Does the winner lose?

For the past year Americans have been losing friends, making enemies and in general, being their old partisan selves over the question of who is best qualified to lead us. We've argued about Iraq, taxes, the budget, whether one candidate is a Mini-Me of George Bush and whether the other candidate is an honorary member of the Weather Underground.

It's now end game. On Tuesday, the shouting, arguments, innuendo, dirty campaigning and the all the rest comes to a screeching halt. We'll get our president … and then … and then … and then what?

Everybody, left, right, center and unknown agree that this time, it really is different. The meltdown, the looming global recession and the foreign-policy mess have produced a world unlike any other that Americans have faced since the end of World War II. So my question is this: Given the magnitude of the problems we and the world face, does the winner of this presidential contest actually lose?

What is to be done? Signs right now point to a deflation, possibly global. Everyone senses this – falling stocks, home values and commodity prices, layoffs and the threat of double-digit unemployment now point to falling wages. Even the price of gold is down. Can falling prices be far behind?

Everyone knows that what the candidates argued about during their three debates – tax cuts, spending programs, something better for everyone, no exceptions – was not only beside the point, but was almost irrelevant to the problems we face. In truth, whether the winner is McCain or Obama (and I hope it's Obama), no one knows for sure what either man is going to do about any of this. It's as if the candidates were sleepwalking. In fact, by not demanding more answers about real problems, so were the media and the public. One might call this the Great Denial Election.

So does the winner lose? If we are headed into a deflation, something this country has not really experienced since the 1930s, what exactly will McBama do about it? More to the point, what can they do about it? It's as real as rain and as serious as a heart attack – neither McCain nor Obama has addressed the economy on its own terms and proposed anything of substance. It's as if both men studiously avoided having to tell us the truth.

And what is that truth? Perhaps that we're up to our eyeballs in debt. Perhaps for a generation, we spent too much and saved too little, pinned our hopes to real-estate investments (something our grandparents never would have understood) or our 401Ks (something our grandparents would have warned us against doing.)

So whether it's the man from Illinois or the one from Arizona, be prepared to be disappointed. Be prepared to, as the old Yankees used to say, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." Because for now, and maybe for the first term of whomever wins, we're in a new age of austerity, limited missions, curtailed dreams and quite possibly, a declining standard of living.

It promises four years of heartache and broken hopes for Tuesday's winner. And it will hit hard, because neither McCain nor Obama was able to look into that magic lens and tell the people the economic equivalent of what Winston Churchill explained on May 13, 1940 – that all he could offer the public was "blood, sweat, toil and tears" – especially the part about toil.