It’s high time both presidential candidates started talking about some real, substantive change.
Thursday night the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, stood up and proclaimed that he was the candidate of change. The Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, has been saying the same thing for months — about himself. (Note to Obama: If you really were the change candidate, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley would be your running mate, not Sen. Joseph Biden Jr.)
Back during the years when we had a Democratic Congress and a Democrat in the White House, we saw a federal government that grew larger and spent more of our money. President Reagan said he would have compared those Democrats with drunken sailors — but he didn’t want to insult drunken sailors.
For a brief time in this century we had a Republican Congress and a Republican in the White House. We saw a federal government that grew larger and spent more of our money. It’s a pity we no longer have Reagan to compare this latest crop of Republicans with drunken sailors, but some conservatives have testily noted the shameful paucity of vetoes President Bush has made on spending bills.
So now, with a federal debt running into the trillions, the leaders of both parties claim they’ll be the president to lead us out of this mess. If I’m to make a voting decision based on the promises of change from McCain and Obama, I might end up sitting out this election and spending my time trying to track down the sage who proclaimed, “I don’t vote; it only encourages ’em.”
Here’s my dilemma: I haven’t voted for a presidential candidate from either of the major parties since 1972, and then I went with Sen. George McGovern. I remember President Nixon’s television address the night before Election Day, 1972. Peering into the camera, he solemnly told the American people that the choices between the two candidates had never been clearer or more obvious.
“Dick,” I said as I sat in front of my telly, “you’re absolutely right.”
Neither Obama nor McCain has experience in the executive branch of government, and I’m not terribly impressed with the record of U.S. senators who go straight from the Senate to the presidency without a stop at vice president in between. In the 20th century the only two who accomplished that trick were Presidents Harding and Kennedy.
Harding’s presidency was downright awful, and Kennedy’s was not as good as his supporters claim it is. This was a man who actually ordered the segregation of an integrated military unit to appease rioting racists at the University of Mississippi in 1962. (Someone should tell Obama, who mentioned Kennedy several times during his acceptance speech, about that one.)
I prefer a president who’s had military experience, since the nation’s chief executive is commander in chief of our armed forces. McCain gets the leg up in that area. I simply can’t understand those presidential candidates who want to be commander in chief of our military forces but passed on spending even one day in the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine Corps.
McCain also has an edge with his commitment to appoint Supreme Court justices who, in his words, won’t “legislate from the bench.”
I suspect Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices cut from the Thurgood Marshall cloth, the ones who see it as their duty to virtually rewrite the Constitution with each decision.
But I expect neither Obama nor McCain, if elected, to implement real change. But since both are committed to change, it’s up to the voters to give them some REAL change.
We can start with the House of Representatives, the only genuinely “democratic” body in our republic. Let’s elect enough congressmen and congresswomen from the Libertarian, Green, Constitution and other parties to make life miserable for both Democrats and Republicans and to let officials in both major parties know we’ll vote them out of power if they don’t deliver on the Obama’s or McCain’s promise of change.
It’s not a change of the president in the White House that we need. We need to change the monopoly in power — I guess the more correct term would be “duopoly,” if indeed that is a word — that Democrats and Republicans have had on the legislative branches of government for far too long.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
