Last month, at a campaign rally in Michigan, Barack Obama called this “the most important election of our lifetime.”

Weeks later, at the Republican convention, Rudy Guiliani also called it “the most important election of our lifetime.”

The implication—by both sides, and by anyone who says it—is that if Americans choose the wrong man, the consequences could be disastrous. If they choose the right man, however, all will be well.

Is it true? It’s certainly easy to get swept up in the hype. The media are expert at turning presidential politics into a sporting event. And the candidates are making every conceivable pitch to convince us that utopia is just a vote away.

Like every presidential aspirant, John McCain is making some big promises. He has pledged, among many other things, that if elected he will combat hunger nationwide, save the Everglades, work to rid Africa of malaria, and win the war in Iraq. He will end dependence on Middle Eastern oil, capture Osama bin Laden, expand the military, and ensure the nation has high-quality intelligence. He promises to restore people’s trust in the government, inspire greater public service in Americans, help smokers quit, protect doctors from lawsuits, ensure that students have access to excellent schools, secure America’s borders, fix fema, train workers for the new economy, and make U.S. employees more globally competitive. He also plans to balance the budget, stop wasteful government spending, rescue Medicare, and save Social Security without raising taxes. And this is just the short list.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable to see a president achieve all that? But wait. As far-reaching as these promises are, they don’t even touch those of his opponent.

Barack Obama has promised, among many other things, that if America elects him, he will safeguard all nuclear material worldwide within his first term, stop new nuclear weapons development, finish the fight in Afghanistan, crack down on al Qaeda in Pakistan, end the Darfur genocide, and create a Palestinian state that exists with Israel “side by side in peace and security.” He aims to cut the world’s extreme poverty in half and boost international aid. He will help revitalize inner cities, overhaul immigration laws, outlaw discrimination against transsexuals, ban racial profiling, make the criminal justice system into one that will inspire every American’s trust and confidence, and even attract more doctors to rural areas. He will provide free college for those who want to become teachers, supply health care and broadband Internet access for every American, preserve Social Security, rebuild aging infrastructure, and build a 21st-century VA hospital—all while slashing federal waste and cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families. He will “make sure our economy is working for everybody,” and generate “nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” He pledges to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, to reduce electricity demand even as the population increases, to “end the age of oil,” and to “work to solve this energy crisis once and for all.” Again, this is just cherry-picking from a much larger list of his campaign pledges.

It gives you a good idea of how socialistic the nation is becoming: The only serious remaining contenders for its highest office are seducing voters with the lure of more government programs, more entitlements, and more regulations and laws.

But how much do Americans believe either of these men could actually keep these promises? Hard to say. Generally, politicians aren’t held too hard to account for their soaring campaign rhetoric.

It’s a good thing, too, because those promises are about to be absolutely shredded.

The reason goes far beyond the limits imposed on a president by a system designed to prevent executive overreach—limits that alone would prevent most of those promises from ever being fulfilled.

It has more to do with priorities. Already, the concerns that many of those promises address are being overtaken by far more pressing, even existential concerns.

Right now, the American economy is embroiled in what Alan Greenspan is calling a “once in a century” crisis. The most vaunted names in the financial industry—Bear, Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, Merrill, aig—are tanking, or requiring unheard-of bailouts that are burdening the government with untold debt. The economic damage caused by the housing disaster is spreading worldwide and irreparably decimating America’s already shaky standing as global financial leader.

The next American president will face a drastically altered economic landscape. His term could well be consumed with trying to manage the vortex of related trends sucking the economy down: sagging stock market, falling home prices, mounting job losses; failing corporations. The bounce in the dollar—caused not by a stronger U.S. but by a weakened global economy—will prove temporary; inflation will increase; consumer spending will slump. To finance his grand plans, the next president will need cash. But he will face increasingly miserly foreign lenders. As America’s credit risk grows, their premiums will go up. Higher interest rates will create additional problems: less corporate spending, fewer home buyers, anemic consumerism. The president’s other option—printing money—will further hollow out the dollar’s value. He will find it impossible to spend the nation out of recession simply because of its already historic indebtedness.

