The real Nov. 2 winner? It's not who you think

Tax relief a given, difference is who gets it

Author: Steve Chapman

Published: October 31, 2004

After all the votes are counted in this election and the outcome known, one of the two candidates can look forward to all the valuable, important things he'll enjoy doing over the next four years. His unlucky rival will have the consolation of being president.

It's hard to remember an election in which victory would be such a dubious prize. But the presidency itself, under the best of circumstances, is not something any sane person would want to endure--which is why we reserve it for people whose political ambitions were on display by the 3rd grade.

Think of it. Maximum-security inmates have more privacy than the president does. You can't go out to a restaurant on an impulse. You can't drive to the grocery store. You can't even take a walk around the block without being hounded by cameras and reporters.

Your every utterance is subject to microscopic examination. You're dogged by Secret Service agents from the time you get up in the morning till you go to bed at night. Bill Clinton once said the White House was nothing more than "the crown jewel of the American penal system."

On top of that, you have limited powers and unlimited responsibility, which is a sure-fire formula for high blood pressure. You can hardly do anything without first getting permission from 218 House members and 51 senators. But anytime anything bad happens, anywhere in the world, you get the blame--either for causing it or for failing to prevent it.

Any successes you achieve, meanwhile, have the shelf life of a McDonald's french fry. In March 1991, after winning the Persian Gulf war, the first President Bush had a 90 percent approval rating. Twenty months later, he had a pink slip.

Sometimes you have to win to achieve some perspective on losing. Upon completing his second term, Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend, "Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power." James Buchanan, dumped by his party after serving one term, told his successor, Abraham Lincoln, "If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country."

Conditions at the moment suggest the winner will age by a quarter of a century between now and 2009. He'll face some of the most sobering, difficult and thankless challenges imaginable, with options running the gamut from awful to catastrophic. By contrast, in the last campaign, all the two candidates had to figure out was how to blow the budget surplus while keeping their hands off White House interns.

The guy who takes the oath of office Jan. 20 will have, first of all, the challenge of turning the Iraq disaster into a success--a task on the order of building a sailboat on the beach in a hurricane. George Bush and John Kerry have the same basic policy--train Iraqi security forces, get more help from the rest of the world, facilitate the transition to democracy and wait a decent interval before retreating. It's plausible-sounding strategy based on a combination of outlandish hope and total fantasy. The next president will also have to deal with North Korea and Iran and their nuclear ambitions, which may be scarier than Iraq.

Then there is the budget. In 2000, the candidates were in the position of George Steinbrenner, with more than enough cash to cover any need. But the next president will be more like the CEO of a bankrupt airline, trying desperately to figure out how to make inadequate revenues cover rising expenses. Whoever wins this election will spend a lot less time ladling out pleasures than distributing pain.

That's even without addressing the one unavoidable event of the next administration: the beginning of the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. As budget analyst Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute points out, if we don't cut Social Security and Medicare benefits or else raise taxes, eventually "all the revenues collected by government will go only for elderly programs." If you've ever tried to get a bone away from a Doberman, you can imagine how much fun the next president will have trying to handle this matter.

Yet we persist in thinking that winning this election is better than losing it. It brings to mind Mark Twain's question: "Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."