The Democrats are in serious trouble - they might regain control.
If there was actually some kind of silver lining to the 2004 elections, it was this: Bush et al. got stuck with their own mess for a while longer. Had they been jettisoned at that moment, there would, no doubt, have been pundits insisting forever after that Iraq had been right on the verge of peace and harmony, when the Democrats came in and mucked it all up forever.
So, following that election - stolen or otherwise - the people who made the mess were left with it a little longer, until it became obvious to everyone that they were befuddled and bungling about in the dark. And now, at a very high price - an awful lot of violent deaths later - we see clearly that, lo, these people haven't a clue. At least on Iraq. So,what about this time?
Could there be some kind of silver lining if, once again, those electronic voting machines tally a Republican win?
And, is there something to fear if this time the voting machine totals somehow jive with how people say they voted - if the Democrats come back into power?
It's the economy, stupid.
The US economy has run right off a cliff.
For the past few years, we've been like a cartoon character that's still blithely gamboling along on the air, just waiting for some wise-ass flightless bird to point down.
The Republicans recently touted low unemployment figures as evidence of their success. And American conservatives love to play these numbers off against Europe's much higher ones. Unfortunately, no one but those American conservatives can pretend to take these figures seriously.
As Europeans have to regularly point out, the US method of calculating unemployment is so far off the rest of the developed world as to make the figures meaningless. Just for starters, the US has over two million working-age people it doesn't count, handily removed from the equation by incarceration (in a prison system that is itself a vast national make-work program) at a rate the dwarfs that of almost every other country in the world, and certainly of the European Union countries.
Worse, for the purposes of accurate analysis and comparison, the US doesn't even include all unemployed people when coming up with the figures, just the slice that are recently unemployed and registered as such.
By that method, we could pretty much cure cancer in the US: we simply declare that anyone who had cancer for more than a few months or was hospitalized wouldn't be included in the statistics... et voila; pouf!
Trying to calculate unemployment by the same methods across the board yields a real unemployment rate in the US of about 13%, well above that of any EU country, and without any of the social benefits to make such a condition less excruciating (and the threat of it less of a constant terror for most of us).
Ah, but there's worse. Much worse. The US manufacturing base has been decimated, more so than if relentless terrorists were sabotaging our factories with abandon. A country that once produced so much of the world's manufactured goods now has an export profile that, if you remove aircrafts, would be indistinguishable from many impoverished and struggling nations. We basically export agricultural goods and raw materials. Even that looks ugly when examined a little more closely - the agricultural goods are so heavily subsidized that US citizens are basically paying other countries to take them.
Our huge automobile industry, once an economic mainstay, now flounders around, self-congratulatory celebrating that they only lost X hundred million this year, down from Y hundred million last year. Hardly encouraging. They only survive due to their financing divisions. Of course one of the Big Three hasn't, it's owned by Mercedes now, and despite the hyphenated name, it's very clear who's in charge. (Even GM was recently being pushed into talks with the vastly more successful Renault, which now owns Nissan, both of which somehow manage to sell cars for a profit. Must be a French thing.)
And so it goes, from cotton to steel to TVs to... even the flagship IBM Thinkpad line is now owned by a Chinese company. (I have an old Thinkpad, with the logo unsubtly in red, white, and blue.)
Part of the Bush administration's stunningly inept response to 9/11 (as inept, one might say, as letting it happen in the first place) was telling us that the way to defeat the terrorists was to go buy more imported consumer junk. The first time I heard it, I thought it was actually an attempt at humor. I don't understand how us going to Wal-Mart and buying junk from China defeats terrorists. And, despite all the patient explanations, I just don't seem to be bright enough to get it.
Fortunately, despite the fact that we don't make anything anymore, just buy things and sell each other houses to generate economic activity, other countries have been quite generous to us. Well, one country in particular - China. The Bush administration, graced initially with this large budget surplus which it quickly squandered, has just been borrowing massive, staggering amounts from China to keep the US economy going, money that's funneled to the wealthy "base" in a variety of ways, from tax cuts (handily paid for by borrowing from China) to lucrative defense contracts (handily paid for by borrowing from China).
The only thing standing between us and that gaping canyon below is China's continued willingness to let us borrow ourselves into oblivion... that and the petrodollar, which forces the whole world to buy and hold reserves in dollars.
The petrodollar is like home-court advantage plus two extra players, both named Michael Jordan. It's like paying for things with checks that no one ever cashes.
But the world is steadily losing faith in the US economy (and not just our economy), and thus the dollar has taken a dramatic plunge since Bush took office. Far from gaining, we've all become about 30% poorer compared to nasty "Old Europe".
We just don't notice it because China has its currency artificially pegged to ours, so all that Wal-Mart junk stays the same. But that has costs for the ordinary Chinese, who are poorer than they would otherwise be, and those ordinary Chinese are becoming restless. (The Bush administration has been pushing China to let the renminbi float, typically bunglingly ignorant of the genie they'll be letting out of the bottle.)
And with that loss of faith, the rest of the world is now looking to a stable currency - which after all was the supposed advantage of the dollar. The world's stable currency now, since Bush treasury abdicated, is the Euro. And a lot of restless, uppity natives are starting to ask why they shouldn't be conducting petroleum trades in Euros. (Particularly uppity were Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which was why they became the Axis of Evil. Venezuela followed suit, and we did what we've traditionally done with such outrageous displays of democracy - backed a coup... but things are changing, and this time, our little Latin American coup not only failed, but we weren't able to send in the Marines to set things straight and "restore democracy".)
At this point, the Euro makes more sense for everybody. And if/when the petrodollar falls, we fall with it - those millions of checks we've been using to pay for everything for so long are suddenly going to come home all at once (i.e., they'll suddenly want Euros for their dollars), and the bank account just won't cover it. Alienating the rest of the world doesn't help keep them on board.
So what happens next? Well, we can't keep running on air forever. At some point, we do have to look down. In Russia, it's been said they could never forgive Gorbachev for telling them that his predecessors had left the country broke, and that changes needed to come.
Somehow, despite having substanial control over all three branches of the federal government, the Republicans were still able to cleverly keep blaming everything on the Democrats. I'm not sure the Democrats will be quite so clever (or irresponsible).
Democrats and Republicans are often compared to the Mommy and the Daddy parties. Well, Daddy's an out-of-control drunk who's been pretending to go to work each day while actually just maxing out the credit cards so he can take us out to dinner and bring home those lavish presents.
When Mommy finds out, and tries to set things straight, and the toys and the dinners stop coming... do we blame her? Will we ever forgive her?
Those are the questions I fear we're going to be looking at very soon.