[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]
The word “change” is all the rage these days on the presidential campaign trail. Unfortunately, its meaning has been so obscured for political reasons that it’s hard to sort through what’s really going on.
In today’s America, when any politician talks of change, it simply has to mean change away from the policies of the Bush Administration, starting with Iraq, continuing through New Orleans/Katrina, tax cuts, deficit spending to the sub-prime mess, to name but a few. The need for change, if you are looking at it substantively, has to be change from current Republican policies – Republican because those policies were enacted with the compliance of a Republican Congress in the days before 2006. That means, presumably, that the Republicans in Congress agreed with the President and supported him on his policies.
John McCain, who has supported Republican positions in 88.3% of his Senate votes, has decided that he is the true agent of change because he has disagreed with the Administration on a small number of points. He is against earmarks, wants to stop lobbyist using money to get at legislators, co-authored a bill on climate change control, believes in using embryonic stem cells, and wants to legalize the flow of foreign workers to the US. Thus, he sees himself as a maverick who has taken on his own party on a number of issues. But, essentially, he has been an “agent of change” on only a few hobby issues. In the main, he has supported Republican legislative goals at an almost 90% rate,
Sen. McCain has redefined “change” to mean taking on one’s own party, rather than the onerous policies of the opposition party. He says that Obama can’t be an agent of change because he is a died-in-the-wool liberal Democrat who has never taken on his own party on any issue and therefore, under the new McCain definition, cannot be an agent of change!
Please, that’s why he is an agent of change! The only politicians who can really be agents of change in today’s American context are the Democrats. They are the only ones who think that the Republican policies of the Bush era are absolutely wrong and have to be changed for the good of the country. They actually have alternative policies to offer as a change from Republican policies largely supported by McCain and are prepared to spell them out, if anyone will listen.
But then, this campaign, more than most, and thanks largely to Republican strategy, is not about issues and reality. It is about emotion and cosmetics. As long as the campaign remains that way, we will focus on a Republican presidential candidate whose best and boldest changes have been designed to make himself more appealing to the Republican base and a Democrat candidate whom Republicans paint negatively as a captive of his own party!
On real policy issues there isn’t a nickel’s difference between McCain and Bush and that covers economic, tax, energy, health care, military, education and foreign policies. He calls himself an agent of change because he plans to “clean up Washington”, not radically change its current policies, with the help of a vice presidential candidate who has allegedly “cleaned up Alaska”, but whose main attraction to his base is her ultra-conservative philosophy.
There is no talk of changing those Bush policies that got us into the multiple messes in which we now find ourselves. That is presumably because he has no plans to change them. No, he will fight corruption, lobbyists, the old ways of doing business, and that’s just fine, but he has articulated few plans to change the Bush policies that Obama says he will change.
The campaign appears to be going well for McCain, proprietor of the “Straight Talk Express”. On the heels of the Republican Convention, he is pulling even and even surpassing the Democrat candidate while running a campaign that has almost nothing to do with issues and everything to do with his new definition of “change”. Is that really straight talk?
Unless the voting public suddenly becomes interested in the critical issues involved – the candidates’ real positions on Iraq, foreign policy, deficit spending and the rapidly worsening economy at home – it seems likely that this strange, disingenuous campaign strategy will continue in place, largely because the McCain campaign sees it as potentially leading to the White House.
If that is the case, we will have elected a new president who will change little other than the cosmetics of Washington dynamics, while pursuing the policies of his predecessor, policies that gave gotten us into the mess in which we now find ourselves and which easily could change the current downturn in America’s fortunes into a total disaster.
Haviland Smith is a former Northeastern Republican turned independent who believes in social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. He sees his former party as having been hijacked by Dixiecrats and turned to social conservatism and fiscal profligacy. He lives in Williston.
