The Rallying Cry
3rd February 2010
By Scott Ferson
Change is what’s left after the purchase. We can look at it in our hand and wonder if we’ve made the right decision. But what if it’s change itself that motivates us, and not the product?
The reading into and the pronouncements of true change will go on as we continue to examine the message voters sent by electing Scott Brown to the US Senate and what it means for the state, the country, the coming elections, and the future of the Obama presidency.
But in attempts to understand what the election results mean and what the voters’ message is, we may be missing the underlying, and far more important concern. The passion for change has replaced political conviction. We search for better governance through volatility. Our patience is thin, and our tolerance for the policies of those we elect is not long. We do not turn out a high percentage of elected officials, but we have equal disdain for the representatives in the various branches and offices on the federal, state, and local level.
This low opinion does not inspire great numbers to service, and the small numbers of challengers keeps reelection rates high. The cry for change always comes with the threat of the promise of a new breed riding a tide of real change. But we know, we surely know, how that tide works.
Now, we all like change - our kind of change - and hate your kind of change. This is how the results in Massachusetts versus the national results last year are playing out. We can blame failed policies or we can blame the candidates or we can blame the voters.
Ted Kennedy would likely be the first to tell us that winners and losers in races own the credit and the responsibility. The voters are not wrong. In a democracy of course this should go without saying, but there is an underlying current in this country: My vote was right, the voters were wrong.
We are polarized in our politics, but we are not grounded, and that is the real problem. Our political parties have become so watered down, so meaningless to the average voter, that individual issues capture our attention and inflame our passions. The war, health care, and the stimulus bills are vehicles for control. We see clear, defined, sustained differences between the major parties largely only on social policy, without making the larger economic, national and international issues part of a sustained platform.
Even within a political party it is better to be the outsider, and in 2008 each party nominated one. Today, the Democratic Party is the party of Barack Obama and its agenda is his agenda. The Republican Party will define itself truly only with its presidential nomination in 2012. Right now its platform is change, which happened to be the real Democratic platform before 2008.
No wonder the voters want change. It happens to be more exciting than the product. We don’t know what we’re buying so we’re interested in the transaction, and hope for the best. If it doesn’t work, there is another transaction in two years. Now that’s change we can believe in.
Scott Ferson, a former press secretary to Senator Kennedy, is President of the Liberty Square Group.