The American people, it seems, are hungry for a change of government. Almost 80 percent of them say they are dissatisfied with the way the federal government is handling the nation's problems, 51 percent are very dissatisfied. Senators Barack Obama and John McCain are, of course, promising to give the American people exactly what they want: change. Obama, the Democratic nominee, claims “the change you can believe in” as his own private brand and asserts that his opponent offers no change at all and that a vote for the Republicans would mean four more years of the same broken politics. McCain, currently basking in the warm glow of a pit bull bounce in the polls, denies that he a Johnny-come-lately to the change mantra. He has always been a maverick, he tells us, and now is the leader of a team of mavericks who are going to reform Washington. “Change is coming,” he assures us, and Obama is too weak to be the agent of that change. Yet, as both candidates wrestle for the mantle of change, it is becoming clear that with less than 60 days remaining before the November election, the 2008 US political campaign is looking less like change and more and more like politics as usual. Plus ça change? Barack Obama has been talking about change since at least 2004 when he gave the keynote address, “The Audacity of Hope,” at the Democratic National Convention and famously said “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America – there's the United States of America.” In his campaign, he has promised a new kind of politics, a new bipartisan way of seeing the country, one that turns its back on the pundits who “ like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States.” Obama, for the first time in American political history, effectively put together an army of small donors on the Internet, and with the money he raised, he promised to enlarge the American political map and campaign virtually everywhere, even opening offices in Alaska. States like Idaho are clearly not going to be in the Democratic column in November, but the idea of a national Democratic Party opening offices and making an attempt in such places embodied the new one purple nation politics which would attempt to put an end to the polarization of the past, a polarization which was clearly either the result of, or perhaps the cause of, the broken politics of Washington. Somewhere along the way, starting with the end of the long, hard fought Democratic primary campaign, a new kind of change began - a shift to the center - and it was a change which some Obama supporters were reluctant to believe in. By the time of his acceptance speech at the Temple of Obama in Denver, the Democratic candidate was offering a typical, traditional, liberal Democratic agenda. His choice for Vice President of a man who has for 35years been a Washington insider was safe, conservative and well-calculated to balance his own lack of foreign policy gravitas, and demonstrated no courage to cross the aisle or to think outside the box. And lately his scaling down of his political map to concentrate on the usual swing states reduces the field of action to the same old reds and blues of the last two polarizing elections and shows that reality has set in and that Obama is ready to do whatever it takes to get elected. As for John McCain, he is of course himself the embodiment of change. There was once the John McCain who was a fair minded, conservative, who sometimes stood up to his own party on issues he felt were important. It was that McCain, the maverick, the darling of the media, who was destroyed by George W. Bush's surrogates, Karl Rove and his team, in the 2000 Republican primaries while Bush kept his hands clean and preached ‘compassionate conservatism.' Now eight years later with graduates of Rove's attack team on his staff, the new McCain allowed speaker after speaker at the Republican Convention to viciously savage the opposition while in his acceptance speech, he spoke compassionately of bipartisanship, of regaining the trust of the American people, and of reaching beyond the aisle. Referring to the Democrats, he said, “Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us….. And I wouldn't be an American worthy of the name, if I didn't honor Senator Obama and his supporters for their achievement.” Yet, only days before when the time had come to choose his vice president, he did not have the courage of these bipartisan convictions and instead bowed to his far right political base choosing a candidate who holds extreme conservative positions which can only lead to further red-blue polarization. That political base was never going to vote for Barack Obama, but McCain did not want them to stay at home, and he also needed their time and their money. Had he selected a pro-life Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman, he would have had neither. The far right has been reenergized and the Republican Party revitalized to such an extent that it is not clear if it is a McCain-Palin or a Palin-McCain ticket contesting the November election. With Palin currying to the right, McCain is free to address Independents and disaffected Democrats without whom he cannot win. Of course, McCain's position is difficult. He does not want to be linked to George W. Bush who enjoys down-in-the-depths poll numbers of Watergate proportions, and yet he cannot repudiate him. This leaves McCain no other choice but to keep his distance and hope that his maverick brand will somehow establish a disconnection with Bush in the minds of the American people. McCain never uttered the words ‘George Bush' in his acceptance speech, and nature intervened and sent a hurricane to spare him from having to be photographed next to the President, who busy with his usual hurricane relief work, delivered a brief video address to the convention by satellite. Bush's address from outer space is the closest McCain has been seen to him since a hurried, furtive handshake was captured on film on the tarmac of an Arizona airport in May, said footage already gaining a certain UFO type cachet. So, where is the change? An election year which only six months ago looked like it might result in bipartisanship in Washington and a purpling of the states, a realignment of politics that would be the beginning of the end of the polarization of the Red and Blue Americas, now looks like it is headed for no change at all. The American political map is virtually where it was for the last two national elections. The two Americas, two poles, red and blue, are alive and well and right where they were, and people are shouting the same hot button words of fear and hatred they always have. Yet, whatever happens, red and blue America will get a change: For the first time in history, a black man will be President of the United States or a white woman will be Vice President. And, at this point in the 2008 US political campaign, that is the only change you can believe in. __
