What's In a Word: Change

Since about a year ago, every pundit worth their salt had their own way of saying that the 2008 presidential election would be a "change" election. If I hear one more of them blather on about how this was a central theme to Barack Obama's campaign, I might just vomit. For what it's worth, Barack Obama was joined in this articulation by both John Edwards (who I supported) and Hillary Clinton. But Obama really made it a hallmark of his campaign.

The thing is that he never made it specific. Which is fine by me, at least in some ways.

But everyone knew what he meant, at least viscerally. We had eight years of George Bush and thirty years of conservative hegemony. Policies they enacted (and much of the Clinton domestic policy agenda was thoroughly framed in a conservative lens in his soft version of neoliberalism) were bad, and they finally caught up with us. I'm talking on a meta-level, American domestic policy was bad, from fiscal to monetary to programmatic. And in a big way, it's all caught up with us. I certainly don't need to break the news to anyone on the general picture or the specifics.

What bothers me right now is that these very same pundits (whose only qualification seems to be having a platform - no matter how many times they're wrong or how much they don't get it, they self-perpetuate their platform and the danger in which they put the republic) who spoke about Obama and change are now questioning much of it.

How many right-wingers have there been on cable news shows? I lost track and almost lost it all today when I saw Mike Huckabee on CNN. Why is the crack-up of conservatism and the GOP a real story when in 2000 and 2004, as well as the intervening years, there was virtually no cable talk about the internal thrashing of Democrats and the rise of a nascent progressive movement? My snide aside is that we have been going through this in different cycles since at least the 80s. But that's not the issue here.

How many times have we had to endure some conservative pundit telling us that America is still a center-right nation? How many concern trolls in mass media are warning that Obama and the Congressional Democrats should not "overreach"? Didn't this election at least validate in some ways the partisan preferences for Democrats on the part of the American people? [Note: I could offer up some statistical proof of this now based upon exit polls and results, but I'm holding out until December when the Census Bureau I believe releases good election surveys and when the American National Election Study puts out some numbers too - that's also when my semester ends.]

And what stimulated me to write something today is the narrative of questioning from these pundits about Barack Obama's transition and governmental teams. They are asking, with the preponderance of legacy Clinton staffers, how Obama can be said to be living up to his mantle of being a change candidate and president-elect.

Well, the issue of change for people was less about the inside baseball of who is where and what their previous employment has been, and more so about a change in policies and ideological orientation.

Barack Obama, who I have and will continue to criticize even though I am a partisan Democrat and ideological progressive, is going to bring change in his policies and what his administration accomplishes. THAT is the change we voted for - and to steal a phrase and abuse it - what we believe in.