I managed to keep my mouth shut for a year or so, but I can no longer. I now feel compelled to return to blogging, at least for a while. Many thanks to Ed Risse and Peter Galuszka for keeping this forum open during my long absence.
This fall, Virginia will elect one of two men for governor — Bob McDonnell or Creigh Deeds — at a historic inflection point in the U.S. economy and political system. The federal government is careening towards fiscal armageddon, with incalculable consequences for the nation and, of course, the 50 states that will be left to pick up the pieces. Simultaneously, in a trend only temporarily masked by a worldwide recession, global energy supplies grow tighter, threatening to render Virginia’s dysfunctional human settlement patterns even more dysfunctional. Meanwhile, Virginia’s population inexorably grows older, putting pressure on state Medicaid/social service expenditures and tax revenues, straining our health care system, and creating an urgent need to build more senior-friendly communities.
These three inter-related crises will define the politics and economy of Virginia and America for the next generation. Yet both candidates have framed their campaign issues in utterly conventional terms, as if there were nothing at all urgent about the times in which we find ourselves.
True, both men offer “energy” plans but both plans fall far short of the deep structural transformation that is needed to preserve Virginia’s living standards and economic competitiveness. True, both candidates talk about improving “government efficiency,” but their ideas, even if enacted in total, would only tinker on the margins of the restructuring that is needed. Neither candidate touches upon the Age Wave in a meaningful way.
People of Virginia! Our nation, and by extension our state, is in a long-term, multiform crisis, the nature of which most people are only dimly aware. Neither Deeds nor McDonnell show any evidence through their public pronouncements that they comprehend the nature of the challenge facing us.
As I have time, I hope to address these themes — an energy crisis only temporarily in abeyance, the rapid aging of the population, and the foreseeable fiscal insolvency of the federal government — with the goal of holding both gubernatorial candidates to account. It is time get serious, folks. We are running out of time.