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Looking Past Palin
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For Obama, A Game Of High-Stakes Fiscal Poker
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Post-Election Potpourri
The Insane Rage Of The Same-Sex Marriage Mob
Sarah Palin Is Not The Future Of The GOP
Walking On Sunshine
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Cold War Hawks Nesting With Obama
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Dean: Dems 'Big Tent' Party Now
Don't Bail Out the Big 3 -- Interview With Dan Ikenson
Business Unusual
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Evil Concealed By Money
The Clinton Gamble



Change vs. Change
David Broder 9/5/2008
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ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Change is coming, change you can count on.

That is the simple, central message from the two presidential nominating conventions held in Denver and St. Paul during the past two weeks.

Whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain going to the White House in January, the new president will understand that his mandate from the voters is to cleanse Washington of its excessive partisanship and attempt to break the gridlock that has prevailed on almost all the big issues.

The good news is that Obama and McCain, for different reasons, have about as good a prospect of achieving that change as any two politicians you could find.

The acceptance speeches they delivered will not find places in many collections of great campaign oratory. But rhetoric aside, the clear intent of both candidates was to signal that they understand the frustration of voters of all parties with the poisonous status quo of recent years in Washington.

There is reason to think that Obama and McCain would actually fulfill the voters' hopes for a chief executive who would be a catalyst for change. Obama, who is 47, is culturally the first post-boomer politician to come this
close to the presidency. The baby boomers -- Clinton, Bush, Gore, Gingrich and the rest -- have been cursed by their heritage. They came of age during the turmoil of civil rights, women's rights and Vietnam, and their generation has never stopped refighting the battles of those tumultuous years.

Obama is too young to have experienced those fights, so his mind is open to ideas and information from a far greater variety of sources. He has fewer scores to settle, so he can serve more freely as an arbitrator.

McCain, who is 72, is almost but not quite a throwback to the "greatest generation," the one that survived the Depression, won World War II and built the international architecture of the postwar world. With the McCain family military tradition and the high patriotism forged by his own prisoner-of-war experience, McCain -- like the heroes of FDR's and Truman's time -- disdains partisanship and searches for the national interest, wherever he can find it.

Their skills and agendas are different, but both McCain and Obama bring strengths to what will obviously be a struggle against the forces of parochialism and partisanship resisting change in Washington.

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Changes
By Frederick Deligne - Nice-Matin, France * Posted 9/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
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© Copyright 2008  Frederick Deligne - All Rights Reserved.

Posted By: The German Guy  on Thursday, September 25, 2008

Finally, a voice of reason who looks at both candidates without spitting poison at one of them! We need more like that!

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