America's Post-American President?

To the Huffington Post's satisfaction, Obama has been photographed holding "The Post-American World":

The book makes the point that as power, skill and capacity becomes more distributed around the globe, Washington would do better to encourage this trend and honor it as both a cooperative and motivating factor.

The author puts it as:

At a time when other commentators are warning that the U.S. is on the skids, Zakaria offers a refreshingly upbeat assessment.

``This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else,'' he writes.

Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, arrived in the U.S. as an 18-year-old student from India in 1982. For him, America remains a land of promise, a nation capable of leading the ``industries of the future,'' such as nanotechnology.

I'm all for improved living standards worldwide. That's tremendous news.

But if America is continuing to lead the world into the future, shouldn't our relative standard of living continue to outpace everybody else's even while the absolute standard rises globally?

Iirc Larry Kudlow made the we're-not-declining-everybody-else-is-improving argument some time ago, and I wasn't convinced then either.

I worry that our elites and special interests are spending the societal capital accumulated since 1776 instead of increasing it. I worry that some pundits on the left and right are, at best, in denial. My instincts are with the majority that believes the country is on the wrong track (which is not to say that any given change would be an improvement).

Addendum September 13, 2008. Our elites are running the country like the Sulzbergers run the New York Times.