America Notebook

I am writing on the morning that President Obama is to deliver his last State of the Union address. You, reader, therefore know what he has said. I can only guess. ‘We have come so far… yet there remains so much to do.’ Did I get it right?

Yet ‘much to do’ only mildly describes the staggering array of crises that President Obama will bequeath his successor. Abroad: a crisis in the Chinese economy that is plunging into depression commodity exporters from Brazil to Brunei… a third war in Iraq, this time fought in undeclared association with Russia and Iran… a wave of refugees into Europe that threatens to smash apart the world’s largest economic union. At home: the typical American family is earning $4,000 a year less than in 2007 and unemployment is dropping partly because of a statistical illusion (the percentage of working-age men who are even looking for work has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded)… the wealth gap between black and white families has widened to an extreme not seen since the beginning of the civil rights era… even as a burst of drug and suicide mortality has reduced the life expectancy of non-college-educated whites — something that did not happen even during the Great Depression.

Under these grim circumstances, you’d think that the ‘out’ party — the Republican party — would be poised for victory. Instead, it is tearing itself apart. More than two thirds of Republicans tell pollsters they will never support Donald Trump. But like Greek city states warring as Philip of Macedon poised to pounce, the two thirds remains split between a fistful of conventionally credentialled politicians. A month before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the Republican field remains dominated by a bombastic, populist, nationalist billionaire.