America proved it was good enough in 2008. After an 8-year era of arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in the U.S. government, 53% of voters voted to elect a new kind of President.
The biggest issue at the beginning of the campaign for the 2008 Presidential election was how (and whether) to end Bush's War. Over the protests of many of us, Bush took the country to war in 2003 to ensure that oil profits from the country of Iraq would continue to flow to American and British oil companies. Bush's War cost over 4,000 American soldiers' lives, plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. More important(!), it fostered hatred of America among tens of millions of people in the world. Although everybody agreed that Bush conducted American operations in his war incompetently, Americans remained divided on whether it was,as Barack Obama named it, "a Dumb War."
The issue that finally assured the election of the new President was not Bush's War but the results of the Republican Party's over-arching policies of cronyism and neglect. By ignoring the need for government regulation of financial institutions, Bush created a monumental financial crisis which people felt harkened back to the Great Depression of 1932. Obama's Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, probably assured his own defeat when he proclaimed "the fundamentals of the American economy are strong" on the day one of the largest financial institutions, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt.
Obama was elected because he was perceived by many in the electorate as more likely to lead a successful American response to the financial turmoil in world markets and to avert a repetition of the Great Depression. During the first month after his election, as unemplyment figures and home foreclosure figures continued to rise, he moved more swiftly than any previous Presidents to nominate highly qualified economists to his cabinet and to enunciate reasonable sounding strategies to implement to stave off a depression. Central to his vision was the creation of a massive jobs program focusing on renewing the nation's infrastructure and building our capability to meet energy needs without reliance on fossil fuels.
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