Reviewing Obamas Blueprint For Change - Road to the Middle Class

LAST WEEK several conservative columnists, with one voice, declared presidential candidate Barack Obama an empty suit. At least, they reckoned that his speechifying demonstrated an astonishing lack of content.

Charles Krauthammer complained about the idea of getting people to pay with their votes for something that ought to be audaciously free: hope. John Hawkins called Obama an empty suit who excites “gullible dimwits” by reciting words like “hope” and “change.” Barack is old wine in a new bottle, reckoned Mona Charen, “an utterly conventional, down-the-line liberal Democrat.”

You could say that the Obama operation acts like any up-and-coming winery, selling an ordinary wine with a colorful label that really jumps off the shelf at the supermarket.

You can get a flavor of Senator Obama’s conventional, liberal program on his website. That’s where he has published his platform, a set of detailed policy prescriptions called The Blueprint for Change.

Mona Charen is right. Barack Obama’s platform is standard Democratic boilerplate. He proposes universal health insurance to cover the presently uninsured. On education he proposes a Zero to Five program of learning and care for children and families, adds funding to No Child Left Behind, and makes college more affordable. On Social Security he is “strongly opposed” to privatization, opposes raising the retirement age and proposes to “choose a payroll tax reform package” to keep Social Security solvent. He’ll bring all our combat brigades home from Iraq in 16 months. There will be no permanent bases in Iraq, but there’s an out. If al Qaeda “attempts to build a base in Iraq” he’ll use US troops for “targeted strikes” on al Qaeda.

It’s interesting to compare the listing of Obama issues on BarackObama.com with the issues on JohnMcCain.com. You can tell that the two candidates are running in different parties. Obama writes about Civil Rights, Disabilities, Faith, Family. John McCain talks about Human Dignity & the Sanctity of Life. Where Obama writes about Economy and Fiscal, McCain writes about his “Economic Stimulus Plan,” his “McCain Tax Cut Plan,” and “Government Spending, Lower Taxes, and Economic Prosperity.”

So when you compare the two platforms you realize that both are predictable. The candidates are building them of the same old planks that have been used in Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns for the last several elections.

This suggests that the 50-50 nation politics of the past twenty years is likely to continue through the November election. As they have for the last generation, the Democrats will stand on a platform of defending and extending the pensions and subsidies of the welfare state, and Republicans are still trying to find a way to wriggle out of paying for it.

Political parties, like people, do not change their ways unless forced to do so. People change their ways after a loss: of a love, a spouse, a career. Political parties change their ways after they have lost landslide elections. There hasn’t been a landslide since 1984.

By all rights, Republicans should be staring defeat in the face this year, having subjected voters to a mortgage meltdown and, very likely, a recession. Yet the very emptiness of the Democratic challenge, a promise of “change” built upon a platform of more of the same suggests that we have not yet arrived at a point of political inflexion.

Real change issues not from the ordinary manipulations of practical politicians but when politicians climb aboard a movement of moral renewal. That’s the thesis of William G. McLoughlin in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. For him the three great reform eras in the United States—the Revolutionary era, the Civil War era, and the Progressive/Liberal era—all issued from movements of religious revival. In The Fourth Great Awakening Robert William Fogel suggests that the current religious revival in the United States represents the start of a new reform era, one that is likely to take liberals out of power unless they can figure out how to co-opt it.

It is this emerging movement of moral revival that surprised our governing elite in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s triumphant decision in Roe v. Wade that freed women, victims of the species, from the yoke of unwanted pregnancy. Unexpectedly, a movement of rejection erupted against the elite assumption that childbearing was a mere interruption in a life of self-development and creativity. Nobody knows where this movement will end.

But it is clear that the “change” proposed by the pro-life movement promises a lot more change to the political and moral/cultural status quo that the audacious hope for change proposed by Senator Barack Obama.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Reviewing Obama's "Blueprint for Change"

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