Obama's “Change” Will be a Leftward Swing, Not a Fundamental Shift

A large part of our sitting legislators and our current president are in office because they made promises of reform, change, taking back Washington, etc.

“We need fundamental change in this country, and that's what I'd like to bring.” When Barack Obama said these words during the final presidential debate, he was talking about the “failed policies ... we've seen over the last eight years.”

There is a lot to say about Bush's failures. But I don't hear a fundamental shift in the way business is done in Washington from Obama, just a cyclical pendulum swing back to the left.

Obama is making the most of the dissatisfaction Americans feel toward Bush. But the need for change in our government goes much deeper than a switch to the other party can fix. When most of our latest batch of reformers won their seats, they got stuck in the same quagmiric system the previous agents of change found. This is not an eight-year-old problem.

But Obama wants us to think he's different. Has he shown that in the time he's been in the Senate? In what ways has he taken on corrupt Washington politics? I can't think of one. If you can, please let me know.

If Barack Obama is elected, he will have little incentive to make good on his promise of “fundamental change”. If he starts implementing liberal policies, people will be excited for a while because he's not Bush. If troops start coming home, people won't care much what is happening in Iraq. Approval ratings won't wait for that fundamental change, and soon it will be just another forgotten campaign slogan.

Now add that to a one-party government. On NPR October 27, Jonathan Rauch, senior writer for National Journal, explained why this leads to non-representative government and alienation of the other half of the country. The president is pressured to play to the middle of his own party, not the middle of the country.

Contrastingly, McCain knows instituting fundamental change is the only way forward he has open to him. He won't have the benefit of being able to do everything the opposite of how Bush did it. He'll have to act competently to impress us. There is no reason to doubt that he would continue reaching across the aisle just as he has in Congress. Since McCain doesn't owe his nomination to any right wing segments of the Republican party he has no reason to push a right wing agenda, he'll be everyone's president. In fact, Jonathan Rauch (see link above) argued that if Democrats want real progress on climate change and health care, they are better off with McCain.

But, if you want to be the "change" candidate, someone else has to be the status quo. One of Obama's favorite campaign lines is that electing McCain would be a third Bush term. This kind of attack works because, as it has so often been said, this is a Democrat's year. But the claim doesn't hold water. McCain has denounced the Bush Administration's failed policies in much more risky settings than Obama has. McCain blasted President Bush's handling of the Iraq war, for example, in the Republican primary debates.

More importantly, what most people dislike about Bush is not his conservatism, but his bully politics and ineffective leadership. There is no reason I know of to expect McCain to follow that example.

McCain has a whole career that shows he isn't another Bush. Although our government is now more polarized than it has been in since reconstruction (see Poole link below), McCain has consistently led collaborative bipartisan efforts to craft good and significant legislation such as election financing reform and climate change bills. Is it incidental that one of his strongest supporters was the Democratic vice presidential candidate eight years ago?

If you want a fun yet objective view of how the candidates are prone to vote (in a simplified linear format), Keith Poole et al. have statistically rated Obama, McCain, Hillary Clinton and George W Bush on a liberal-conservative continuum based on their voting records. Obama and Clinton are nearly equally liberal on the left wing of democrats. McCain is rated as a moderate republican. Bush is comfortably right wing. They call McCain's voting along the continuum “erratic.” I take that to reflect the fact that McCain worries less than most about whether a good bill falls on the liberal or conservative side before he votes for it.

Barack Obama has promise as a leader, he just isn't erratic. I would like him to show us, as a senator, what he means when he uses the word “change” before we elect him president. Right now, what this country needs is a new collaborative approach to government, not a liberal preponderance of power in the same old system.