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- FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL - Four More Years. For Better Or Worse, For Richer Or Poorer. Obama won re-election, much to everyone's surprise, including my own, I must confess (I expected Republican vote suppression efforts to barely succeed in stealing the election, but Romney's unpalatability as a candidate, combined with Hurricane Sandy and a very large and energized Latino vote, unexpectedly changed that outcome). And, as I always have done in this space after a presidential election, I review my predictions from the last four years, and make some new ones. Not wanting to disappoint, I am going to continue that tradition. So, first, my predictions for Obama that went up on this page back in 2008, under the title, "Follow The Money", and an analysis of how they came out: 1. Obama will have a hard time getting his legislative agenda through Congress, in spite of Democratic control. Well, that one was spot on. The Republicans, never having seen a Democrat with whom they were willing to compromise, proved to be every bit as obstreperous as I had expected. 2. Obama will lose control of Congress in 2010. That one worked out partially true. The Democrats did lose control of the House, and just barely hung on to control of the Senate. But since Democratic control of the senate fell below 60%, that eliminated their ability to choke off a filibuster, and that meant that the Republicans had de-facto control, since the Republicans were willing to use the filibuster with reckless abandon. So I'll award myself a three points out of four on that one. 3. The recession will deepen into a depression, and Obama will get the blame. With real, not headline unemployment currently sitting at 21 percent, up from 14% when he took office and only four percent below the peak of the Great Depression, and real, not headline GDP continuing to slowly sink without interruption, the polyannaish numbers coming out of the administration aren't fooling anyone, except maybe a few Obama Democrats. Yet, in the face of the relentless administration propaganda that Things Are Better Now (which, for his own reasons, he can't refute), Romney's long-running campaign theme wasn't able to get enough traction to pull him out of the woods. So, in spite of rapidly declining real middle-class incomes, people continued to lose ground, yet they did not blame Obama - they saw it as a legacy of the Bush era. Not that Obama could have done anything if he'd tried useful measures anyway - his lack of control of Congress would have meant that he would have been obstructed - in the name of pushing him out of office, the welfare of the country be damned. 4. Obama will not roll back the human rights abuses and "unitary executive" privileges usurped by the preceding administration. This one was also spot on. Not only did Obama continue the previous administration's human rights abuses, he intensified them, making them even more egregious, all but abandoning the Bill of Rights. Guantánamo is still open, the Patriot Act is not only still law, but has been extended, and Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents before him combined, warrantless spying has gone on steroids, and the legal abuses of the Bush administration have been ignored. He has now arrogated to himself a "disposition matrix" - an Orwellian term, meaning he can send out goons to kill anyone he likes, as long as he calls them "terrorists" first. 5. This supposedly liberal Democrat will, just like Bill Clinton before him, eventually come to be viewed as "Republican Lite" by his base. Another one, spot on. When it became apparent to everyone to the left of Barry Goldwater that Obama was becoming "Republican-Lite," Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, was asked what Obama's progressive base would do. "Where they gonna go?" he asked with truly remarkable arrogance. Well, most of them went on vacation on Election Day - which is why Obama's victory on November 6 wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement, and he had to really struggle to achieve it. 6. Obama will become a one-term president, who will be largely seen (in the near term, at least) to have failed, much like Jimmy Carter, mostly because he failed to implement his vision (to the extent that he has one). Blew that one. Well, more accurately, Hurricane Sandy blew that one, along with a highly energized Latino vote, which was mostly just scared silly of a Romney presidency. If either of those hadn't happened, we'd be talking about a Romney presidency right now. I'll give myself one point out of four, though, because I was right about his having failed to implement what little vision he had, and that will come to haunt his legacy. His health-care "reform" is really Romneycare Light, written as it originally was by the American Enterprise Institute and worked-over by the insurance industry lobbyists, and there's little else about his presidency so far that the high school history textbooks will talk about a half century from now. Obama would clearly have been a one-term president, had the Republicans run a strong candidate. He's been re-elected more because they didn't, than because Obama has been a president to remember. 7. The Republicans, who view the Congress and the White House as rightful Republican property, will resume control [of Congress] in 2012, and this time, they won't give it up, because the doctrinaire ideologues will have, by then, taken complete and uncontested control of the party. Incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it best - when asked in 2010 what his priorities would be for the next two years, he said it was going to be "Getting Obama out of office" - nothing at all said about doing the public's business. The Republicans have not shown even the slightest trend towards moderation, nor do I expect them to anytime soon. Their extremism, which cost them the 2012 presidential election, will not moderate anytime soon, though I do expect it to spawn a rash of Republicans eating their young. See below. So that's how I did four years ago. And that brings us to my predictions for the next four years: 1. Expect a big fight to break out in the Republican Party between the Tea Party extremists and the more pragmatic traditional moderates. We've already seen hints of this, particularly between the Republican leadership in Congress and the more radical elements of the Romney campaign. But, given the crushing defeat in the elections, expect this fight to break out into open warfare. The Tea Partiers, in no mood to compromise, are unable to see that their own extremism forced Romney into untenable positions (such as immigration, social spending and the like), and ultimately played a major role in his defeat. The Republican leadership, not wishing to see a repeat in 2014, will go to war with the Tea Party extremists, trying to move the party as a whole back towards a tenable moderation. The Tea Partiers, financed by the Koch brothers' astroturf group, Americans For Prosperity, will move to take full control of the party. The outcome is too difficult to predict at this point (the Tea Party is showing evidence of decay, while the Republican National Committee itself is in disarray, with the now-discredited Karl Rove running it like a private fiefdom). 