Those that can't...

...might preside, but only for a while.

It wasn't long ago that George Bush, faced with massive job losses, a weak dollar and historic budget deficits seemed ready to stake his presidency on his status as, by his own description, a "war President." The his war turned out to be based on fraud in its inception and incompetency in its prosecution, and Bush supporters turned their attention back to the economy which, they assure, is in rapid recovery.

Confidence in that recovery seems hard to find amongst the electorate, though. No matter how much off better the economic authorites assure people that they are, people just don't seem to feel it in ways that might matter at the polls. In fact, as badly as Bush has bungled his war effort, his polling on ecomomic management has been consistently lower than the fading confidence in his role as a leader in military and foreign affairs.

Stirling Newberry outlines some of the underlying reasons at BOPnews.

...since late 2002, all of the stability in nominal wages has been bought with pure devaluation - deficit spending and concessionary interest rates. While there has been an upturn as the US economy seems to be on the mend, the 25% fall in global wage since the 2002 peak - when the US seemed to be leading a global coalition to remove the bottlenecks to a globalized economy - is startling. The US worker is back where he was in 1997's pit.

This is the real raw material of people's hopes and aspirations - their nominal ability to get ahead. The global wage is the long term inflationary and devaluationary pressure - we are falling behind in our ability to import, which pressages a sharp reduction in living standards. People understand that someone has to pay for the failure in Iraq, and they can begin to see that that someone is them.

Statistical evidence aside, the American people seem to stubbornly persist in the belief that if the economy is really better, they should see that improvement reflected in their own lives, and they don't. They know that the lunch they're being offered isn't free at all, it's being served on credit that can't be sustained. They understand that the job numbers are cooked, and the jobs that are really being created are generally inferior to the ones that have been lost.

Still, we are generally an optimistic people. Americans believe things should be better because they believe things can be better. We don't believe that we are failures, so much as that we have been failed.

The recent tone of the Kerry campaign seems to indicate that they understand the mix of optimism and disappointment that lies at the heart of American sentiment these days, and the message that Kerry is promoting hits, in my opinion, exactly the right notes.

America is ready to be America again. All that's left is to convince them that George Bush can't make it happen, and doesn't even seem to know it.