Change v. experience--so what

Michael Kinsley:

IF it’s a question of “experience” versus “change,” change will win every time. Hillary Clinton, of all people, should have known that. Doesn’t she remember 1992? That was when her husband made “change” his mantra and chanted it all the way to the White House. This year, Mrs. Clinton tried to suggest that Barack Obama does not have enough experience to be president. He hung her experience around her neck and chanted the change mantra himself.

An Obama presidency would, in fact, be a huge change in all sorts of obvious ways. Yet on the Republican side as well, there is talk of change. Of course it is trickier with a sitting Republican president. But that hasn’t stopped one of the candidates from seizing on the word and using it as the centerpiece of his campaign.

It’s not the candidate you would have guessed if you haven’t been listening to them: it’s Mitt Romney. Nothing better illustrates the mystical power of “change” in American politics, and its malleability, than its selection by the expensively engineered Romney machine, even though the word doesn’t seem to apply in any way to the man or his campaign.

It’s hard to say what Mr. Romney’s campaign is really about. He would clearly do or say anything or its opposite to become president. But, in general, he seems to be trying to make himself as conventional a Republican as possible, calling for tax cuts blah blah blah, supporting President Bush 100 percent on Iraq, shedding any aberrant views on abortion or gay rights that he may have picked up by accident in Massachusetts.

He radiates conventionality, with his “Leave-It-to-Beaver”-and-then-some family and his good looks straight out of “Mad Men,” the TV series about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s. (I was a few years behind Mr. Romney at a small private high school in Michigan. He graduated in 1965 and looks exactly the same now as he did back then.) If anything, his message ought to be stability: things do not have to change.

Mr. Romney’s actual mantra is “change in Washington,” but that is no more helpful in the logic department. He is not campaigning for Congress. Bragging that he will bring “change in Washington” is either a purposeful insult to a sitting president of his own party, or it means nothing at all. Clearly, it means nothing at all.

...

To wrap Presidential campaigns around the words change versus experience is to admit there is no real difference on the issues. Apparent there is some polling out there that suggest the voters are looking for "change" what ever that is supposed to mean. Democrats obviously believe it means someone other than Republicans in office. That is why Hillary Clinton sounds like she is running for head cashier based on her experience as a Wal-mart checker. For Republicans change that meant the Democrat would change their ridiculous anti war policies and their control freak economics would be a change for the better.

What the race should be about is not change, but how best to effect policies that will defeat the enemy and grow the economy. Hopefully, the GOP nominee can frame the debate on those issues and quit competing to be the head cashier.