The 2008 US presidential election comes at the end of an eight-year Republican administration in which the median household annual income in the country dropped from $50,557 to $50,233, according to the Census Bureau as reported in November in Business Week. During that same time, the country's Gross Domestic Product increased by 22 percent, which should have translated into a rise of the annual income for middle class families to $64,000.
Corporate profits in that time jumped an average of 10.8 percent per year while the consumer price index rose by 25 percent and core inflation jumped 18 percent, not including food and energy. The price of gasoline went from $1.47 a gallon in 2001 to $2.78 in 2008 after peaking at $4.11 earlier in the year. The rise in food prices has been equally acute, with the cost of a dozen eggs going up 97 percent, from about $1 to $2.
The Republican candidate married to an heiress and the owner of so many houses he can't keep count, would be holding his election party at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, a semi-secluded spot that according to the New York Times is to Arizona what the Waldorf is to New York. The Democratic candidate would be holding his celebration in Chicago's Grant Park, with 70,000 expected to attend, thousands more on a waiting list and with possibly up to a million expected to crowd into the nearby downtown area.
Both candidates have promised change if elected. Based on that scenario, one of two Americas will emerge with the election.
In the event the Republican candidate wins, there will be a new body in the Oval Office and a new one in the associated vice-president's office. Advisors can be expected to remain much the same, especially with the current vice president emerging days before the election to throw his support behind the man who strove throughout the campaign to distance himself from the current president and to claim repeatedly, "I'm not Bush".
In the Oval Office itself, an erratic "maverick" can be expected to exchange frequent displays of temper with the new vice-presidential "maverick," who early on made the mistake of calling the campaign the Palin/McCain ticket instead of the other way around. Given her refusal to mind her Republican handlers as the election neared, she would butt heads with the president over every issue, including the liberality of the conservative judges being packed onto the Supreme Court and the amount of drilling to be done in the Alaskan wildlife preserve.
Domestically, for Americans, the picture would remain much the same, as it would on the international level. The big difference could be an increase in entanglements with the emerging global giants of Russia and China as the quixotic warrior president lent the country's weight to "America's friends" in the former Soviet countries and their numerous breakaway republics. The war on terror would also remain basically unchanged as militant recruitment caught its second wind from an America increasingly loathed throughout the world.
By contrast, the new body in the Oval Office in the event the Democratic candidate was the winner would have a steady hand. He'd work with the globally and domestically astute vice president with a clean slate of intelligent advisors. New programs aimed at retooling and retraining America for a global world would be implemented as the country's badly damaged support network around the world was repaired.
Jobs would also be created by improvements to the country's infrastructure, including by the rebuilding of aging roads and bridges. Those are a necessity for America's middle class in a sprawling country. They are badly in need of repair and they have not received attention for eight years.
The big change for America in the event of a Democratic victory with the 2008 election would be in the war on terror and America's need to fear. A friendly America cooperating with the world would be counterproductive to zealots. The development would leave them bereft of the paramount target.
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