December 18, 2007--It's "Change," Stupid

Listen carefully to Hillary Clinton this week and you will hear the word “experience” being supplanted by the word “change.”

Experience just wasn’t getting the job done. In fact, it was producing negative consequences—presenting oneself as having had 35 years of experience in the public arena made her vulnerable to appearing (1) old and (2) a part of the compromised way of doing business. With that “compromised way” responsible for getting us into a disastrous war (even if the surge is “working” the war is still a disaster) and all snarled up in partisan bickering while our health care and education sytems flounder and we ignore global warming and the collapse of our infrastructure.

Thus the appeal of the Obama and, to a lesser extent, the Edwards campaign, which have been all about new ways of doing business. In other words—Change.

The Clintons first attempted to mock this, claiming that real change is the product of experience and hard work and not just, as in the Obama campaign, “hope” or in the case of Edwards “demand.” But since this too hasn’t worked, they will now say that Senator Clinton is a “proven change agent,” “a lifetime advocate of a change agenda.”

The New York Times reports that this new strategy has been devised by Bill Clinton himself who has been telling campaign workers that the initial strategy—running her as if she were the incumbent—isn’t working. (Article linked below.)

Hillary’s purported chief strategist Mark Penn—who last week was involved in linking the words “Obama” and “cocaine” in the same sentence—put it this way: “If you want to have change in this country, if you want a new beginning, then how about electing someone who has a lifetime of making change?”

I actually could go along with this except that I have one problem with it—who might Penn be talking about? I assume he is here referring to Hillary Clinton who, he asserts, has had that lifetime of “making change.”

I wonder who he is referring to because whenever she is described that way, as someone who has a long track record of causing change to happen, or when she talks about herself this way on the stump or in interviews, I lean forward in my chair and hope that Tim Russert or whomever, would ask the following follow-up question:

“Senator Clinton, can you give me two or three specific examples of changes in public policy that you have brought about?”

I suspect she would answer by listing changes that she has advocated, which is a very different sort of thing. Because during her eight years as a “witness” to the presidency (the newest way of describing her experience in the White House) and seven as a senator, I’m not sure that there are any significant changes that she has, to quote Mark Penn again, “made.”

This is by no means her fault—as the First Lady, heath care aside, her role was primarily limited to private advice-giving, though it is possible that President Clinton took some of it and by doing so some kind of change occurred—I suspect his “Don’t-ask-don’t-tell” executive order might well have been the result of one of her suggestions.

And except for this past year in the Senate, as a member of the minority, it was not an easy thing to actually accomplish anything.

Yet, even in the absence of any real evidence that Hillary Clinton caused much change to happen, we will be hearing nothing but “change, change, change” during the next few weeks.

In effect, ironically, this too makes her a candidate whose campaign is based on hope. The hope that if she manages to secure the nomination and wins the election she’ll be able to do something she has never done before—bring about change.