WASHINGTON, July 2 (UPI) -- Sen. Barack Obama brought hope and Sen. John McCain brought some fresh thinking to the U.S. Republican Party, but everything in the United States during the first half of 2008 was overshadowed by a weakening economy and dollar, and the soaring price of global oil and gasoline.

The Fourth of July holiday weekend in the United States, coming right after the start of the second half of the year, marks a good time to look back over the first half: It was a time unusually bright with the hope of positive change but also unusually ominous because of the global food and fuel crises, and growing tensions between the United States and Israel with Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

U.S. President George W. Bush's economic policies based on keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels had ridden out seven years of unprecedented terrorist attacks, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and steadily rising global oil prices. But the first half of 2008 was the time when the Bush economic juggernaut finally fell off the tracks.

First there was the global subprime crisis that had in fact hit in the fall of 2007, but its ripples continued to spread around the world in the first half of 2008, weakening the U.S. and British economies in particular and casting a continuing pall of uncertainty.

That was bad enough, but the subprime aftershocks were only heralds of far worse long-term economic tsunamis that drenched the U.S. domestic economy and most of the rest of the world as well.