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COLD OPEN |
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So we're almost home.
On Monday night President Obama and
Mitt Romney finished their third debate. It doesn't really matter how you scored
it. (I thought it was Romney's weakest performance.) The only relevant point is
that Romney won the debating portion of the race, decisively. And this verdict
isn't some subjective judgment. It’s just fact. Look at the
numbers.
Before the debates, Romney was consistently behind by somewhere
between four and six points. Today Romney is, at worst, even with the sitting
president of the United States. And he may actually be ahead by a nose. It's the
strongest position he's been in during the entire race.
So barring any
destabilizing incident, we may be headed toward a toss-up election in which the
Republican challenger has a 50-50 chance to unseat a Democratic incumbent who
had won election by the largest margin of any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. If
I had offered those odds on January 21, 2009, I bet you would have taken them in
a New York minute.
That said, I see two strains of thought out there that
seem unwarranted. On
the one hand, there are some Republicans projecting an air of such
confidence that it’s a little unseemly. In these circles, the idea that Romney
is riding a wave of unstoppable momentum seems overly optimistic. Romney surged,
at the right time, and that surge has stuck. But while he hasn't backslid more
than a point or so, even the most optimistic polling for him (from Gallup) has
had him in the same strong position for a few weeks now.
I understand
that, tactically speaking, these Romney bulls are trying to project strength in
the hope that reality
will follow. And that's fine. But at the same time, you never taunt the
baseball gods.
In the other camp are Republicans who wish the situation
was brighter. After all, Obama is the most vulnerable incumbent since Carter or
Ford—maybe even since Hoover. And I would agree that had Romney run a more
substantive, forward-looking campaign—showing America the guy from that first
debate—he might be in a more comfortable position. Maybe even a commanding
one.
But that's all in the past, and despite Romney's campaign
missteps—his thin proposals, a convention that was largely squandered, and the
47 percent implosion—he's still got a very real shot to beat Obama. I said
before that those odds would have looked great in January 2009, but the truth is
they would have looked great a month ago, too. And that's not
nothing.
All that's left now is the sprint to the finish. And then the
great and good American people will speak. |
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| LOOKING BACK |
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"However, those searching for an overarching Kerry foreign
policy vision or doctrine would have to wait. Waging the 'more effective'
struggle against Islamic extremists that Kerry promises on campaign stops would
have to suffice. A post-9/11 Democratic foreign policy that places American
moral values on the same pedestal as American power, to strengthen international
consensus and institutions to defeat terror, is still a work in
progress.
"Nevertheless, John Kerry is certain in his gut about what is
right with his view of the world and what is wrong with George Bush's view. The
two men have starkly different assessments of who the enemy is and what it will
take to defeat him. A Kerry presidency would demonstrate that divide from the
outset."
| THE READING LIST |
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The
battle for Best Buy.
* * *
China's
high-speed rail boondoggle finally crashes to earth.
* * *
How
to pick passwords that hackers can't break. |
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| INSTANT CLASSIC |
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"I mention McGovern in my column today, but now would like to
add that as much as I believe it would have been terrible for the country if he
had won in 1972, I do have great respect for him. We've met a few times and I've
always found him to be a gentleman. What a contrast to the sneering, snarling
Joe Biden. McGovern and I have corresponded a bit over the years. He read some
of my columns and offered his views, sometimes agreeing and sometimes not, but
always polite and agreeable. He was that rare thing in politics — someone for
whom the truth mattered.
"He once tried his hand at running a bed and
breakfast and was appalled by the government regulation that made running a
business so difficult. He was honest enough to say that if he had known this
before serving in Congress, it would have altered his votes on a number of
issues.
"The last time I saw him was at Bill Buckley's funeral. Of course
he would pay his respects."
—Mona Charen, October
16, 2012. |
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| LOOKING AHEAD |
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| We'll have stories on the election going into the final days of
the race in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. |
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| THE LAST WORD |
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Three pieces of bad news:
(1) Last week David Smick had a
bracing
essay about the economic perils that await the next president. Actually,
bracing isn't quite the word for it. Maybe terrifying is better.
