What If the Winner Is the Loser?

by Dennis Peacocke

November 2012

The eyes and ears of multiple millions around the world are fixed on the United States and our current presidential election. By any account, as the world’s so-called leading “superpower,” it matters on multiple levels who wins the oval office on this very troubled globe. Technology has not only “flattened” the world, it has turned it into a global theater where nearly everyone is only a cell phone away from every nations’ intertwined drama.

The backdrop for this political show of shows is clearly two-fold in this elections’ script: Islam’s growing religious interruption of politics as usual in the Western world and, secondly, the relentless paralysis of our economies. Europe and America, the two major drivers of the world’s investment and consumption, are wounded giants harassed both internally by economically self-inflicted debt wounds and externally by religious fundamentalists who won’t play by the same rules of “tolerance” the giants have set up. Therefore, our President’s ability to address and apply global leadership to these immensely troubling issues really matters.

The real questions, beyond all sound and fury of this drama, are these:
Do either of the candidates and their supporting parties and constituencies have any real answers to these immense problems?
Are there any other leaders, nations, or constituencies who do if these players don’t?
What if both Europe and America’s leaders are stuck and what we are seeing is the need for truly major re-works in the current global script?
What if whoever wins this presidency is stale-mated by the way the current script is describing the nature of the theater itself?
My own deep suspicion is that whoever wins this election may well end up playing the role of the loser. While they may rearrange policies and priorities, the way they are viewing the drama itself is insufficient to begin to unravel its seemingly negative inevitable conclusion given the current script. This know for sure: when the music of the drama stops and their “solutions” haven’t worked, both they and their party will “have no chair,” and they will be perceived as the villains of this show for many years to come, and that is……the bottom line.