A hopeful view of hope

With the election only days away, every blogger, now matter how unqualified, must record his or her thoughts on the candidates. Since an Obama victory seems likely, I would like to offer an optimistic take on what will happen if the candidate of change and hope takes the oval office.

My guess is that he will not lead effectively, because he has no record of leading effectively. In the past, he has been controlled by the far left edge of the Democratic agenda, and that will probably remain true. So he will boldly and prophetically enact any number of hair-raisingly bad laws and policies, aided and indeed directed by his democratic congress. The age of entitlement will begin.

As liberal as Americans are, we are not as a group ready for socialism quite yet, so too much too fast may cause the frog to jump out of the water. Voters will be horrified by the extremism of the far left, and we will get a "swing effect" at the next election, to the benefit--God willing--of someone more insightful than John McCain. This swing effect will be augmented by the fact that the Democrats will controll the entire federal government for four years, and so every problem that arises within the four years will be perceived by voters as the Democrats' fault, whether or not the accusation is fair.

But will damage done by four years of Obama outweight the good of Democratic implosion? That depends almost entirely on the republican candidate four years from now: if we get a dynamic and principled leader, then he will use the momentum of the swing to undo the wreckage and even improve the nation; if we get a politician-at-heart figurehead whose virtue is a lack of vice, then we will be one step further down the road to serfdom.