Ironies of Change

Today everybody is a change candidate: Edwards, Hillary, even Mitt Romney join Obama and Huckabee. Well, they're all right--none of them is Bush.

Which is actually a big problem for Huckabee. If he was Gomer Bush, he'd be on his way to the nomination. But without establishment GOPer credentials, he's going to have to win it on his own, opposed not only by Democrats but by much of his own party.

But according to the persuasive E.J. Dionne, Huckabee may represent a change in the Evangelical community. In his conversation with Keith today, he points to a number of popular grassroots EC leaders who are folding in compassion for the poor and stewardship of the earth--in other contexts, traditional Christian constructions--to their political portfolios. However, at this point the EC community is split, and if Huckabee can unite it under a more capacious banner, that would be change.

Hillary Clinton would like to be the Democratic change candidate. The irony for her is that in 1992, Bill Clinton was the change candidate. I remember one network newser counting the number of times he said "change" in one of his debates with Bush the First, just as I heard one reporter today count the number of times Barack Obama said it in a speech.

On her first day in New Hampshire, Hillary and her people downplayed the significance of Iowa--they were never going to win there, it's a caucus not a primary, it's like running for mayor in a middle sized city. I'm not happy Hillary lost in Iowa, but I am happy Howard Wolfson and others on her staff lost. I'd like to see them lose their jobs.

But Hillary also sounded the theme she's likely to continue pushing, a judo move not on "change" which hasn't worked for her, but on Obama's "hope." She warned today against "false hopes," that is, pinning hopes on a candidate who doesn't have the experience to deliver. That's actually a reasonable argument and a decent formulation. We'll see how it plays. We'll see if Obama's personal qualities and charisma as well as his verbal response counter it.

But the Bill Clinton example is instructive in other ways. Clinton got elected as the change candidate, and he didn't bring it enough--or fast enough--and he was in political trouble pretty quickly in his first term. Perhaps he didn't have the experience. But it was also true that his missteps combined with an insurgency that had been building in the R party, led to the devastating losses of the 1994 off-year election in which Dems lost control of Congress.

If you listen to Obama talk about bringing people together to effect change, his premise is that he has the votes in Congress to make that possible. So if he gets the nomination that's going to be his message--he not only wants to be elected, he will make a Democratic majority in Congress part of his campaign.

Finally, this thought on change. The word itself isn't very specific--it could mean change for the good, for the worse, towards or away from any number of things. The direction of change is important. JFK ran effectively on the slogan of getting the country "moving again" which was a change in tempo and presumed direction, from the apparent torpor of the second Eisenhower term. Change in the right direction, and in the right way, is the support structure for the one-word anomalous slogan.