Obamamania (James Kunstler)

[Tace]

James Kunstler -- Clusterfuck Nation

Feb. 12, 2007 -- You've really got to feel sorry for whoever gets sworn in as president in 2009. Whichever of the candidates gets there, he or she will be walking into a shit storm of trouble much worse than the domestic political turmoil that Lincoln faced in 1861.

By January 2009 we will surely be reeling from the "work out" of peak financial excess represented by the hedge fund fiesta and the reckless mortgage fiasco (from which the housing industry as we have known it will never recover). By Jan. 20, 2009 (inauguration day), the global oil crisis will be accepted as self-evident even by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (and its clients in the oil industry). By Jan. 20, 2009, we will have gone through two more global warming hurricane seasons. By Jan. 20, 2009, we will have spent several hundred billion dollars more maintaining our garrisons in the Middle East and elsewhere -- and the strategic concerns that have required them will still be there.

This translates into severe socioeconomic hardship at home and deteriorating influence on the geopolitical scene. Under the circumstances, Senator Barack Obama seemed perhaps oddly serene in last night's interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" with newsman Steve Kroft. It was not an idle, unmindful serenity, though. Obama, who spent many childhood years in Hawaii, seems to know what it's like to stand on the beach and watch a killer wave roll in. Just knowing that the killer wave is only one in an infinite succession of waves that will roll in eternally lends more dimension to this essentially tragic view -- and the tragic hero is typically the person required by destiny to get hammered by the killer wave, but goes forth to greet it anyway. Perhaps Obama's most appealing quality is his stoicism in the face of this awful assignment.

His most telling answer was to Kroft's question: "Why are you in such a hurry to become president?" Obama replied succinctly that "we may not have ten years" to get our national act back together. By saying this, he managed to get across what most Americans over eleven years of age must suspect in their heart-of-hearts, no matter how hard they are partying, or working to cover their re-set mortgage, or praying to Jesus for a winning lottery ticket: that circumstances will compel us to live differently, whether we like it or not.

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[BeyondGeography]

1. He's got the curmudgeon on his side

That's saying something.