2. Contrary to the hopes of his remaining four or five faithful followers, Obama will continue to move to the right. No longer having an incentive not to show his true colors, Obama will become more confrontational at the same time he becomes less tolerant of dissent within the country and even within his own ranks. Expect to see stepped-up efforts to rein in dissent - yet more FBI infiltration of protester and cop-watch groups, more agents provocateurs subverting organized dissent, yet more arrests for whistleblowing and leaks. Watch efforts stepped up against Wikileaks and efforts to get his hands on Julian Assange. Expect more warrantless surveillance, and no movement towards re-establishing habeas corpus or ending that political theater known as the "war on terror." 3. Obama will become more confrontational with Israel, covertly giving Bibi Netanyahu a hard time before Bibi's election. Bibi's tacit support of the loser, Mitt Romney, is now going to come back to haunt him. Expect no war on Iran before the Israeli elections in January, and probably not afterward, either. The Israelis are now on their own on that one, and that means no war. Instead, watch Obama, tiring of Israeli prevarications and mendacity, will move closer to the Palestinians and working with them to rein in Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, and to advance Palestinian statehood. Payback's a bitch, Bibi. Expect continued public abandonment of Israel, as it is increasingly seen as being the ruthless Apartheid state that it is - and so Obama will feel ever less political need to kiss AIPAC's butt. 4. Expect a deal on the ongoing budget deficit problem, with social spending taking the biggest hit. Obama will go to bat to rein in the metastasizing Pentagon budget, but he won't succeed. The second-ranking Pentagon generals and the defense industry will collude with the Republicans to prevent any major cuts, even though the Joint Chiefs of Staff has already recognized that something has to be done, as does the Secretary of Defense. But the power will be arrayed against it, and any cuts to spending will inexorably come from "entitlements," and, yes, current beneficiaries are going to get hit, and hard. As part of the compromise, the Republicans will get their beloved tax cuts for the obscenely rich, and the resulting revenue loss will be made up for by shifting tax burdens onto the middle class. In other words, those things the Republicans wouldn't say they were going to do during the campaign, they will accomplish - with the full cooperation of Obama. 5. Expect the economy to continue to struggle along, with no overall improvement, and growing dissatisfaction among the middle class, increasingly impatient with their shrinking share of the pie. Another major U.S. financial crisis is possible - even likely, sparked once again by Wall Street's continued gambling with other peoples' money. If/when it happens, expect unemployment, misery - and anger to skyrocket, and it will be a Greater Than Great Depression this time. If such a crisis happens, expect the Republicans to take complete control of the Senate and strengthen their control of the House in 2014. There won't be any meaningful finance industry reform until the crisis becomes so extreme that even the Republicans are forced to abandon their ideological dogmatism and start looking for answers that are known to work, only because it will be obvious that the only alternative is a revolution. That will be a measure of their desperation before they'll look at pragmatism. Since a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, the Republicans, with the cooperation of Obama, will take the opportunity to shred what's left of the social safety net, in the name of austerity - and, as in Europe, it will prove to be exactly the wrong thing to do, exacerbating the crisis, increasing the suffering and making social cohesion erode that much further and faster. If there is no such financial crisis, expect real unemployment to slowly rise from its current 21 to roughly 26 percent, inflation to remain fairly steady or actually fall slightly, and the GDP to continue to slowly erode. Real GDP will end up about 8 percent less than it is now, and middle class incomes erode by a further 25-40% or more by the end of Obama's second term - the portrait of a hidden depression. 6. Faced with an increasingly obstreperous congress and a domestic economy on which he has increasingly less wiggle-room, Obama will tend to do what second-term presidents often do, concentrating instead on foreign affairs, seeing it as his easy path to legacy. This is where his and his predecessor's failures will come back to haunt him. Latin America has long since gone its own way and likes its freedom, and won't be coming back to Washington's fold voluntarily anytime soon. So watch the newly reconstituted Fourth Fleet be revitalized and expanded - to Latin America's resentment. While Obama has been neglecting Africa, China has moved in and is now eating Washington's lunch, and Obama's only opening will be the occasional military crisis, which he will exploit via his new AFRICOM. South and east Asia are becoming wealthier and more powerful, and therefore less inclined to cooperate with Washington's agenda, and Obama will have little wiggle room there. Europe, preoccupied with its own problems, won't be falling all over itself to help Obama out. Obama will find diplomatic options to be limited, so will try to use military power instead - watch the Drone Wars proliferate. But it won't work - it will only raise tensions and resentment among former allies. And so Obama's foreign basing options will become increasingly limited, foreign governments will be less inclined to cooperate with the United States in defense, and Obama will be forced to retreat. The decline of imperial power will become obvious for everyone to see. So there you have it. There's my predictions. Print them out and stick them on your refrigerator for the next four years. And remember, you read tomorrow's headlines today, right here on Veritas Et Ratio. Scott Bidstrup, Tobosi de El Guarco, Costa Rica, November 7, 2012 Click on your browser's RSS icon or put this link in your RSS reader for automatic updates of this editorial and other content on this site:

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