Projections of Power

The bland American debates were no accident. This was a campaign conducted in the YouTube age, where any verbal slip, any casual statement that suggests beliefs that are deemed controversial or any inadvertently compromising behavior is replayed endlessly on television and on the Web. As a result, the safest bet for a candidate is to keep repeating the same carefully vetted messages in rally after rally, day after day. That's why what should have been an exciting election from start to finish often felt ritualistic and devoid of truly challenging ideas.

But to succeed, the new American president will need to challenge both the world and his own people with new ideas and new approaches. That will mean breaking out of the bland campaign mode, which won't be easy after nearly two years of it. And he won't have much time to switch gears. Too many problems and too many unresolved issues are on the agenda to give him the luxury of time to examine each one carefully and then spend weeks or months weighing his options. Events will force his hand and lead to early snap judgments on whether he's up to the job.

First of all, there are bound to be tests in the international arena. "Our rivals across the globe suspect we are played out—short of energy, long on debt, and hogging the world's resources," writes Victor Davis Hanson in the Hoover Digest, a publication of the Hoover Institution. "They think the future is theirs, the past ours. They will surely challenge the next president, however nice, to prove them wrong." That may reflect a right-wing perspective, but it sounds like a pretty realistic one.

Those challenges are likely to be economic as much as political. It's hard to overstate the impact of the economic crisis during the final stretch of the campaign, and the new president will have to demonstrate resolve and skill in tackling this issue as soon as he takes office. If the United States is going to disprove those who see it as a superpower in decline, it must put its economic house in order. Its military, political and even cultural clout, along with its traditional role as a land of opportunity that attracts the best and the brightest from all around the globe, depends on getting this task right.

That means facing some harsh truths and then changing course. Even before the current economic crisis really hit, President George W. Bush complained that Wall Street got drunk. True enough, but the politicians also acted drunk when it came to spending. The Republicans abandoned all sense that someone had to pay for the massive expenditures on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the existing social programs. The Democrats pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the government-sponsored agencies that were created to enable more home ownership—to assume responsibility for more and more high-risk mortgages. The result was that both agencies had to be rescued by the government to prevent their collapse, and confidence in financial institutions began to crumble.

Coupled with the looming social-security crunch to happen when the baby-boomer generation moves into their retirement years, this means that the new administration has to deliver on a strategy for the United States to rein in the culture of buy-now-pay-much-later. Without such a strategy, America's influence in the world will decline. But the new president has to recognize that a more disciplined approach will entail unpopular measures, including some new taxes and less reckless spending. On the campaign trail, both candidates suggested that the United States can almost painlessly work itself out of its current problems. The new president has to abandon such rhetoric and begin leveling with his people.