The Man Destined to Fail

Up until this point all of my posts have been tied directly to a specific news article or event; I feel that it is now time for a change of pace.

With the presidential election just over a month away, both candidates have ramped up the efforts of their private muckrakers and begun saturating the airwaves with an unprecedented amount of advertising. This, combined with he recent string of life altering events on the national stage (the credit crisis, hurricane Ike, renewed violence in Afghanistan), has led me to form a hypothesis:

The next President will be inevitably be, at best, a disappointment. They will go down in history like Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson; their terms in office will be marked by comments about difficult and ultimately unsuccessful battles against nigh unsolvable problems. At worst, and this seems increasingly likely given the recent unscrupulous ads put out by the McCain campaign, they will be framed as total failures and four years from now Americans will vote for a get-the-job-done-no-matter-what-the-cost politician(see Nixon, Tyler).

Part of the reason I think this is an increasingly likely scenario is the unnaturally high expectations that voters have for their candidates this election cycle. Americans have put the next president in a position where he'll have to solve several problems, which have been stewing for nearly a decade, in just four years. The chance of success is very slim and the the margin for error is even slimmer. However, the primary reason for my prediction involves the death, in the media and in the perception of Americans, of truth. The media and politicians constantly bombard the American public with contradictory claims about the issues of this election. For example, if I ask a conservative pundit about Sarah Palin's involvement in the dubious "Bridge to Nowhere" I will likely hear that she stopped it. However if I ask a liberal pundit, I am likely to hear that not only did Palin not stop the project, she was complicit in it. What is more, both of these pundits would present their views on the issue as facts. Thus, the audience members of these pundits will be at an impasse if they try to have a dialog about Palin with a person from the opposing party. Both people will believe they have irrefutable evidence that they are correct. This sort of situation arises constantly in today's media saturated society and it has led to a situation in which the truth is simply what people choose to believe. Because of this the next president will seem to be a savior to the Americans who voted for him, and a grave mistake to those who didn't.
Every decision he makes will be followed by a flurry of propaganda from the opposition, and another "factual" impasse will be created.

I don't think this will be the end of the American Experiment, new web 2.0 technologies seem to be a budding solution to this problem, but I would be very surprised if the next few presidents ever have an approval rating that tops 55%.