The prospect of getting a $300 tax rebate sometime this spring doesn’t excite me.

I know the point of the economic stimulus plan is to encourage Americans to go out and spend money, and it is hoped to keep the economy from going into a free-fall. But a few hundred dollars isn’t going to do much to relieve the gloom that I’ve been feeling for quite a while.

Apparently it’s a feeling that’s going around. Last week, The New York Times reported that American voters are in a dark mood going into November’s presidential election, and that their sense of what it means to be an American has taken a beating. For some time now I’ve felt that if I’m not exactly living in a Third World country, I am living in a second-rate one. And that’s despite the fact that I have a full-time job, health insurance, a nice husband and a reasonable interest rate on my co-op mortgage.

Two years after being downsized like so many other Americans, I am earning less. And in New York City, where an ordinary cup of coffee now costs $1.50, where subway fares are jacked up by millionaires who get to ride the trains for free, where the price of a ticket at my neighborhood movie theater just went up to $11.75, and where it recently cost me $18 to get a pair of jeans taken in after I lost a few pounds, I’m feeling poorer than I have in ages.

I’m lucky to have health insurance from my former job, but the premiums just went up by more than a staggering 30 percent. And while I’ve been diligent about saving money, my retirement savings have been significantly whacked by the past year’s ugly stock market. The dollar is in such bad shape abroad that my husband and I spiked our plans to go to Europe this summer, even as we are regaled with stories about the Europeans who are flocking to New York to take advantage of the cheap prices.

According to the Web site ourfuture.org, the median income for American households has been in decline between 2000 and 2006 and, given the rising cost of things, we are noticeably poorer. As an American I also feel poorer not just financially, but morally. Our government has us mired in a war that was based on lies and that is draining the economy. Meanwhile, the United States has been revealed to be a country that tortures prisoners, that detains people for years without trials or formal charges, whose corporate executives lie about their profits and loot their own companies, sacrificing the jobs and savings of thousands of loyal employees, and whose president is widely perceived as being a knucklehead.

Add a huge national deficit, a subprime mortgage crisis that could force thousands of Americans out of their homes, and an education system that now ranks only in the middle, compared with other developed countries, and it’s enough to put one in a funk. Americans who’ve visited China and Japan recently praise the energy and entrepreneurship that are visible there, while the extent of the malaise here is apparent.

Which means that what the next president does will be so important. What will it take to get this country back on track? Among other things, getting out of Iraq, as soon as possible. Repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, a disastrous decision, coming as it did just when the war was gearing up. Giving tax relief to the middle and working classes. Expanding health coverage to the 48 million Americans who don’t have it. And investing in the physical infrastructure of the country. That means the levees and the devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans, the subways and bridges in New York City, a national train system so that Americans can enjoy the kind of mass transportation that the Europeans and the Japanese have. We also should take major steps to reduce harm to the environment, from relatively simple measures, to the more complex, but doable one of drastically reducing our reliance on oil.

John McCain is the Republican candidate who honestly admits to Americans’ lost nobility in the world, how impossible it is to square our deeds as a country with the American ideal. Barack Obama is the Democrat who talks about the possibility of finding a new direction and working together to dig ourselves out of this mess. Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton talks about moving forward, while appearing to have one foot in the past.

We need to elect someone who can move us forward, and not just do a patch job, because we’ve already fallen behind. The truth is, America the mighty has fallen, and it will take a mighty effort to lift us back up.