Georgia Dome
by Dwayne Hood

ATLANTA, Ga. — The fat lady has sung.

The confetti has been swept from the floor, inauguration plans are made, and America is closing a chapter on one of the worst presidencies in our history.

Political honeymoons are nice but inevitably short lived. In the coming year, Americans will awake to the sad fact that Barack Obama is just another man, like all of the other men that we’ve elected to our nation’s highest office. He is not a messiah who can walk on water, feed the masses, or resurrect our economy from eight years of deregulated greed.

But Obama is refreshingly intelligent and has surrounded himself with brilliant, experienced people with differing views. He has assembled an impressive cabinet in a short period of time. And sadly enough, they will be called into service before January 20th because our present government is dysfunctional.

The remnants of the Bush administration are quietly stepping aside as the nation and the world waits to see how this new president and the Democrat-controlled Congress will confront two wars and the worst economic crisis since our Great Depression.

Here are a few predictions of what will and will not happen during the next four years.

The Democrats will not rub the Republicans’ noses in their loss as the GOP did to Democrats in 1995. The Obama administration will govern to the center and work for compromise with Republicans. And some Republicans will reach back across the aisle because they don’t want to be found on the wrong side of history. An age of continual gridlock will slowly thaw into reason and moderation.

The economic crisis will get worse in the coming years and the Obama administration’s mission will be damage control in preventing a deep, painful recession from imploding into a full-blown depression. There will be further job cuts, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and tax payer-funded bailouts. But we will eventually bottom out and slowly rebuild ourselves into a smaller but stronger economy able to weather 21st-century global challenges.

Obama will call upon Americans to sacrifice. That is a concept unknown to a majority of people. Our president’s response to a national crisis will no longer be a call to go shopping. It will be to work more, spend less, and do without.

The legacy of the Obama administration will probably be a Marshall-type plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and become energy independent. They will also address the dangers of global warming. There will be a bridge loan to the Big Three automakers with many strings and conditions attached. But it still may not be able to save all three. The Big Three may become the Big Two, but a segment of our manufacturing base will survive. And our remaining automakers and suppliers may eventually be merged into international auto conglomerates led from abroad.

The heyday of the American union is also over. The power of organized labor will surrender to the realities of globalization. There will still be unions but their power to control entire industries has ended.

And sadly, Joe “the gaffe machine” Biden is probably right. Obama will face an international challenge within his first year in office. We may even suffer another terrorist attack on our shores. But this new president will meet the challenge without landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier.

The war in Iraq will dramatically downsize into a troubled occupation. Most of our troops will be withdrawn in the coming four years. This will happen for several reasons. We do not have the billions of dollars necessary to keep 150,000 troops there for another four years. Al-Qaeda is also reconstituting itself into a force threatening enough to redeploy more forces into Afghanistan. And the Iraqi government is calling for our withdrawal.

As our troops withdraw, there will be widespread violence but it will be no worse than what we have seen in the past five years. The Iraqis will survive but their government will not be a democracy. The ultimate winners of our unnecessary invasion will be Iran which will coerce and control an Iraqi government amenable to their demands.

The United States will regain the moral standing among nations that was squandered during the past eight years. We will stop torturing prisoners and will shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Other constitutional violations such as illegal wiretaps, secret prisons, and politicization of the Justice Department will end. But many abuses of the past administration will go largely unpunished because of presidential pardons.

Some campaign promises will also fade to the harsh realities of an economic collapse. The health care and education issues in America will worsen because money and political willpower will be focused elsewhere. We can only put out so many forest fires at the same time. Priorities will be made and health care and education will languish.

Attention on illegal immigration and gay marriage will also decline. The collapse of our markets is already creating a silent, undocumented society of unemployed workers. The influx of new aliens will lessen as job markets dry up. And gay unions will continue as society debates the semantics on what to call it. Political fervor will die only to be kick-started by the GOP as a tired campaign issue in four years. But ultimately, gay marriage will recede from public view much like gays in the military, gays on television, and gays in the workplace, etc.

One of the overreaching victories of an Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will be future appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judicial pendulum will thankfully swing back to the center with at least two new appointments. That will rescue our court and our civil liberties from a possible Joe McCarthy-type conservatism.

The Republican Party will also reinvent itself into a kinder, gentler, and much smarter alternative to the Democratic Party. The GOP now stands at a serious crossroads. The Sarah Palin social fundamentalists want to pull the party farther to the right into a modern day puritanism. Nothing could make the party more irrelevant.

But new leaders such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford will lead the party back to the center. They will succeed because evangelicals will stop trying to vote their way into heaven and will trade their rigid ideology for moderates who can govern. The future GOP will have to open itself to different demographics in order to survive.

The Civil Rights Movement will also evolve away from grievance politics and white guilt to focus on paralyzing conditions African Americans inflict upon themselves. New spokespeople will promote jobs, education, marriage, health care, child care, and community activism. While discrimination will still exist and be decried, new leaders will call for less protest and more personal accountability.

The social and governmental torch is being passed to a new generation of Americans in both political parties. The culture wars of the past 40 years are being set aside to confront the most serious challenges of our lifetime. American history teaches us that great leaders are not born or simply elected into greatness. They are created by the trials and times in which they serve.

We now stand at the threshold of those times and trials. The next four years will determine who answers the call to our national destiny.

Dwayne Hood is a former newspaper reporter from Alabama who now spends most of his time in more academic pursuits, although he writes this weekly column exclusively for The Locust Fork News-Journal.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under The Bush Years.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.