The front page of the New York Times yesterday morning trumpeted the news that master message maven Bill Clinton has ordered up some new “change” rhetoric in hopes of rekindling Hillary’s sputtering campaign. He’s decided to spread the word that Hillary has always been a “change agent,” that she is a “proven agent of positive change,” and a “lifetime advocate of a change agenda.” Staffers are calling the litany the “change, change, change” phrase. But the new words aren’t really new at all — they are as old as politics. We’ve heard them from Brother Bill before, with questionable results. And they may or may not resonate with voters, who may or may not want a whole lot of change in their lives.
Clinton made “change” a watchword in his first presidential campaign and first term in office, as in this speech to the D.N.C. Gala in New York City in June 1994:
I spend a lot of time talking to laboring groups of people saying, I’m trying to make change your friend and not your enemy; support my trade policies; yes, it’ll change the economy more and you’ll have to change jobs more often, but we’ll be more prosperous and we’ll provide lifetime training policies for you.
So we made change our friend and sure enough it brought us a new trade policy called NAFTA, which then cost three million manufacturing workers their jobs. Some among us prospered greatly. But most members of the “laboring group” never recovered. Clinton never followed through on the second part of the new friendship, and few workers were ever retrained.
I first heard the “change” word 50 years ago from the lips of a canny political consultant in my home state of Georgia. Parks Rusk, the brother of Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under John F. Kennedy, was a liquor referenda guru (always for the wets, thank goodness) and his favorite political slogan was: “It’s time for a change.” Parks, like Clinton, knew that promising something better was always preferable to running on your record, especially when it came to changing laws that prevented people from enjoying a Rum and Coke or a Jack and Coke (always Coke) outside the privacy of their own living room. But I suspect Parks would recoil at the notion that someone could be elected by calling themselves an “advocate” or an “agent” of change, or repeating a mantra of “change, change, change,” especially at a time when voters see every day through the media what life is like for most of the world’s population. And he’d certainly say: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” when it comes to Clinton’s brand of friendship.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to see a radical change in the direction of our country, what John Edwards sometimes calls “transformational change.” An unbroken chain of conservative presidents — Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes — helped big business create the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialized nation in the world. They all but destroyed the ability of people in “the laboring group” to lift up their families by joining unions; and problems with health care, education, jobs and pensions are gnawing at our national innards. But most people will ask: “Change from what? From a democracy that works, even though we didn’t get to vote on going to war? From an economy that works, even though millions of us get left behind?”
My guess is that “change, change, change” is going to make about as big a difference for the Clintons — and indeed Edwards and Obama — as it usually makes for a homeless person sitting on a sidewalk and extending a Styrofoam cup. Too many American voters are only one or two generations away from forebears who could neither read nor write, and couldn’t count much past 50 because that’s about how long they expected to live. Even though two and three family members are now having to work just to make ends meet, they feel lucky by comparison. In 2008, they may be in a mood for change, but I doubt they’ll want it with a capital “C.”
The front page of the New York Times yesterday morning trumpeted the news that master message maven Bill Clinton has ordered up some new “change” rhetoric in hopes of rekindling Hillary’s sputtering campaign. He’s decided to spread the word that Hillary has always been a “change agent,” that she is a “proven agent of positive change,” and a “lifetime advocate of a change agenda.” Staffers are calling the litany the “change, change, change” phrase. But the new words aren’t really new at all — they are as old as politics. We’ve heard them from Brother Bill before, with questionable results. And they may or may not resonate with voters, who may or may not want a whole lot of change in their lives.
Clinton made “change” a watchword in his first presidential campaign and first term in office, as in this speech to the D.N.C. Gala in New York City in June 1994:
I spend a lot of time talking to laboring groups of people saying, I’m trying to make change your friend and not your enemy; support my trade policies; yes, it’ll change the economy more and you’ll have to change jobs more often, but we’ll be more prosperous and we’ll provide lifetime training policies for you.
So we made change our friend and sure enough it brought us a new trade policy called NAFTA, which then cost three million manufacturing workers their jobs. Some among us prospered greatly. But most members of the “laboring group” never recovered. Clinton never followed through on the second part of the new friendship, and few workers were ever retrained.
I first heard the “change” word 50 years ago from the lips of a canny political consultant in my home state of Georgia. Parks Rusk, the brother of Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under John F. Kennedy, was a liquor referenda guru (always for the wets, thank goodness) and his favorite political slogan was: “It’s time for a change.” Parks, like Clinton, knew that promising something better was always preferable to running on your record, especially when it came to changing laws that prevented people from enjoying a Rum and Coke or a Jack and Coke (always Coke) outside the privacy of their own living room. But I suspect Parks would recoil at the notion that someone could be elected by calling themselves an “advocate” or an “agent” of change, or repeating a mantra of “change, change, change,” especially at a time when voters see every day through the media what life is like for most of the world’s population. And he’d certainly say: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” when it comes to Clinton’s brand of friendship.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to see a radical change in the direction of our country, what John Edwards sometimes calls “transformational change.” An unbroken chain of conservative presidents — Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes — helped big business create the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialized nation in the world. They all but destroyed the ability of people in “the laboring group” to lift up their families by joining unions; and problems with health care, education, jobs and pensions are gnawing at our national innards. But most people will ask: “Change from what? From a democracy that works, even though we didn’t get to vote on going to war? From an economy that works, even though millions of us get left behind?”
My guess is that “change, change, change” is going to make about as big a difference for the Clintons — and indeed Edwards and Obama — as it usually makes for a homeless person sitting on a sidewalk and extending a Styrofoam cup. Too many American voters are only one or two generations away from forebears who could neither read nor write, and couldn’t count much past 50 because that’s about how long they expected to live. Even though two and three family members are now having to work just to make ends meet, they feel lucky by comparison. In 2008, they may be in a mood for change, but I doubt they’ll want it with a capital “C.”