Agents of change

The Democratic race has come down to arguments about which of the leading candidates is the true agent of change, with Obama, Clinton and Edwards fighting over the title.

What seems missing from the coverage is a consideration of what kind of change the contestants propose. If we listen to what they are saying and how they are saying it, we find that each of the leading candidates has a different kind of change in mind.

For Hillary Clinton, change is programmatic: national health insurance, pre-kindergarten for all children, etc., etc. If there is an over-arching vision of the relationship between citizen and government, it's not very apparent. Clinton intends voters to believe that she has learned her lesson from past battles, that she can be more effective as President than she and her husband were in many of the same fights in the 1990s, but the unstated premise is that no basic change in the nature of our politics is required. (Let me add that I believe that Ms. (or is it Mrs.?) Clinton is probably right; for a whole raft of reasons, she probably does have a much better shot at getting large programs like national health insurance through now than Bill did during his two terms.)

John Edwards has been espousing a program that, in most essentials, would have been familiar to populists a century ago. (The old populism contained a racist and nativist streak that is absent from Edwards' liberal version; his platform is reminiscent of Fred Harris' New Populism of 1976.) While Edwards is trying to construct an alliance between middle- and working-class Americans, he is not doing so explicitly, contenting himself mainly with an attack on their common foes: big business and the wealthy. The weakness of this approach is that in America, where classes mix and meld almost imperceptibly, it may be hard to identify all but a few super-rich individuals as the enemy. The failure of populism in America--as of socialism-- has largely grown out of the fact that many of the middle and even working classes have allied themselves with the wealthy. Republicans have had success in using a "culture war" to attain such an alliance, but even without "social issues," many Americans believe that the people at the top deserve their positions, and also that they, themselves, might attain such heights. Back in the early 1970s, I spoke with people who wanted to limit the salaries that corporate executives could get; at that time, $250,000 per year was a fortune. I suggested that the obstacle they faced was that, even if the guy on the line at GM knew he would never be the company president, he was damned if he'd admit that his son couldn't be, and if his son made it, he didn't want the youngster's opportunity to be limited. Edwards does not seem to confront that reality.

Obama's call is for change of yet another sort: he seeks a way out of the sour partisanship that has divided the nation and paralyzed progress. While he has proposed programs that are similar to those of his rivals, the basis of his appeal is not specific proposals--some of which are less liberal than those of Clinton or Edwards--but to the idea that the American project can still work, that Americans can come together for the common good and that problems can be solved without playing one group off against another. In many ways, Obama invokes the spirit of JFK--a President who's most important contribution to the national discourse was to convince Americans that the government was their agent, and that the nation could do great things. Whether Obama can carry out that kind of change if elected is likely to depend as much on the size of the Democratic majority in Congress (both in terms of votes for his programs and as a symbol that political weight has shifted significantly leftward) as on his own qualities.

Which of these varieties of change is best for the nation? I'll leave that for you to judge.