Scott Ritter: What the midterm elections say about America

Tuesday’s mid-term elections hang over the heads of the American voters like an executioner’s sword – halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the elections are not simply a referendum on the state of the union, but perhaps more importantly, a hearing on the fate of the president himself.

The first two years of Donald Trump’s come back tour have not gone anything like the American people who voted him into office two years ago were led to believe. They were promised an end to the endless wars in the Middle East, yet the US finds itself embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East which clearly did not need to be fought, and perhaps worse from the perspective of the psyche of the American voter, is a war America is losing badly.

Failed military adventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia have been a regular feature of the American experience for the past three decades, and elections – especially midterm elections where the president’s name is not on the ballot – do not normally hinge on foreign policy or national security issues, but rather local issues – the domestic agenda, so to speak. And there is no greater barometer for a consumer-driven society like the US of the success or failure of a domestic agenda than American economic health. The age-old question, “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” is very much the talk of the town, and the answer should send shivers down the spine of every Trump loyalist scanning the polls as they would an EKG, desperately looking for evidence of viable political life: Americans most certainly are not.

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a famous American political aphorism attributed to James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped manage Bill Clinton’s successful run for the US presidency in 1992. It is as valid a point today as it was 34 years ago, something Donald Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten. “Short term pain for long term gain” has emerged as the Trump counter to Carville’s words of wisdom, a reflection on the price Americans are paying at the pump when putting gasoline into their cars or diesel into their trucks.