Perhaps the most overused and under-examined word in the Democratic candidates speeches is the word "change". It's ubiquitous enough to mean everything or nothing.
With the exception of a few philosophers--Parmenides comes not to mind but through Google--most mathematical and philosophical principals agree in various degrees that change is inevitable. In other words: not a very bold platform.
So what are we talking about when we talk about change? Why is it resonating, polling so well, if inevitable? When did it become the all purpose buzz word?
The phrase "Change is Good" was the late nineties precursor to "It's all Good", which segued, after 9/11, to "It is what it is." "Change is good" was the thing you said to people going through a divorce or losing their jobs or the love of their lives--in other word--a lie that had the possibility of becoming true. What you really meant was: it will get better than it is now. Is this way, it is probably true that all of the three top democratic candidates are the candidates of change, because each of them will be a better President than the one we have now. But that's not a high bar to reach. If this broad definition of change applies in the popularity of the word, it is, at base line, an anti-Bush sentiment, and more than anything I think that would account for the ubiquity of the word "change" among Democrats. But like good wine, words have other layers.
One layer up, Senators Clinton or Obama would literally be the candidate of change by virtue of being the first person from a specific population to occupy the presidency. This type of change in gender or race is similar to John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic President or Mitt Romney would as a first Mormon President. Romney has, in fact, started to refer to himself as a "change" candidate--a designation John McCain slyly agreed with in the New Hampshire Republican debates, implying that Romney changed positions a lot. This same night in the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton also seemed to default to this literal level of change. "A woman as President would be a huge change," she said to applause. Barack Obama didn't dare counter with the argument that an African-American president would also be a huge change, because that literalism would have conflicted with his more abstract ideology.
But it was an assertion Clinton needed to make. She has had something of an oxymoron going on stating that she is the candidate of change and then refering back to the nineties in some sort of Back To The Future Scenario. "I have been a change-maker for 35 years" she asserts, upping the ante of change by changing the verb into a noun, conjuring up and image of the leader some tribal village, perhaps the one that it takes. This has become an oft-repeated description--I have heard supporters refer to her as a change-maker, but I have never heard one member of the press ask the simple question, "What did you change?" Or for that matter what she counts as 35 years experience?
It was Clinton who clarified each of the top three candidates position on change fairly accurately, although, in reference to Obama and Edwards, pejoratively: "change happens, whether you do anything or not. The world is always changing. Our challenge is: How do we master that change and make it work for America again? Everybody's got ideas about change. You know, some people think you get change by demanding it. Some people think you get change by hoping for it. But I believe you get change by working really hard."
Senator Barack Obama, Clinton's subtexual hoper for change, often puts the word in front of his podium, so that there is a concrete textual reference. In the days before the caucus, the sign says. "Stand for change." Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times articlediffered, calling Obama the Anti-change candidate. Fighting words those, but somewhat subdued when Dennis Kucinich threw his perplexing endorsement to Obama during the Iowa caucuses because "he too believes in change."
The change Obama talks about--a change in the manner of discourse, an ideological change, which will promote more a global trickle-down change, is in some ways Reaganesque. The problem is trickle-down economics didn't really work during the Reagan administration, just as trickle-down democracy didn't work in the Bush administration. (Although to be fair, what was ideologically presented as trickle- down democracy was really enforced occupation).
It is Obama and Clinton who most frequently use the word change. The Des Moines Register pointed out that Senator Clinton used the word in a stump speech 17 times as compared to Obama's 23 times in a stump speech. Former Senator Edwards is not adverse to the word either. During the New Hampshire debates, he lumped Barack Obama and himself as candidates of change against the "status quo," gesturing toward Hillary Clinton at the end of the table.
John Edwards talks about change in a slightly different way--for one thing he admits changing his view about the war and changing his mind about NAFTA. Senator Clinton, who also voted to fund the war, never mentions change in this way. Edwards is the candidate Clinton alludes to as demanding change. It is a systemic change he is demanding. No more corporate governance. His is actually the platform of policy change.
It is Rudy Giuliani who points out that change is not always good--"there's good change and bad change."
We all know this. How many times immediately after 9/11 did we hear: "the United States has changed. It will never be the same." Maybe we are trying to go back to the nineties where "change is good," was a safe thing to put on bumper-stickers. I suppose that would bode well for Hillary Clinton.
The first definition in the OED doesn't really clarify things: "the act or fact of changing,"
but the second one "the substitution of one thing for another, succession of one thing in place of another," is something that we are so hungry for that, at some level, we don't mind the word that defines that succession being repeated like a mantra over and over, even if contextually we don't always know what it means. We are so ready for change.