Iowa State University professor Steffen Schmidt says the 2008 vote for president will be a "watershed, seriously important election."

Washington -- The 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign will reflect dramatic changes in American society, political analysts tell America.gov.

Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt said the 2008 vote will be a “watershed, seriously important election.”

The election would be important, he said, even without a global terrorism threat, or that the presumed presidential nominees are Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, who could be the first African-American U.S. president.

Important elections occur “when there is a general shift in the paradigm [basic structure] of society,” Schmidt said Examples in U.S. history include the 1861-1865 Civil War and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Schmidt said 2008 is a “threshold year when the full impact of globalization is making itself felt in full force, and the U.S. economy has now shifted so that most Americans are no longer working in stable lifelong jobs.” Instead, Schmidt said, “we are becoming a very fast-moving, innovative and novel economy -- the first 21st century economy.”

The election, he said, marks the “end of the cheap energy period and the need to shift to new energies and technologies which can be accelerated or slowed by good or bad national government policies.”

These challenges face “whoever becomes U.S. president in 2008,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said older Americans will be “critically important in 2008 simply because their numbers are huge and they are facing the economic [income, job and pension] and health consequences of the 21st century economy and they are very concerned” about those issues.

The candidate who “can see what the next 50 years will require to keep us competitive, wealthy, and strong and who can articulate that to voters will win the election,” said Schmidt.

UNITED STATES FACES ENORMOUS CHALLENGES

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said 2008 ranks “among the most important elections in U.S. history because America is at a turning point today.”

Presumed presidential nominees, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

“There are enormous challenges abroad with two wars raging” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the United States faces an “enormous challenge in terms of how we get off the fossil fuel economy and ensure our children a future,” said Lichtman, who will be in Russia September 15-30 for the State Department’s U.S. Speaker and Specialist program. Lichtman will “impersonate” Obama in the staging of up to five U.S.-style presidential debates to heighten Russian awareness of the American election process.

The presidential election will show the conflicting pressures older voters face in casting their votes, Lichtman said. Many older voters, he said, identify with McCain because the Arizona senator is 71, but have views on the issues more compatible with those of Obama, who will be 47 when the election occurs. Lichtman said the Illinois senator showed during the Democratic primaries that he can motivate younger voters “but the open question is whether they will show up at the polls and vote where they haven’t in the past.”

Young people “are the hardest voters to turn on and the easiest voters to turn off,” said Lichtman.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN OF HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE

Cary Covington, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, said the election is important on at least two levels.

“First, and most obviously, the symbolism of an African American running for the highest office in the country is, regardless of whether he wins or loses, of historic significance,” said Covington.

On a substantive level, Covington said, the country’s choice between McCain and Obama will be “critical to foreign affairs. Differences between the two candidates on domestic issues are, of course, important. But presidents cannot determine our path in domestic affairs the way they can in foreign affairs.”

Covington said presidents can use their leadership role in foreign affairs to pressure the U.S. Congress to “endorse their preferred policies in ways that they cannot do in domestic policy.”

McCain is more attuned to President Bush’s “unilateral approach to foreign policy” and his “reliance on ‘hard’ foreign policy tools like the military,” Covington said.

Obama, in contrast, “appears to prefer to act multilaterally, much like” the first President Bush as he prepared for the 1991 Gulf War, Covington said.

He added that Obama also seems “inclined to lead with the ‘soft’ foreign policy tools of diplomacy and to rely on military force only if the diplomatic efforts fail.”

This difference, Covington said, is “important because the rest of the world is likely to respond quite differently to a continuation of the Bush approach than to the change embodied by Obama,” who will give U.S. allies a “sense of inclusion and a stake in outcomes.”

Covington said the differences in the approaches of McCain and Obama are likely to influence foreign policy more significantly than domestic policies.

For information on the foreign policy positions of McCain and Obama, see “Candidate McCain Aims to Revitalize U.S. Global Standing” and “Obama Emphasizes Multilateral U.S. Foreign Policymaking.”