It is difficult to calculate the pressures these economic woes will put on the already strained social integrity of this nation. The next president will face far more significant social problems than his predecessor did. Unemployment, inflation, recession, food shortages—these will find corollaries in the fracturing of families and neighborhoods, the increase in substance abuse, domestic violence and urban crime. Consider as well the economy’s unprecedented dependence on alien workers, and how the levels of immigration have weakened social cohesion and created pockets of hostile foreigners within the nation. Racial tensions are rising and could well be compounded by the outcome of this election, regardless of who wins.

And as much as the next president would like to restore America’s former prestige in industry, science and technology, he will not be able to do so by pledging additional money—if it could be found—to attract better teachers and improve education. The younger generations are suffering measurable deficits in emotional maturity, intellectual capacity, work ethic, self-sacrifice, ambition and will. These crippling problems have a number of causes that America has rendered itself incapable of confronting, including societal moral decline, sloth, and family breakdown. On top of these is the sense of entitlement and complacency produced by socialistic governmental programs—a malaise that cannot be remedied by more government programs.

Compounding these problems, the next president will find himself struggling with the irrefutable uptick in environmental disasters. Just take a peek at fema’s declared disasters webpage. Ronald Reagan saw an average of 23 major disaster declarations each year he was president. His successor saw 39 each year. Bill Clinton dealt with an average of over 47. President Bush has seen 54 annually. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike brought this year’s total, only halfway into September, to 56. That’s a new disaster requiring governmental intervention every five days. The drain on federal resources is growing greater all the time. And those figures don’t even include the far-reaching drought that, along with widespread flooding, has ravaged food production in the U.S.

The presidential candidates, though they may differ with some of these specifics, nevertheless accept the general premise that the nation’s problems are worse than ever. In response, they each say, That makes it all the more important that you vote forme.It’s because of all those troubles that this is, in fact, the most important election of our lifetime.

But there is a darker reality that both candidates and their supporters, caught up in the commotion of the campaign, are ignoring.

The reality is that the next president will be taking the helm of a cursed nation.

One can already see most of the problems described above besieging America. As much as one may want to believe that a new president will reverse the trends, simply following their present trajectory shows it very likely that next president will be overwhelmed.

But when you look at what the Bible prophesies for America in the near term, the true horror of the picture emerges.

The scenario we’ve already looked at is forecast in the Bible to continue and get far worse. The economic, moral and familial failures are prophesied to keep trending downward. The weather disasters are prophesied to grow more frequent and more catastrophic. The pressures on food supplies are prophesied to intensify. Immigration- and race-related hostilities are prophesied to heat up and explode into violence. The national loss of vigor and willpower is prophesied to become even more obvious. Not only that, these issues are prophesied to be compounded by still more crushing crises, including devastating disease epidemics, more lethal terrorist attacks, pestilence and famine.

In addition, God prophesied the loss within America of strong, masculine leaders to shepherd the nation through such tribulations (Isaiah 3:1-4). The resulting national weakness and wreckage will leave America imminently vulnerable to the prophesied nuclear attacks by a foreign nation that leave cities without an inhabitant—and subsequent national captivity. For a thorough scriptural study of how these prophecies apply to the United States, and to see the ultimately inspiring reason for which God is bringing them to pass, read Herbert W. Armstong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

This is how the Bible describes America’s coming days. These are the curses that are progressively befalling this nation that has turned itself so completely away from the God who gave it such abundant blessings.

The tempo at which this sequence of curses is already beginning to ravage the United States is accelerating. Exactly how much will occur during the term of the next president is not certain. What is certain, however, is that the curses will not lighten up. They will only grow worse.

The only question is how quickly. That is essentially the question that may be decided in this “most important” election.