Lately, everyone running for public office — Democrats and Republicans alike — seems to be campaigning as The Candidate for Change. They mention "change" more often than the panhandlers outside Canter's Delicatessen.
And what's odd to me is that the candidates rarely bother to emphasize that they're (presumably) talking about change for the better. I mean, no matter how bad things are, someone could change them for the worse. Supposing a candidate was in favor of banning all delicious food, giving everyone in America a case of whooping cough, letting everyone out our prisons and issuing them a loaded howitzer as they leave, replacing our currency with bowls of gravy, nuking one random U.S. city per week and banning all TV programming that does not include Tom Arnold. That would be a platform for change. It would also be the old Lyndon LaRouche platform but never mind that now.
It's good to be open to change and willing to change…but change just for the sake of change is kind of simple-minded. And I've come to think that when a candidate says that, it's because they and/or their handlers have decided that the American people are simple-minded.
If we believe this recent AP poll (and the others take you pretty much to the same place), the country is really disgusted with George W. Bush and Congress. Bush is at an all-time low, even with Republicans. Overall, he's at 30% and Congress is at 22%. I suspect the latter number is misleading because it encompasses two disparate kinds of dissatisfaction: Some voters are mad at Congress because of all it's done to oppose the Bush agenda and some are mad because it hasn't done more. Also, as the above-linked article notes, "[Congress] usually has lower ratings than the president because it is an institution people love to criticize. Many have negative views of Congress while still supporting their own House and Senate members." This country may report strong disapproval of Congress but we're going to vote to re-elect an overwhelming majority of those people.
But clearly, we aren't happy with two of our three branches of government…and if they asked about the judiciary, they'd probably score just as poorly. At some point, some focus group testing of us must have realized that we've started to salivate at the mere mention of the word, "change." We're so desperate to have confidence in someone in Washington that we aren't even thinking about making the wrong kind of changes. We should. Because we so often do.