"Neither a borrower nor a lender be"

David Broder in today’s Washington Post is spot-on:

The good news for Barack Obama is that the calamities in the financial world may have created an insuperable barrier to John McCain’s White House ambitions.

The bad news is that Obama stands to inherit the leadership of a country in far worse condition than he could have imagined when he began this campaign almost two years ago.

It’s particularly telling that, in all of the debates so far, the moderator has asked a question along the lines of “what campaign promises will you not be able to keep as a result of the economic downturn,” and that no candidate has really given anything resembling a straight answer.  (The closest was Biden in the VP debate saying that he and BHO might have to “slow down” foreign aid.)

Our deficit right now is staggering, and nobody wants to talk about reining it in.  I give Obama credit for a couple things: his plan covers the cost of his promises better than McCain’s, and he does defend his big-ticket items (energy, education reform) as things that will ultimately benefit the economy down the road.  But we’re still skirting the issue.  Medicare and Social Security account for over 40% of the budget and that figure is growing all the time; meanwhile, we’ve spent almost all the time in this campaign talking about things like earmarks (an insignificant portion of the budget, no matter how reprehensible) and making character attacks.

Why should we be worried?  Well, if you’re my age (21,) you should be worried because we’re going to be paying through the nose for all of these deficits.  But, as Broder notes, there’s another danger.  There’s a chance that the Democrats will have a beefy majority in the next Congress – maybe even 60 Senate votes.  In that climate, it may be very hard for either president to say the difficult “no”s that will need to be said to some domestic programs that may get pushed.  Let’s just say they’re getting their telephone-dialing fingers limber over at Americans for Tax Reform. 

(Final note: I know Obama is way ahead in the polls, but even so, check out the tone of this column!  Broder is ready to inaugurate the man.  Granted, so is most of the rest of the pundit class – but I’m just not ready to call this thing yet.  I don’t have the cojones for the prognostication business, I guess.)