The first tumultuous year of the McCain administration has finally concluded. The war hero Senator’s narrow victory over the Clinton/Obama ticket with its litigation and recriminations nearly the equal of Bush v Gore set a difficult tone from the beginning that the Arizona maverick pulled against mightily with America in the middle.

The first task of course was addressing what we now call The Great Recession. The McCain Stimulus; some 400 billion dollars of scattershot federal spending was denounced widely on the Left as too little and too vulnerable to special interest thievery. From the Right there was a grumbling acquiesence that has turned to disgust and electoral fear as a wary nation faces nine percent unemployment for the forseeable future. The financial sector bailouts are seen generally as a failure or merely an exercise in corruption. It seems that what was considered a package of loans has no chance of being repaid anytime soon. The attempt at an auto industry bailout, though championed by Clinton and Obama in the Senate, collapsed under legal opposition from bond holders and other deep pocket entities that saw Chrysler liquidated and GM purchased for a song by a consortium of Toyota, Ford and Hyundai. Detroit is decimated. A program of subsidies for new car purchases designed to get more polluting vehicles off the road is a disaster costing far more and achieving far less than envisioned. The phrase “Cash for Clunkers” has become an epithet synonymous with failure.

In Iraq the McCain policy to stay the course has been a quiet success; the public has slowly come to either forget about the Iraq war or approve of it as they did at its inception. In Afghanistan the McCain Surge has been in place for three months despite the bitter public opposition of nearly every elected Democrat. Combat deaths are way up although other violence in that nation has been suppressed. Whether a weary nation has the will to continue is questionable.

Senator McCain’s commitment to close Guantanamo and end what he and others describe as “torture” has hit multiple road blocks. The McCain Administration decision to hold trials for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others in DC Federal Court has been a fiasco. Two months after the transfer of these prisoners no further action has been taken and it seems likely that they may be returned to Guantanamo or some other legal limbo as the news is dominated by the re-appearence of released Gitmo prisoners in acts of terror and warfare across the globe. The devastating and mysterious airliner bomb attack on Christmas Day that killed four hundred and twenty seven people, mostly Americans, has driven the nation to a despairing mood that has brought the Obama philosophy of diplomatic engagement and military withdrawal to new popularity although he had notably muted these views once he was named the Number 2 on the Democratic ticket.

In Arizona, a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Mr McCain has turned into a massive political rout for state Republicans as obscure State Senator Albert Hale won in a landslide upset largely on opposition to the McCain agenda, foremost his healthcare legislation that vastly cuts Medicare and Medicaid as it imposes taxes on so-called “Cadillac” healthplans which have proven to include nearly all private sector employer plans.

Of course the completely unforeseen is always the most impactful and the utterly devastating earthquake in Haiti has proven to be the greatest challenge for the President to date. Hundreds of thousands have died and nearly the whole nation is endangered. Lawlessness, always a simple fact in Haiti, has exploded. Vast resources both military and civilian have been dispatched and do what they can but just two days after the initial shock a tidal wave of media and political figures led by Senator Obama have declared it all too little and too late. From nearly every media megaphone comes the accusation that McCain has abandoned Haiti for racial, if not racist reasons. House Majority Whip Nancy Pelosi denounces the Haiti debacle as “McCain’s Katrina” to thundering applause from the Democrats and sullen acceptance by the Republicans.

Indeed, already it is plain that Senator Obama intends to run in his own right for the Presidency again and will be campaigning from his Illinois Senate seat until that day arrives. He has been a forceful opposition voice against the form if not the premises of McCain’s healthcare, financial, stimulus and foreign policies. That uncompromising stance has made him the Senate Majority Leader despite being a one-termer. He commands a fifty-three seat majority (with the recent death of Senator Kennedy and the Republican victory in that special election) and his bullet-proof media relationship and rock-solid base of dissaffected Left-leaning voters across the nation make Senator Obama an opposition figure with power unparalleled in American history. His most shattering maneuver may well be his recent and public reaching out to former President George W. Bush on Haiti and other matters in answer to McCain’s habitual reshifting of current resentments towards that target. With his powerhouse arm-twisting that won Chicago the high-profile Olympics bid and his Nobel Peace Prize speach denouncing war unconditionally, Mr Obama has maintained near parity with McCain in the public mind despite being merely the second on the losing ticket.

It seems that the political and economic climate could scarcely be worse even as the climate itself has receded from the Catastrophic Global Warming brink. But this also does not avail McCain as he has supported the Global Warming agenda and traveled to a hostile Copenhagen where he narrowly arranged a deal that looks dead in the Senate. In the House, Republicans led by John Boehner denounce this modest McCain victory as a solution to a non-existent problem while the costs of Cap and Trade look fatally large to a nation struggling under a ten trillion dollar deficit, half of which was realized just this year.

All in all, it has been about as difficult a Presidential first year as one may find in modern history. One can only hope that the reserves of strength McCain developed and demonstrated in his long, brutal captivity and public career of decades will see him through for the sake of the nation.

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