“Everybody look what’s going down.”
It seems entirely appropriate to borrow some lyrics from the hit Buffalo Springfield recording of For What It’s Worth, written by Stephen Stills, as a lens for examining the 2008 election at this early stage. The February 1967 tune—40 years ago—can be seen as the first clear sign of nervousness in the then-revolutionary counterculture, a kind of wake-up call to rally the revolutionaries. We may be in the midst of a revolution again right now.
The song begins, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear… I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”
Until the presidential candidates arrived in Iowa to campaign in advance of the January 3 caucuses, 2008 was looking like an election year in which nothing was happening. In fact, for all the fuss about “change” stirred up by Gov. Mike Huckabee, Congressman Ron Paul and Sen. Barack Obama, politics-as-usual seemed to be winning the day. By midnight on caucus day, and particularly after Obama’s spectacular victory speech, politics-as-usual was a on its deathbed or already a ghost.
Suddenly, some radical ideas stopped looming as targets to the other candidates. Change! Everyone was saying “change, change, change.” Huckabee wants to dismantle the IRS. Paul wants to dismantle the IRS and end the war in Iraq immediately. Except for universal healthcare, Obama’s positions don’t generally lend themselves to abbreviation in a word or two, but he has been voicing an extreme, almost ’60s-like concept of social interaction (“not a collection of red states and blue states, but the United States”) that has attracted young adults back to the political process. What’s more, they showed up to be counted in Iowa, too.
Absolutely, there is something happening here: “There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind.”
The picture emerging in the campaigns is relatively easy to see: It’s a group shot of all the candidates—Republican, Democrat and otherwise—trying to look fresh-faced and wide-eyed. They want to seem not to be connected, seasoned DC insiders. The truth, of course, is that they all are Washington Beltway insiders, some more than others.
What does that mean to you and me and the rest of the American electorate? It means that we are forced to filter what we hear. We have to compare the newly minted, fresh-faced “change” ideas from candidates with what they were saying in their (attack) ads on and before January 2.
That’s the national picture. In fact, that’s just the presidential election. What does any of it mean for us on a local level? Except in the sense of being citizens who will live under the next president… not so much. There is this one thing, though: Our local elections won’t have big state or county offices on the ballot, so local folks might be inclined not to bother voting. That might matter less in other years. In most years, it is kind of hard to imagine that the lives of ordinary citizens will be much affected by the choice of the next president. That is definitely not the case in 2008.
The candidates who are really steeped in the concept of rock-heaving change—Huckabee, Paul, Obama and to some extent Mitt Romney and John Edwards—envision hugely different futures for the USA and for every citizen. Living far from Washington will not prevent us from living in the world recreated by the next president. Even the candidates not committed to what looks like really major change—Fred Thompson, John McClain, Rudi Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson et al—have plans for America that will matter to us individually. Maybe that’s because the Iraq war continues or spreads. May it’s because the income tax system does or doesn’t get fixed or discarded.
There hasn’t been a moment in presidential politics in the past several decades when the choices really were so varied or so different. The people who get involved will have everything to do with which candidates, which options and which ideas are still on stage when it comes time to actually vote in November. (Are you involved? Are you at least donating to a campaign?) Then, those who vote in November will make the final choice.
Unless you are older than 65, there has not been a more important presidential election since you became a legal voter and cast a vote for Johnson or Goldwater. Get registered and vote. Better yet, get registered, get informed enough to make a choice you can live with, and then vote!