It says something about the attitudes of the members of my generation when political change is compared to changing one's magazine subscriptions or clothing preferences. If anyone honestly believes that buying a new genre of music on iTunes is somehow analogous to the type of transformational change this country requires, I recommend taking a look at the front page of any newspaper.
With the economy in shambles, 150,000 American troops attempting to police a civil war halfway across the world and 50 million Americans without health insurance (including, in four months, most members of the Class of 2008), does our country need - or want - wholesale recycling of the ideas which dug us into this hole?
On a more fundamental level, how many people can honestly claim that our government addresses the needs of the majority of American citizens? That's why change has emerged as the dominant narrative in the 2008 presidential race.
In the beginning, only one candidate was talking about the need for change in Washington. Now, the candidates are competing to out-change each other. The question facing voters is this: What kind of change do Americans really want? How drastically different do they want the policies of their government to be?
Republicans are campaigning on a platform of minimal possible change involving continued American involvement in Iraq, continued tax cuts targeted at corporations and wealthy Americans and the use of the free market to resolve all of the country's ills. Democrats are generally united by their desire to undo the previous eight years of the Bush presidency and enact the maximum possible change.
Implicit in the rationale of, for example, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) is a desire to set the clock back to 1992 - and the eight succeeding years of her husband's presidency - along with the accompanying domestic and foreign policy successes. Sometimes, a candidate's platform is undercut by his or her history.
We also seem to be witnessing this phenomenon in the Republican race for the nomination, in which several candidates have made certain promises that they would have difficulty keeping if elected. But if an overarching narrative is substantiated, it can be a powerful force.
According to Governor Howard Dean (D-Vt.), the overarching narrative of a campaign matters much more than the litany of policies and positions. "People vote on character and values, not specific policies," he said in a recent appearance at Tufts.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have campaigned for Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and continue to do so; in fact, I've written about him in these pages before. But even observers who aren't Obama supporters recognize that his narrative of "change" is based on the positions he champions and the realization that these positions are, in fact, drastic departures from years of policies and practices in Washington.
Many voters cannot remember a time when candidates actually ran a campaign designed to appeal to the entire country, instead of only to people who agree with the candidate's ideology. For the entirety of my lifetime, and the lifetimes of many Tufts students, politics has been a continuation of the battles fought by our parents. Democrats get attacked for saying that Republicans, once upon a time, had ideas. Republicans are demonized by their base because they once worked on a piece of legislation with a prominent Democrat.
This kind of innovative approach is necessary when one considers the failures of the status quo in solving the problems that our country faces at home and abroad. Government itself is fundamentally broken, and that's why Americans still lack solutions to the problems which originated before the inauguration of our current president: a failing education system, lack of health coverage and an America largely disliked by many around the world - not because of what our government represents, but because of what it does.
If you need any testament to the power of Obama's message, ask your friends and demographic peers who overwhelmingly vote for him in state after state. Ask the tens of thousands of people who continually pack his events. Ask people like myself who see him as an inspiration for those who never had a reason to get involved in the political process until now.
Obama's campaign is an embodiment of the ideals which my generation only recalls from their history classes - that America achieves greatness when its citizens unite around a common purpose, instead of dividing themselves according to their party affiliation.
If you are fed up with just cheering for the inevitability of change, then go do something about it. Go out and phone bank for the candidate of your choice. I'll be organizing phone banks for mine every day until and during the primary in the Campus Center. Knock on doors. Go read about the candidates and their stances on the issues.
Fundamental change doesn't spontaneously occur as time progresses; great historical or political change has always been a function of movements and people, not inertia. Lastly, don't patronize those who think that massive, fundamental change is possible. Ask the women of 1900 or the African Americans of the 1950s about making change, and then ask yourself why you aren't doing more to help.
Daniel Scarvalone is a senior majoring in political science.
