A Slight Delay

High hopes accompany Barack Obama’s apparent nomination for the Democrats’ top spot this fall, just as some on the GOP side think that John McCain will bring their party, and the country, real and lasting change. If history–both long-term and recent–is any indication, though, voters on both sides of the aisle should approach the race as much with their heads as their hearts; if not, there’ll be some pretty dissatisfied and disaffected people from one end of this country to the other come 2012.

Let’s start with McCain. The 2000 race, which introduced McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” amid much hype and fanfare, and perhaps too few questions, seemed to present something new and different in American politics. We were told that this, finally, was a person both willing and capable to sacrifice party politics for his own ideals and higher principles. The Senator seemed to have a certain brash honesty about him that appealed to a broad spectrum of voters.

In the eight years since, though, while the people’s wish for change remained intact, something in the man seemed to have changed. Having first (accurately, I think) pegged the likes of Falwell and Swaggart as “agents of intolerance,” McCain went on to seek their endorsements, along with those of pastors Hagee and Swaggart. The same man who was responsible in part for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms would later flip-flop on the issue once the campaign in question was his own. And, perhaps most tellingly (to say nothing of most gallingly), the same person with first-hand knowledge of the torture of POW’s–the torture he suffered for years in a North Vietnamese POW camp–reversed his stance on torture.

None of these, or the many other reversals of belief that McCain has shown over the course of the 2008 campaign, are minor issues. This isn’t paper-versus-plastic, or someone who used to love tapioca now claiming to hate the stuff; these are issues that speak to our core values as individuals and as a nation. It would seem, from here at least, as though the single biggest “change” that McCain is peddling would be frequent changes of heart and mind.

Obama’s dilemma is a bit different. He doesn’t have McCain’s history, and therefore brings with him a bit less baggage (though he’s likely to be dogged over Reverend Wright, patriotism, and a host of other distractions). But like McCain (both the 2000 and 2008 editions), Obama is promising something new in politics… politics in which people can be engaged, and politics that will be above the sturm und drang that’s passed for the norm in Washington since, oh, 1776 or thereabouts. Less influence by lobbyists, less partisan bickering, more bipartisanship, more fellowship, more less, and less more (y’all can fill in the catchphrases at will, by now).

The ideals are lovely. The thoughts, and the eloquence with which they’re so often expressed, gives me goosebumps. But sooner or later, the ideals have to rub shoulders with, or put on boxing gloves opposite, the practicalities of running a country. Compromise becomes necessary to get much of anything done, and sometimes the compromises made are the very ones that end up sacrificing ideals in order to just keep things moving forward. We can try to limit the malign influence exerted by power brokers, lobbyists, and their sort, but odds are better than even that we couldn’t eliminate them; either they’d persist, or something else–perhaps worse–would take their place.

It’s useful to bear in mind that while there’s much that’s unique to American democracy and American politics, there are certain things that come with the territory no matter where or how you try to govern. It has less to do with ideals and more with the nature of power, as well as the things that people will do to maintain and weild that power. There’s a reason that people still study Machiavelli, and why people will be learning from the mistakes of Bush, Rove, and their ilk years from now… the nature of power, and of people, is notoriously slow to change. One hopes that Obama’s supporters will keep this somewhere in the backs of their minds.

A bigger problem–faced by both men, and the whole country by extension–is something for which neither can really take the blame. While the system does need to be changed, you can’t remake something in a new image without first acknowledging the thing for what it is.

Washington’s system of lobbyists, power brokers, pork barrel spending, and politicians-for-life is something that’s taken root over the course of our whole history. Anything that entrenched can’t be changed completely over the course of a four-year term, or even a couple of them. It would take nothing less than a sea change in politics itself, starting at the grassroots level and percolating up to Washington; politics, after all, is like a fractal, with the same patterns repeating themselves ad infinitum whether you look closely at the details, or if you zoom out for the bigger picture. Until the culture of politics–to say nothing of human nature–changes, it’s going to be pretty damned hard to make some of the other changes that politicians of all kinds have been promising since time immemorial.

Tags: change, Election 2008, McCain, Obama, Politics

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.