While I have my guess as to who might win the 2004 presidential election, Tuesday’s results are far from certain as this column is being written.  Yet there remain several issues undecided by the outcome of the race between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Let us ponder them for a moment:

Iraq: The road to democracy and American imperialism has proved far more difficult than the rabid fantasies of the neoconservatives.  The next president, whoever he is, is going to have to ask for another deployment of troops to vanquish Fallujah and beyond.  The question remains whether the new administration would be willing to confront this challenge, or accept the Iraq war as a chastening experience and plan a withdrawal.  But the current commitment will not guarantee success in what is increasingly proving to be a guerrilla war.

Taxes: The conventional wisdom is that taxes will not rise significantly regardless of who is elected president.  The conventional wisdom is wrong.  The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire.  Congress will have to pass legislation extending these tax cuts, especially the reductions in the top two marginal rates, that can sustain a presidential veto.  This political reality does not change whether the next president is a Republican or Democrat. 

Increasing the top two marginal tax rates will also raise taxes on Americans with families with incomes below $200,000 a year.  These are people in their peak earning years, not the entrenched rich like Teresa Heinz Kerry.  Yet the next Democratic administration threatens their incentives to produce as well as their potential to create and retain wealth.  Finally, over the next few years a growing number of non-rich (read middle-class) families will face the economic threat of the alternative minimum tax, in conjunction with real-income bracket creep.

Entitlements: Forget the idea that spending restraint is a matter of ideological commitment.  Over the next four years, Social Security will lumber more closely to insolvency and the bankruptcy of Medicare will draw even closer.  The need to rein in the expenses on these two mandatory spending programs, which account for an increasingly large share of the federal budget, will become increasingly apparent.

Marriage: The political consensus is increasingly that national efforts to thwart gay marriage are the result of counterproductive, divisive politics.  That consensus is wrong.  The Federal Marriage Amendment may be wrongheaded, but it is the clear result of judicial imposition of gay marriage throughout the country.  Courts will not heed those who wish to make this issue one decided, at great length, by the elected representatives of the American people.  Instead, they wish to abuse their own constitutionally enumerated powers and rewrite the age-old societal definition of marriage.  It is crucial that this redefinition be rejected.

Immigration: We heard quite clearly in the third presidential debate, when CBS’ Bob Schieffer yielded to the American people and asked an immigration question, that neither candidate has a firm opinion of the debasement of American citizenship.  Both Bush and Kerry favor some version of amnesty.  Both favor increased levels of legal immigration.  Neither aspirant favors any serious effort to curtail illegal immigration, especially if it would mean thinking outside the box by erecting a fence along the Mexican border or tightening employer sanctions against the cheap-labor lobby.

While there are many crucial issues that cause some to label this the most important election in our lifetimes, there remain critical debates that neither Bush nor Kerry will decide.  Regardless of who wins this election, we face tough choices that cannot be ignored despite the excitement of partisan contests.

We are likely to wake up Wednesday with a new president.  But this does not mean we will not have four more years of serious public-policy debate ahead of the American people.

W. James Antle III is a primary columnist for Intellectual Conservative.com.  He works as an assistant editor of The American Conservative magazine and is also a senior editor of EnterStageRight.com. The views expressed here represent his alone.