While it's far from clear who will win next week's presidential election, four outcomes are within watermelon-seed-spitting distance from certain.

What's wrong with the United States of America? It's a question countless people are asking, in the United States and around the world, following the massacre at a movie theatre in Colorado. Why does the United States spawn such madness, so frequently? And why is it getting worse?

American presidents who seek re-election when the economy is weak almost always lose. Badly. To buck that trend, the Obama campaign is trying a new and challenging strategy.

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a frightening claim about Iran. "I look at the rhetoric and the kind of philosophy that drives the Iranian regime, the kind of threats they have made to others in the world," he said, "and my deep concern about this regime is that, for the first time in history, we are facing a regime that not only wants to attain nuclear weapons but a regime that has, compared to virtually all other holders of nuclear weapons in the past, far less fear of using them."

Let's play word association. Ready? "Jimmy Carter." Chances are you thought "failed president." Or "weak." Or "soft liberal." Or maybe "better ex-president than president." The common thread is failure. Jimmy Carter was a weak, indecisive, ineffectual liberal who failed.

In conventional political classification, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan are in quite different categories. But still there are remarkable parallels between the two.

The United States of America is in trouble. The mammoth deficit. The gargantuan debt. The moribund economy and appalling unemployment. It's hard times in the land of plenty - as anyone could see with just a glance at the thin, exhausted face of President Barack Obama as he addressed a joint session of Congress last week.

But how did it come to this? That's the $64,000 question, as Americans said in a more optimistic time. It's also the question we must answer if we are to learn from our neighbours' brutal experience.

Americans may have celebrated July 4th with the usual hotdogs and fireworks, but Uncle Sam was a sick old man on his 235th birthday. Deficits and debt. A moribund economy. Appalling unemployment. Crumbling infrastructure. Endless foreign wars. We all know the litany of ills. It's long and grim and the question for most observers is not whether Uncle Sam will continue to decline, but how far, and how fast.

Are the Harper Conservatives changing Canada or is Canada changing the Harper Conservatives? Much as I like to complain about the government, I tend to think the answer is closer to the latter. One big reason? I follow American politics closely and so I inevitably find myself comparing Conservatives and Republicans. And from that limited perspective our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate - which is to say, sweetly Canadian - and are getting steadily more so.

Consider two important conservatives who just got new jobs.

Mounting deficits. Economic stagnation, high unemployment, and fears of worsening inflation. Peak oil. Calls for a return to the gold standard. Declining American power. Deepening pessimism and an unpopular president.

And what's with the shaggy hair? High school students look like the cast of That 70s Show.

Which is fitting, I suppose, because it increasingly feels as though we've been whisked back more than 30 years and we're re-living the decade of bad news and bad fashion. True, there are important differences. Today, inflation is only a threat. It's not the Soviets fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. And the crook who left the White House didn't have to be pardoned to escape responsibility for his crimes. But still, this era has a lot more in common with the '70s than bad hair.