This election year has been shaping up to be different from any I have known in my lifetime. Everyone is dissatisfied with our government and the politics that go with it. And we all should be. Neither political party has served us well. The Republicans, upon gaining power, immediately became big spending pork barrelers; cutting taxes, all right, but then proceeding upon a spending binge that would put the Democrats to shame.
So, in 2006, the public put the Democrats back in charge in Congress. Now we have gridlock, with the Democrats trying harder to make political points than to make progress. And, of course, the Republicans trying to obstruct them. The only thing they both agree upon is to spend money. The only disagreement is over who gets the gravy. The result is that Congress polls even lower than a very unpopular President. And they should. Both sides.
The Iowa caucuses are not really very important in the overall scheme of things in this election, but I do think it is telling that the two winners are persons who are actually outside the regular political establishment in each party. Although Obama is a Senator, he is too new to have had much of Washington rub off on him. For him to win in Iowa is significant, because it shows he can get votes from an overwhelmingly white population, and this takes the race issue off the table. He represents a big change for any political party. As David Shribman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says:
"We know by the winning performance of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois that a black man can be a formidable candidate outside of the urban areas where black politicians have had their most profound impact. Iowa is only 2 percent black, yet Sen. Obama showed wide appeal. The biggest test of Sen. John F. Kennedy's Catholicism came at the very end of the 1960 primaries, in heavily Protestant West Virginia. Sen. Obama's test came at the very beginning of the 2008 primaries -- and continues this week in New Hampshire, where blacks constitute less than 1 percent of the population........"
Is Obama a new Kennedy? Where is Lloyd Bentsen? I guess we will have to wait and see.
Mike Huckabee represents a real change for the Republican Party. Certainly he is from outside the Washington establishment, but he is also outside the mainstream of the Republican Party. A populist, his policies in Arkansas as governor were much closer to those of Bill Clinton than to mainstream Republicanism. Why did he get the votes? Peggy Noonan has a suggestion that makes sense:
"...... From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.
They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs......"
Another out of the mainstream candidate that showed well in Iowa was Ron Paul. He has been in Congress for many years, but has voted against almost everything since he got there. No one could possibly consider him to be one of the good ole boys in Congress. His 10% has to be an additional protest vote against the politics as usual in Washington.
What does this all tell us? Clearly, many voters, probably most, want change in Washington. I suspect big changes. The question is: to what?
Obviously, the pollsters have picked up on this. Look at the Democratic campaigns...they all advocate change. Only Huck and Paul do so on the Republican side. The problem is still: change to what?
My suspicion is that what we all most want is to be told the whole truth about things, without lies, without spin, and without condescension. We will never have consensus on what changes to make except for that. But that would be a good start.
The winner this year is going to be the candidate that the people trust the most. Telling the truth might be a good start for them all.
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