Now that the debates between the two major candidates for President are over, and the election is just days away, some observation must be made about what is not being said. The Presidential campaign rhetoric and debate process has produced an electoral atmosphere devoid of vision, ignorant of global realities, and uncommitted to the future. It has been said many times that without vision, the people perish. This has been a presidential campaign without vision.

One of the debates was in St. Louis, yet nothing was mentioned of the fact that the Midwest especially St. Louis, and the entire nation in fact, is observing 200 years since the Lewis and Clark expedition. Whatever may be said today about that expedition (and there have been some vocal Native American critics of a too-sanitized bicentennial observance without attention paid to the fact that the expedition marked the beginning of massive white incursions into vast Native American lands and thus the beginning of the end of Native American culture as it was then known), it was conducted in the spirit of exploration, committed to contact rather than conquest, and initiated by one of the most visionary Presidents ever to occupy the office.

That among many other themes and references to a nation which needs to reorient itself and its vision of the future in a post 9-11 world, were not at all the subject of any substantial commentary by either major Presidential candidate. This campaign has been all about fear mongering on both sides, prescription drugs, tax cuts, deficits, capturing terrorist, military readiness, and the Iraq quagmire. They are all important issues, to be sure, but they are the immediate issues of the day, the issues for the next two years or five years. They are not the issues for the next ten or twenty years.

A Presidency needs to be about more than the immediate issues of the day. A Presidency needs to be about more than how much legislation can be passed. A Presidency surely must be about much more than tax cuts and prescription drugs.

The current Administration has no real defining foreign policy besides getting the terrorists. It has no real policy for global regions, especially the Middle East, except to flounder on the "road to peace" plan and to sputter and fluster while the government of Israel acts as no other government in no other area of the world is acting. That lack of regional leadership is all too evident in Asia, where economic temptations of China's billion-plus population are allowed to overshadow deepening concerns about human rights, and where responses to North Korea's nuclear weapons program have been wholly ineffective (a weapons program brought on in no small part by the Administration's own narrow-minded insistence that Japan should "shoulder its share" of regional security concerns, which to most of the rest of the Pacific region means a possible re-militarized Japan, presenting a prospect that is frightening in the extreme).

The current Administration has no real significant energy policy besides drilling for more oil and digging for more coal. It has no real environmental policy besides allowing for more arsenic in water, relaxing emission standards for power plants, and withdrawing from global warming treaties. The current Administration has no real economic policy except more tax cuts for the rich and playing shell games with deficit numbers. And the current Administration has no real education policy except the woefully misguided No Child Left Behind Act, which is woefully underfunded. The current Administration has no jobs policy except to say that the $1,000 extra tax deduction for dependent children has revitalized working families.

The current Administration has no exploration policy except to slash funding for maintaining the Hubble Telescope and grandiose plans for a mission to Mars that would cost billions and take perhaps 20 years to launch. The current Administration has no science and technology policy except to restrict stem cell research and scoff at new power generation proposals while going full bore on the ridiculous and totally unworkable "missile defense shield" boondoggle.

The current Administration has no real policy for the global realities of our day except to utilize the United Nations only when it suits our purposes and to "spread freedom throughout the world." And by the Administration's standards, this approach to "spreading freedom" is an American-style freedom with campaigns and elections and a constitution, imposed upon desperate third world countries without adequate economy, jobs, schools, roads, or utilities, or even civil order for that matter, as if freedom can be defined only by a constitution in a drawer and an election fraught with trepidation and violence. And "spreading freedom" also means regional trade treaties among the large countries, globalization, and a world economy managed by some for the benefit of a few in which billions of people are still at or near the subsistence level of existence.

We are in the twilight of the nation-state system, where global realities are upon us, where national sovereign is a political myth. Regional and worldwide efforts are imperative on crucial issues of hunger, disease, religious tolerance, racial divisions, true economic growth, education, and housing. Terrorism is only one part of that global concern and it is not separated from the others.

All of these larger issues are among the issues of the future. All of these issues are issues for the next 20, 30 years. The Presidency is the office of national leadership where those issues are considered, contemplated, and proposed. A candidate for President needs to demonstrate to the electorate, during the campaign as well as after it, the capacity for the long view, the vision, the future understanding, that the country sorely needs.

And these issues need to be considered and discussed and reviewed for more than just a few weeks after an inauguration. For these are vexing concerns, with serious choices to be made in policy, perspective, planning, financial commitment. If that kind of leadership ever was needed, it is needed now as we move further into the 21st Century. An 17th Century system of nation states, 18th century ideas of "economic progress" and "freedom," and 19th century notions of political management, simply will not do. A whole new wave of viewing and visioning is needed, and it has not come from this campaign.

This country is going in circles. It has since Vietnam, surely since the Reagan years. Since September 11, that circle has become a downward spiral. America now has little sense of itself, no concept of its role and reputation in the world, and no real notion of the future. If the next President cannot truly address the vision of the future with the issues of the next 20 to 30 years, this campaign will not even have been worth it.

---
C. William Michaels is an attorney in Baltimore, Maryland and the author of "No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State" (Algora, 2002). "No Greater Threat" is the only book containing a review of the entire USA PATRIOT Act. For more information on the book and author, contact www.nogreaterthreat.com.