It seems likely that the man who wins the presidential race gets the booby-prize. The new president’s task would daunt Hercules.

The difficulty of guiding and protecting America, leading the West, and keeping guard over the whole seething world at this point in human affairs should be too formidable for any man or woman of normal intelligence to think of tackling it.

Either both candidates have a measure of self-confidence in their capabilities amounting to almost lunatic self-delusion, or both are astonishingly blind to what they’d be undertaking.

America is in the grip of an economic crisis that no man and his dogs can save it from. Only time and free economic activity can eventually restore confidence and prosperity. But both candidates propose regulation: one of them full-blown socialism. Their remedies can only make the crisis worse. The winner will be blamed and damned for that, but even if he should decide not to regulate, blame and cursing is what he’ll get.

The world is threatened by the dark regressive force of militant Islam; by proliferating nuclear arms in the hands of evil men; by an aggressive Russia and the rising power of Communist China; and by the slow but steady pre-emptive capitulation of an ignominious Western Europe to all these threats. One candidate seems not to grasp the reality of the dangers, and might even have sympathy with the ideologies behind them. Neither candidate could bring himself to warn Islam, or the evil despots, or Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese potentates, that America is willing to use its military might to force them to change their ways. Without that threat and a manifest resolution to carry it out, nothing will stop them.

While we fall ever deeper into debt with China; while Russian warships cruise the Caribbean and Russian arms and technology strengthen our enemies in South America and the Middle East; while every day Islam advances further until it can overwhelm us; our Don Quixote in the White House will go to war against the weather. Some will praise him for that, no doubt, until real disaster ruins him and them.

In the light of all this, competing for the presidency looks very like competing for the captaincy of the Titanic.

If one of the candidates should suddenly see clearly what he will be confronted by if he wins, he might do everything he can to hand the victory and the burden to the other. Perhaps John McCain is doing just that. It’s the only plausible explanation for his failure to use the potent ammunition he’s got against Barack Obama, to defeat him in the contest for the dreadful job of leading us to shipwreck.

Jillian Becker

October 2008