By Alexander Dietz | This is not the most important election in history, or even in the decade.
It is a chronological certainty that each presidential election is the most important in years – at least four years, in fact. Every cycle, however, candidates, surrogates, and pundits feel an obligation to stress that this time, the stakes are higher than ever. Joe Biden said at the vice-presidential debate, “This is the most important election you will ever, ever have voted in, any of you, since 1932.” According to a poll taken this summer, 51 percent of the so-called “millenials,” those in the generation born after 1980, agree.
Assuming medical technology does not dramatically improve, though it may, current undergraduates will probably live to be around 80. In that case, as long as the United States survives and sticks roughly to its current constitution, they will observe 14 or 15 more elections.
It should be obvious that it is impossible to predict with any confidence that this vote will be more influential than Election 2024 or Election 2052, so the claim of journalists like the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky that this is a once-in-a-lifetime contest should be dismissed on its face. However, even if the question is restricted to the five or six presidential campaigns college students have witnessed, one can conclude that the election of 2000, not the election of 2008, will have been the most important of their lifetimes so far.
The importance of an election largely depends, of course, on the events that occur once the victor is sworn into office. The most consequential national and international events, in terms of their long-term impact, during those five presidential terms were, arguably, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the USSR, the Persian Gulf War, welfare reform and the economic growth of the 1990s, the conflict in the Balkans, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the conflicts in Afghanistan and again in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the recent financial crisis.
Overall, the events of January 2001 to January 2005 had more far-ranging ramifications and presented a more serious test of leadership than those of the previous decade or the succeeding four years. While incidents fresher in the public mind always seem to matter more than they do in the long run, it is reasonable to believe that the bloody and costly troop presence in Iraq extending from 2003 through the present day carries more significance than the brief invasion of 1991.
The beginning of the War on Terror, which redefined American foreign policy, far outweighs the bombing of Yugoslavia. The emergence of the Islamist threat may pale in comparison to the fade of Communism, but the latter occurred largely independently of the policies of the first Bush administration, and would probably likewise have been little affected by a Dukakis presidency. Similarly, while Bill Clinton and George W. Bush deserve credit and blame, respectively, for the economic vicissitudes that occurred under their watch, external conditions and congressional regulations ultimately carry more responsibility.
The leadership of the current president, then, matters more than that of his two predecessors, who held office during the “holiday from history” between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Of course, a President Dukakis, a President Bush who won in 1992, or a President Dole may have done something that would have made their election more momentous (say, decide to drop a nuclear bomb on Beijing), but there is no evidence to suggest that this would have happened.
The events of George W. Bush’s first term, meanwhile, were clearly more important than those of his second. Hurricane Katrina was the most devastating natural catastrophe in over 40 years, and the damage was indeed greatly exacerbated by government policy. However, even if John Kerry had been sworn into office in January 2005, there is little chance that he would have had the foresight or the ability to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency before Katrina struck just seven months later.
But if Al Gore had been elected in 2000, he probably would not have pushed for a second invasion of Iraq, and history would have taken a different course. He certainly thinks so: in his 2006 appearance on Saturday Night Live, in which he claimed that in an alternate universe his administration had been able to stop global warming, reduce gas prices to nineteen cents a gallon, and raise the national budget surplus to “a perilously low 11 trillion dollars.”
This time around, Americans will choose between two candidates whose stances on immigration, Guantánamo, torture, climate change, energy, trade, and even Iraq are strikingly close. At the present moment, it looks as if economic stewardship, managing Iraq and Afghanistan, and/or an attempt at healthcare reform may be the focuses of the next administration, and in none of those cases is the difference between the plans of Barack Obama and John McCain as stark as those between Bush’s first term and a hypothetical Gore Administration.
Ralph Nader famously said eight years ago that there was not “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties. That may have rung true at the time, but in retrospect he turns out to have been way off. When he says it now, on the other hand, he has a bit more ground to stand on.
Mr. Dietz is a junior majoring in political science.
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