefactor. 

John Patrick Diggins is a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History.

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Daniel McCarthy

Scott McConnell

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Robert A. Pape

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

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