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  West Wing: The Depressed Superpower

West Wing The Depressed Superpower

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

Part 2: Presidential candidates face aging and increasingly jaded voters.

A man like Karl Rove, the strategist behind George W. Bush and the architect of his two presidential campaigns, has long since noticed the sour mood and indecisiveness dominating American society today. Rove would love to drive an enormous political wedge into this rift within the US population, and his first recommendation to the Republicans is to enthusiastically place Hillary Clinton's healthcare policies at the center of the coming election campaign. Let the voters decide, he says cunningly, whether they would trade freedom for government bureaucracy.

But when it comes to their attitudes toward the social welfare state, Germans and Americans differ widely. Voters from Passau in Bavaria to the Baltic Sea island of Rügen in Germany are convinced that the state will help them get something from their neighbors. But voters from Miami to Seattle fear that if the state intervenes, they will be forced to give some of their hard-earned wealth to their neighbors.

New York Times columnist David Brooks sees his country trapped in a "treacherous political maelstrom." On the one hand, Brooks writes, people are desperate for change. On the other hand, voters are unwilling to accept any changes to their status quo. "People want a night watchman for a government, which patrols near their houses but never walks in the door."

Hillary Clinton could very well be the right woman at the right time. She does anger the left, however, because she doesn't even attempt to fulfill their expectations. Her pragmatism makes sense, but this is precisely why many find it so unbearable.

'Hillaryland' - a Country of Limited Possibilities

Campaigning means announcing a bold political architecture and not outlining a seating chart for the coming years, her critics say. But Hillary Clinton refuses to yield. Anyone who has spent an evening with her knows that she is polite, precise, hungry for knowledge, energetic and disciplined. But she is by no means a visionary.

Her pragmatism is of the brittle variety. Unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who sometimes seems similarly rigid in her daily routines, Hillary Clinton never allows even the slightest hint of subversive humor to cross her lips, not even in the smallest of groups.

For that reason she is too cautious, too mistrustful. One could almost believe that it was Clinton, not Merkel, who spent her formative years in East Germany. Her constant could haves, should haves and would haves, her mastery of the art of qualifying everything she says, and the fact that if she does walk a tightrope, it is never far from the ground and just a few inches above a political safety net -- all of this makes her a formidable opponent.

If the Americans vote Clinton into office, they will follow in the footsteps of her husband Bill and enter into a marriage of convenience with her. Hillaryland is a land of limited possibilities.

But perhaps America's collective depression has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. Perhaps neither the Iraq war nor globalization is solely to blame for America's blues. What if the real problem lies with the American people and not with the circumstances?

The challenges facing America today are no more daunting than those of the past. Americans have always been called upon to exert enormous amounts of energy to establish, develop and defend their superpower. But the difference is that the people facing today's challenges do so with weakened reserves of strength.

An Aging Society with Dwindling Joie de Vivre

The baby boomers, who gave America its rhythm, have grown older. Only 12 percent of all adults were older than 65 in 1950, while almost twice as many are today. America has never been as old as it is in 2007.

While the average age of the population rises, many other characteristics diminish with age -- courage, confidence and the willingness to accept risk. The most successful album in the country's record stores today is "Long Road Out of Eden," by the early 1970s rock band The Eagles. Trikes -- three-wheelers for the older set -- represent the only growing segment in the American motorcycle business.

The Baby Boomers grew up watching movies like "Easy Rider" and came of age reading Philip Roth's "Everyman." The life story of Roth's tragic hero, the former creative director of an ad agency, parallels that of the Baby Boomers: a reasonably successful career, a series of erotic experiences, private failures and life-long enmities.

We first meet the protagonist in Roth's novel as his spirit, observing his friends, enemies and various wives as they attend his own funeral. Life doesn't let you start over again, one of the mourners says under his breath. All are united in their sentimentality.

Sometimes real life mirrors fiction. Three of the country's most renowned political consultants recently got together for the first time in a lecture hall at the New York Public Library: George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley and a close advisor to the Democrats, Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, and Drew Westen, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, also a Democrat. The three men have spent decades practically at each other's throats.

But now they were talking about ideals, the best way to run a campaign and language, including the wrong kind of language. The Republican said that he was troubled by the term, coined by Bush, "War on Terror," because it spreads fear and stifles optimism.

Democrats Fondly Evoke Reagan

Westen, one of the two Democrats, said he had fond memories of Ronald Reagan and his legendary campaign ad titled, "It's morning again in America." The ad tells the story of a country in which inflation is down and marriages are up, a country that is "prouder and stronger and better" than it was before. The rich voice of the announcer tells Americans that they can "look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America."

Westen insisted on playing the ad for the 500 people in the audience. The effect was dramatic, as if someone had suddenly declared a cease-fire in an era marked by political conflict.

The three experts on the stage were also visibly moved. Luntz, the Republican, was the first to speak, and his words were in the language of reconciliation: "Can't we understand each other again? Can't we come together again? Can't we all regain hope again?"

His words were met with thundering applause.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan