are we ready?

Sure haven’t posted in a while. Excuse the obvious rustiness. Watching the Democratic debates last night (Saturday, Jan 5th) between Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson, I thought I would never hear the end of a certain word. I’m sure I’m not alone, but I sure am growing more and more skeptical of this little word that seems inextricably tied to any discussion of the upcoming elections.  CHANGE.  Before Saturday night, ‘change’ meant a few things in both the Republican and Democratic camps. For right and left, it meant a change from the way the Bush administration has done many things. Clearly, the US public want things a little different in the future, and all candidates realize they must bring something new to the table. However, for Democrats Obama and Edwards, the word change meant a little more. For Obama especially, I saw change as a crafty rhetorical tool to make up for his youth and lack of experience. In the way he has defined the discourse, change is being a fresh face in Washington, having the idealism to defy old, change-resistant government, and the compassion to bring people of different beliefs together to make a difference. Edwards’ explained his vision of change a little bit differently. For him, it meant fighting for the ‘little guy’ (he mentioned his father and mother toiling in the mills as an example), representing the lower middle class by opposing corporate interests, and overall altering whose voice really gets heard in government.  For the most part, Hillary has stayed away from directly engaging this rhetoric of ‘change.’ Instead, she chose to emphasize her credentials and experience.However, last night, Hillary made her first clear attempt to co-opt change into her own responses. In a deft rhetorical move, Hillary stopped fighting ‘change’ with ‘experience’, but instead bridged the gap between the two concepts. Pointing to her 35 years of service in government, Hillary painted herself as a proven enactor of change. Her track record and DC contacts do not make change less possible, as Edwards and Obama would like to have the voters believe– instead, they undisputedly demonstrate that she has, does, and will make change continue to be possible. I have mixed feelings about Hillary’s rhetorical embrace of change. On the one hand, it was a bold move in which she chose to use Obama and Edwards’ debate tactics against them, ensuring that their attempts to compartmentalize her as an ‘insider’ and therefore ‘resister of change’ would not be as easy as they had hoped. On the other hand, though, Hillary’s use of the word raises its importance even more. Now that the intangible concept of ‘change’ has been elevated to supreme status, all three candidates will expend time and energy explaining how they best embody this concept. Hopefully, meaningful discussions of issues and platforms will emerge as a result. However, the debate could easily shift to abstraction (see the Clinton quote from a NYT article below): “‘You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose,’” [Clinton] said. “We need a president who knows how to govern, who will bring us together as a country to find common ground, but who also knows how to stand our ground.”   beautifully put… let’s see where change takes us next.