The political party that
controls the White House after January could, four years later, be out of power
for a generation. The economic challenges are that daunting…
The risk
stems from something more fundamental: The globalization model of the past 30
years is cracking up. And there appears to be no new model to replace
it.
What has Smick worried is this: Global exports are falling
everywhere; not just China, but 12 other countries are also manipulating their
currencies against the dollar; and cross-border lending has dried up. In sum,
the era of globalization might be over. And, as Smick points out, it’s waning
before we've come up with a system to replace it.
If Smick is right, then
in the macroeconomic sense it would matter only slightly whether Obama or Romney
is president because neither has any idea as to what will refill the hole in
America's GDP that will be left by the shriveling of our financial services
sector which, at the peak of globalization, accounted for 40 percent of U.S.
corporate profits.
But don't worry. It gets worse.
(2) As Smick
was writing, Tom Edsall pointed
to a hypothesis put forward by Northwestern economist Robert Gordon, which
boils down to this: The era of U.S. economic growth is over.
Gordon's
theory is that America isn't in recession; it's at the beginning of the new
normal. American economic expansion, he argues, has been the result of a series
of technological revolutions—agricultural, industrial, financial, and
informational. And now we're plum out of revolutions.
In a way, this is
a variation on Tyler Cowen’s Great
Stagnation thesis. And my natural inclinations lead me to be sympathetic to
this argument. It's the long-form version of saying that 60 years ago the best
and brightest figured out how to go to the moon; today the best and brightest
build apps for your iPhone. We're all about small-ball today.
(3)
Finally, there’s George Will’s recent
column about the problem with America’s democratic consensus. Will writes,
Rash promises were made, Greve
says, "in an era of prosperity, when and because we thought we could afford
them." Now they "are far too entrenched to be dislodged in the course of
ordinary politics." Even granting Mitt Romney's embrace of something like his
running mate's reforms, this year's politics are terribly ordinary. Although
consensus is supposedly elusive, it actually is the problem. "Our operative
consensus," says Greve, "is to have a big transfer state, and not pay for
it."
Looking at these three diagnoses, I'd propose that while all three
have merit, there's something bigger lurking beneath the surface. And that thing
is the single most important aspect of American life.
Lots of things have
changed between 1945 and today. The most elemental is this: In 1945, America's
population was on a course of steady growth; today that growth curve has
flattened out and will eventually begin to decline. Because Americans don't have
enough children to replace themselves and the only thing keeping our population
from shrinking—for the moment—is immigration.
As Smick, Edsall, and Will
make clear, America may have several discrete problems—the end of globalization
or a lack of revolutions or an addiction to voting entitlement programs for
itself. But each of these is undergirded by our larger demographic
problem.
Globalization falters when exports shrink, but that decline is
the result of slackening demand created by falling fertility. As a country's
fertility rate falls, its median age rises, and eventually its population
shrinks. And the only good an old, shrinking society increases consumption of is
healthcare.
If we're seeing a slowdown of technological progress, that
too can be traced to demographics. Decades of economic research suggest that innovation
is a function of population.
And as for the entitlement problem Will
talks about, remember that the inherent problems with Social Security, pensions,
and Medicare aren't that these promises were made by a society that was more
prosperous. It's that they were made by a society that was creating the
taxpayers to support them at a much higher rate. America isn't poorer than it
was during the Baby Boom years—we're much wealthier by almost every measure.
What's changed are the assumptions about our population. People don't have as
many children as they used to, so we're not creating as many future taxpayers as
we had planned to.
And it's not just us. Look around the world at
countries where the population is stagnating (or contracting), and you'll see
economies stagnating, too, just like ours is today. In the 1990s, people thought
Japan was experiencing a mysterious "Lost Decade" where growth was suddenly put
on hold. But it turned out that the mystery wasn't all that hard to solve:
Japan’s economy was crippled by the country's demographics. And their Lost
Decade continues today.
Well soon, it's going to be Japan's "Lost Decade"
everywhere, all the time. |
| MORE FROM THE
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