Where is this mandate for change?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In spite of a so-called mandate for change being perpetuated by the mainstream national news media, seasoned Beltway politicians Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton are in the driver’s seats of their respective parties seeking nominations for president.
McCain, a D.C. insider with more than 25 years experience in the U.S. Senate, holds a commanding delegate lead over Beltway outsiders and former state governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.
Clinton, meanwhile, leads in the delegates count toward the democratic nomination and has won many influential, political states on her march toward the White House. She has seven years in the U.S. Senate plus eight more pulling the strings of her husband’s White House administration during the 1990s.
By contrast, Barack Obama, her chief rival, is a relative Beltway newbie, having only completed half of a six-year term in the U.S. Senate.
If change is so important this election season, then why have voters been marking their ballots for the same old D.C. dinosaurs instead of newer, fresher faces on the scene? I just don’t see the mandate for change that supposedly exists out there. Yet, I continue to get an earful of it everyday.
The loudest voices for change have come from the Democrat Party. Both Clinton and Obama claim to represent change—the former because she is a woman, and the latter because of his brand of hope. Obama, in fact, has made change a central theme of his campaign and has been perhaps its most ardent zealot throughout the 2008 presidential race so far.
Clinton, while claiming her gender qualifies her as a change agent, smugly believes that simply being a woman means bringing better ideas to the Oval Office. A little sex-centric, are we, Hillary?
I believe gender to be neither a qualifier of intellectual capability nor a benchmark for ideas and policies. Hillary and her supporters are way off base here.
But I digress: Having said that, the only changes Hillary would bring to the White House are her feminine tastes in fashion and interior design. There will be skirts, blouses and brassieres hanging in the First Closet as opposed to suits and ties.
Otherwise, Hillary will not bring the kind of change to Washington that this so-called sweeping public mandate demands. She is a D.C. insider, like McCain, who has her hands in the trough of a national political machine.
Frankly, I don’t think even Obama’s concept of change is really change at all. He advocates the expansion of government via universal health care and other social programs. In fact, he has even stated his plan for financing universal health care through deficit spending. So, he plans to spend money that the government doesn’t have. How is this change from the way government already does things?
Even if the so-called change agents of this campaign were serious, they would not be able to affect real, meaningful change in Washington. Standing in their way are the likes of McCain and Clinton.
Others before them have tried, and instead learned that to get what they wanted done, they had to compromise with the establishment. Ronald Reagan learned this in the 1980s. In order to put his economic and military policies in motion, he had to compromise with Congress and lobbyists who wanted other things.
Don’t get me wrong here: While I think the idealism of change is a good thing, it is still a pipedream that dies quicker than a D.C. cherry blossom in a hail storm.
Both Clinton and McCain understand the myth of change and why it is so powerful with voters. Even they have jumped on the change bandwagon, because they know it is what voters want. But they are savvy enough to recognize that the only real change in Washington, D.C., is who sits where and for how long. It is like one big game of musical chairs: When the music stops, somebody is left without a chair. Hence, we have change.
Changes in party power, between the legislative and executive branches of government, is just about all any Beltway insider can stomach. Anything more will upset the apple cart, rock the boat, and throw a wrench into the Beltway Machine. In spite of voters, the last thing any Washington, D.C., insider wants is too much change.
Look what happened to the Republican Party after the 1994 elections, which awarded both the House and Senate to the GOP after 40 years of democrat control? Within a few years, the republicans went from beginning to honor the tenets of their “Contract With America” to shunning their conservative base during the last years of the Clinton Administration through increased spending and avoidance of key social issues.
No sooner had a conservative element seized control of Congress in 1994 then the assault on conservative leaders like New Gingrich was launched by the liberal Washington establishment. In a short time, Gingrich and other conservatives were demonized as cold-hearted, uncompassionate extremists who wanted to see people suffer. As a result, the “Contract With America” was never completely fulfilled and conservative republicans were bullied back into the shadows of political insignificance.
Later GOP Congresses would continue to pass spending bills and ignore social mandates of their conservative base; the last straw being in 2006 when illegal immigration was chief among the issues conservatives wanted the republican majority to address. But Congress sat on its thumbs while scandals perpetuated by the news media surrounded the GOP leadership. As a result, nothing of substance got done and conservatives did not vote for their republican incumbents. Consequently, the GOP lost control of Congress altogether.
Now that the democrats are back in power, we see again that little has changed. Other than party affiliation, what is the difference between the Congresses of 2006 and 2007? Where is this change the democrats promised a year ago? Indeed, what, if anything, has changed, besides who sits where and for how long?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.