Foreign Policies: as a nation we are in an odd, almost inexplicable position. We are the global hegemon, the single greatest concentration of political, economic and military power in human history. And yet we seem functionally unable to use this power to our own advantage.--
The military response to militant Islam appears to be both ineffective in the larger sense of establishing us as the "attractive" choice for Middle Eastern moderates and inextricable in trapping us in a Groundhog Day in Central Asia. Through our own efforts we have managed to make our likely soon-to-be Great Power rivals, China and India (and probably Russia) the winners of our Iraq War (Gary Brechner explains it better here) while empowering Iran as the regional power we should have tried to contain.
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Meanwhile the problems we create for ourselves by tying our fortunes to the ill-thought-out "crusader state" , Israel, are magnified by our own geopolitical ineptitude and our unwillingness to do what Great Powers should do and force our proxy/ally to do what we need it to do to accomplish our policy goals. The farce at Annapolis was just the latest blockheaded attempt to try and get what we want without having the sack to force Israel to destroy its settlements and disgorge the conquered lands we will need to have a chance at preventing our discomforture at the hands of the eventual latter-day Saladin.
Our current president makes it clear that he has no intention of significantly reducing our costly commitment to occupation - to the contrary, he and the current strongman in Iraq are attempting to lock in American occupation troops for a half-decade or more. This is useful to the current administration on multiple levels; as a foot in the petroleum source door, as a domestic political stick to beat the Democrats and other Americans disturbed and distrustful of the Republican indifference to Constitutional liberties.--
The domestic myopia of political advantage and the obsession with Islamic boogeymen abroad have combined to prevent us from being able to deal with the potential problems of a resurgent Russia and an aggressive China, not to mention the many unstable and potential trouble areas in Africa and the Americas. All this is locked in by our commitment to the Middle East, a commitment that will not be easy to reverse even if our "leadership" was decided on it. It is not.
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The inevitable result will be that no choice we make in November 2008 will affect this. We are now committed to being the imperial power in Iraq for the forseeable future, barring a general (think 1920 against the British) uprising. Which, given the political disarray of the country, the Iraqis are unlikely to manage short of an American Amritsar.
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Domestic Policies: the fundamental understanding we as Americans have about our nation and its government has been irrevocably - again, short of another Revolution - shifted. We have accepted - and will continue to accept - invasions of and restrictions on our personal choices and liberties for many reasons. Confusion regarding the extent and nature of the official lawbreaking; fear of enemies, both real and imagined by those same officials to justify their acts; simple sloth and loss of civic engagement. Our slow slide towards more complete oligarchy and personal surveillance will continue. Since we don't understand the issues, and no candidate wants to address them, this will not even be a serious campaign issue next fall. The descent will continue.
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Economic Policies: IMO the real ticking bomb. With a nation increasingly dependant on foreign investment, a nation losing the ability to manufacture or grow what it needs, a nation hostage to an inevitably-peaking (and possibly post-peaking) petroleum system for everything from transportation to agriculture, my guess is that we are within a generation or less of a major economic meltdown.
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One of the least-covered of the GOP revolution that has changed American life since Reagan has been the massive deregulation and devolution of oversight over everything from power generation to fuel economy to food production. The "subprime mortgage" mess is just a symptom; the real illness is that over the past thirty years the brakes have been taken off our economy. The entire farrago has been profitable predominantly for the rentier class that is largely insulated by wealth from the impacts of their economic choices. As at no time in living history since 1929 our economy is driven by short-term profit-taking and leveraged paper profits. The entire structure balances on the financial sectors (banking, real estate, insurance) that are, in fact, creations of a mass confidence scheme (that is to say, it depends in large part on the confidence of investors and financiers on the stability of the system) but one that is ever more bubble-driven while being overseen by fewer, and weaker, impartial outside controllers than (yes, again) before the Great Depression.
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Update 12/3: Here's a good example of just the kind of thing I'm talking about. As many as 15 people may have died in this Florida nursing home largely because the financial organization that owned the thing as part of a massive multilayered conglomerate wanted to save money. A combination of profit-taking, cost reduction, lax government oversight and simple human carelessness has led to an ugly mess that the families of the victims can't even unravel. What a total fuckstory, as my old pal James Struthers would have said.
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Ironically, economic issues have been almost completely absent from the political discussions among the candidates. We probably won't be able to make a sound choice because we will simply lack any way to distinguish one from the other - assuming that the vast sea of political contribution cash won't dissuade our "representatives" from taking any actions to steer clear of this iceberg. The question for me isn't IF - it's WHEN, and how quickly and deeply we'll sink.
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I'm afraid that this prognosis is dark, indeed. I wish I could be more optimistic, but as you know I'm convinced that we are living through the Fall of the American Republic. I'm afraid my only ray of hope is that I believe that by November 2008 the screenwriters strike will have been settled...so we will have our new episodes of "The Wire" and "24"...and won't be reduced to consoling our political and economic miseries with anything better than THIS:
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