Blackburn: Vote for change, but don't expect it

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — In the past few weeks, you could find more change in the presidential campaigns than in the sofa cushions of the land. Barack Obama ran as a change agent from the start. He did well, so John McCain is trying to be a bigger change.

Washington and its culture will change, they say. Left and right will join in singing "God Bless America," and the people will be served.

Sorry to say this, but don't count on it. Any of it.

Americans voted for Jimmy Carter and change in 1976. Four years later, they voted for Ronald Reagan and lots of change; in 1992, for Bill Clinton and change. The 2000 election had a "stay the course" vote like 1984, '88 and '96, but somehow we got George W. Bush and change.

Change came to Washington from four of the past eight elections. If we really want that kind of change again, we are fickle, we haven't been getting what we vote for or we haven't paid attention. The leading poltroons change from Republican to Democrat and back again. Pretty soon, they all look alike. Washington remakes them or spits them out.

Jimmy Carter charmed viewers by getting out of his limo and walking in his inaugural parade for a change. But one of his aides, in touting the change, had said, "We will have failed if we end up with Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser." That's who Carter appointed. Washington was comfortable with them.

Carter appointed his friend Bert Lance to run the Office of Management and Budget. Lance was a successful banker and a shrewd man in Georgia. Washington didn't know him and gave him the death of a thousand paper cuts over small and imaginary improprieties. Paul O'Neill, a smart man elsewhere who was George W. Bush's first treasury secretary, also failed to propitiate the local gods. Such examples are legion.

Through these years of change, civility went downhill. As a House leader after the GOP retook power in 1994, Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, showed his class by telling Democrats, "Your president is just not that important to us." Republicans hated Harry Truman, but they respected the importance of his office.

Sounding like a premature Obama — or premature George W. Bush, for that matter — Clinton claimed to be able to work with the other party. He proved it by signing their law to end welfare. As a reward, the House impeached him.

The incumbent has shown that it is possible, without winning in a landslide, to start a war and wreck the budget if you have a compliant Congress. But he has been a downed power line for three years, and the public wants change. Again.

Whether the change agent or the changeling is elected, it won't be a landslide. He will go to a city where there are no more worthy opponents, only enemies to be crushed. The loudest screamers get the biggest audiences, and the least honest foundations raise the most money.

But that's the sideshow. The main event involves people who see themselves as more important than the president and their clients as more important than the public. It has been that way, with style changes, at least since Henry Adams wrote "Democracy," and that was in 1880. People with big money at stake in what they can get the government to do for them in the way of subsidies, contracts or favorable laws do all they can to make events fall in their favor. Politics is not entertainment for them but full-time business.

They even pay for congressional culture wars. Calling each other names distracts members from serious fiscal or economic oversight — if they are even capable of it anymore. One party has its speeches, talking points and legislation written by lobbyists and think tank "fellows." Beats working.

The people who really run things there don't mind if someone puts lipstick on the pig, just so long as their pork keeps coming.

Tom Blackburn is a former member of The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board.