As he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in August to take on Republican John McCain in what has been a historically significant effort to become the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama said this of America, “We are a better country than this.”
In light of what happened in the US economy since and the global mayhem that has ensued, we couldn’t agree more. And that belief is one singular reason why this newspaper, published some 11,977km away from the White House, is today formally endorsing Obama as the best person to be elected the next president of the US.
We believe the world’s largest economy—and its political, cultural and intellectual capital— still make America the essential nation. The current economic and stock markets crises, we hope, end up being seen as a transformational crisis because what failed us wasn’t necessarily free markets, something Mint has proudly stood for since its own birth, but greed abetted by a failure of transparency. The danger, as some of our columnists have pointed out in recent weeks, is that the very US-led global financial bailout will make some push for a permanent role for governments and bureaucrats in running all aspects of many economies. When those voices become as loud and irrational as those bullish voices that created the crisis, America, we think, will again have to play a vital role in shaping that global debate, just as the US government acted quickly and decisively—while many governments, including that of India, just talked—once the magnitude of the current problem was clear. This is vital because the past few weeks have clearly shown how interlinked we all are, no matter where one lives. As an Irish proverb says, “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”
Barack Obama
Therefore, the fact that the past eight years under George W. Bush have seen a disastrous slide in America’s global standing don’t necessarily give us much cheer even if there are some who want to see a false silver lining in this decline, perhaps a faster rise for China and, maybe, even India.
Today’s America is one whose health is weak and, more importantly, whose morale is low. For good reason. Under eight years of post-Bill Clinton Republican rule in America, some five million citizens of that wealthy nation have fallen into poverty while seven million more citizens are now without health insurance.
A US-started war and the resultant fighting has already gone on longer than America’s involvement in World War II, killing tens of thousands, Americans and Iraqis alike. America’s national debt has almost doubled and is close to $10 trillion, and the Bush administration has run up what looks like a $500 billion—and mounting—federal deficit (even as it spent at least $600 billion on the Iraq conflict), after starting its term with a $700 billion surplus in 2001.