The emptiness of the rhetoric of change

Timothy Noah:

It's hard to think of a more meaningless political watchword than "change," but "change" is what the presidential candidates are promising.

Barack Obama's endless repetition of the word won him the Iowa caucuses, prompting other Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to make it their mantra too. Hillary Clinton and John McCain won in New Hampshire by arguing that they too wanted change and that they had the experience necessary to bring it about.

In a Fox News interview Jan. 8, Mitt Romney, who seems less a candidate than a human weather vane, got into the act as well. He managed to utter the word "change" four times in response to a single question. "Change," reported Time magazine's Michael Duffy after the New Hampshire results came in, "is the undisputed theme" of 2008.

But why? Since when did "change" become the Holy Grail of American politics -- and what can the word possibly mean if all these disparate candidates are for it?

The general idea is as old as democracy -- think of the venerable exhortation to "throw the rascals out" -- but the obsessive repetition of the word itself is a relatively new phenomenon. Granted, in 1944, the Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, ran for president on the slogan "It's time for a change" -- but that was after his opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had served three terms. After Dewey lost handily, the word went out of fashion for a while.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy promised change from the Eisenhower years with the slogan "Let's get America moving again," but he didn't use the word itself. In 1976, Jimmy Carter offered the slogan "A leader, for a change." Bland as these slogans were, by today's standards they would be too substantive. In the current environment, a candidate who promised to get the country "moving again" might invite attacks that he favored big government, while a candidate who promised leadership "for a change"( i.e., as opposed to the incumbent) might get tut-tutted by the media for stooping to negative campaigning. Even "Let's make America great again," Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1980, would likely prove insufficiently anodyne today because of its militaristic overtones.

All of these candidates campaigned for change, but none fetishized the word "change." That began to, um, change in 1988, the year Michael Dukakis announced in his race against Vice President George H.W. Bush that "I want to be a force for positive change." "We are the change," answered President Reagan at that year's GOP convention. The counter-slogan proved such a success that Reagan repeated it at the 1992 convention.

That time, though, it didn't work, because Bill Clinton had made himself Mr. Change. Clinton uttered the word 10 times in his nomination speech, which was as many times as he uttered the better-remembered word, "hope" (as in, "I still believe in a place called Hope"). "It's time to change America," Clinton said. "Our people are pleading for change," he elaborated. "We've got to change the way government does business," he continued. "How do I know we can come together and make change happen? Because I have seen it in my own state," he concluded.

A LexisNexis database search tells the story. The phrases "change agent" and "candidate of change" turned up in news sources 50 and 70 times, respectively, in 1988. By 1992, they turned up 483 and 557 times. A cliche was born. A similar search for 2008 shows the phrases turning up 217 and 300 times -- and that's only two weeks into the year. On an annualized basis, that's 5,642 and 7,800 times, respectively.

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It is a cliche. It is also a pretty silly substitute for changing the subject from experience, which Obama is short of. One of my grandsons would be a change if he were elected President, but he would certainly lack experience. I think they should at least graduate from grade school before running for office. As smart as they are, that probably would not be enough experience for a big job like the Presidency. Obama has demonstrate a broad ignorance of issues, especially when it comes to our efforts in Iraq and those of our allies in Iraq. He would not be a change for the better. I think we should start substituting "inexperienced" whenever we hear a candidate mention the word change. That applies to Hillary too, since most of her experience has been synthetic.

David Ignatius also looks at the politics of change.

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"Change is really a difficult horse to ride," explains Richard Morin, a senior editor with the Pew Research Center. "It's easy to get on but hard to stay on. As soon as you get specific about change, you make enemies."

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That is precisely what I have been arguing is the best way to attack Obama. Do so on the specifics or the lack there of.