Did I vote for the wrong president?

Had I known in 2008 what I know now, I'm starting to think, I might have voted for John McCain for president. Not because he and I share similar political views, but because we don't.

Sometimes in supporting someone for elected office, you get carried away by sentiment and forget that politics is a sport like any other -- tennis, for instance. When Obama began his epic match against the Republicans in January 2009, he had the wind at his back, and it was his serve.

Worried that overwhelming his opponent might appear indelicate and a trifle brutish, he bet on the Republicans to play a defensive game and put the ball in play instead of going for an ace. He lost the health care issue in straight sets. The Obama presidency has been on a losing streak ever since.

So-called moderates who admire Obama's cool and willingness to compromise argue that at least we got some health care reform. The reform Obama campaigned for contained a public option.

When that far-sighted feature was bargained away, along with it went any hope of controlling spiraling health care costs through the creation of a larger pool of payers and providers from which consumers could choose.

A large pool is the whole point of government programs and services, whether education or Social Security. The more who pay in -- yes, in the form of taxes -- the smaller the individual contribution has to be, and the wider the safety net.

There is no profit motive in this system, so there is no incentive to "grow" the government. Companies these days espouse the grow-or-die philosophy. Government does not.

This is how we got competition restored to business through the concept behind the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and confidence and stability restored to a desperate populace through the New Deal, legislation that not only pulled us out of the Great Depression but made us the envy of the world back in the 1950s and '60s, when we had the highest taxes in our history and the lowest income gap, the lowest inflation rate and the lowest unemployment.

Since then we've been lowering taxes and raising our debt load to give ourselves the mistaken impression that we are a prosperous country.

In reality, we're a country in which are headquartered a few thousand prosperous conglomerates that have no allegiance to American workers or markets. This is a new and extremely troubling situation, one that Obama has failed to address.

Here's another one: Our mounting national debt is intertwined with our personal debt.

Republicans in Congress rant about how households pay their bills and government should, too, when in fact households in America haven't been paying their bills in years. Why would we shell out for Social Security? It's not even our security, but our parents'.

I'm referring to banks that are more-than-ever "too big to fail," to servicers, to the rating agencies (where salaries are underwritten by the investment banks), to realtors, and most of all to those on Wall Street, who fostered the mythology that home prices would never fail (even as their own quants knew otherwise) and that a U.S. economy unencumbered by government interference would forever grow jobs that would pay salaries that would keep people in their homes.

Anyone who read the paper back then knows that just the reverse was happening, that home prices were being artificially inflated, that homeowners had caught the fever and were betting the farm on houses they didn't even own (but wouldn't be able to walk away from once the homes were worth half what they'd "paid" for them).

Attempts by the government to regulate this industry were continually undermined, foiled and ridiculed by Republicans in Congress and on Wall Street so adamantly that common-sense moderates assumed they must be missing the forest for the trees.

The only people who saw it all unfolding with perfect clarity, of course, were the architects of the collapse, those same fat cats who profited from the scam and whose minions are now in charge of our economy thanks to Obama's astounding and relentless naïveté.

Why Larry Summers et al. were ever asked to create reform out of the rubble is beyond my understanding.

McCain may be a Republican, but he knows the limits of compromise. He may be a hothead, but he's not naïve. Having been indicted himself in a similar scam, he was in a mood to redeem himself when he ran for president.

He was also, being McCain, angry for having been (as he sees it) duped. This is why he was against the bank bailout -- and even though a bailout was inevitable and necessary, he meant his resistance to have symbolic impact that voters would remember at the polls.

Had McCain won, his positions would have been embraced by Republicans as practical and derided by Democrats as "conservative" and "extreme." This is partly because McCain truly is a polarizing personality, while Obama is just the opposite, a pleaser.

The extreme right would have had no reason to exist with McCain speaking on behalf of the right. Obama, in failing to reach the masses with plain hard talk and, yes, finger-pointing and name-calling and demands for criminal investigations and stiff sentences, allowed a vacuum to be created that the Tea Party filled.

Those who recently fought for a hard-and-fast debt ceiling would not have been elected to Congress. Sarah Palin would be busy measuring curtains in the vice president's mansion. Michele Bachmann would be remembered dimly as that obnoxious woman who couldn't keep her hands off President George W. Bush.

People who tell me I should have supported Hillary Clinton aren't listening to what I'm saying. She would have been worse. I have no regrets that Obama was my candidate. I'm proud that I waited for hours in the sweltering heat to hear him accept the nomination, after writing him check after check and walking door to door campaigning for him.

He had it all. That he squandered it I don't chalk off to inexperience so much as to a morbid fear of America's first black president being a one-term president.

Ironically, Obama cares more about dispelling racial stereotypes than about running the country. He has my sympathy. I don't resent him. I only wish he'd had the vision that George Washington had when he denied himself a third term.

Maybe it was easier for a rich white man. But Washington knew that winning elections is less important than what you do and say once you've won.

Politics is a power struggle, money-driven. So whom will I vote for in 2012? Obama will probably face Mitt Romney. If Romney wins, we'll have four more years of drifting to the right, as Republicans further consolidate and embolden their coalition of money and religion.

We will have lost the right to govern ourselves. If that happens, I will try to remember the good old days and tell my grandchildren that, heck, politics is no different from tennis.

Federer was a great player and America was a great country. But all great things must come to an end.