Obama: A New Politics of Change

Last Thursday, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama emerged from the Iowa caucuses with a decisive victory over his two main opponents, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. At first glance, the wide margin of Obama’s victory might seem inexplicable. After all, every Democratic candidate supports withdrawal from Iraq, a broad expansion of health care, a comprehensive solution to the threat of climate change, and a host of other progressive reforms. In the absence of major differences between the candidates’ policy positions, Obama’s victory might seem to be a fluke—a function of some factor as arbitrary as the weather or the Orange Bowl.

Yet Obama’s victory represents something more than a brief aberration in the ordinary political process. Obama won with enthusiastic support from more groups than his typical strongholds—college students and highly educated liberals. More women voted for Obama than for Clinton; more union members and their families voted for Obama than for Edwards. Clearly, then, his victory in Iowa was not only a consequence of his campaign’s ability to mobilize an established base of voters.

Instead, Obama’s appeal across the boundaries of race, class, and gender is a testament to a less tangible difference that sets him apart from the rest of the Democratic field. That difference is his emphasis on change as the unifying theme of his campaign. Certainly, other candidates in recent weeks have attempted to appropriate the theme of change. In Saturday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton used the word “change” 23 times; John Edwards used it 14 times.

But Obama remains the only candidate to forcefully argue that we must change the way politics itself works to successfully change our policies. Only Obama has consistently offered a coherent vision of the way in which a broken political system—in which politicians decide what to say, how to vote, and with whom to cooperate for re-election based on partisan loyalties—leads to poor decisions. Certainly, the Bush administration was at fault for the misguided invasion of Iraq, but the effort was aided and abetted by those members of Congress who, fearing that standing up for their convictions would make them look weak on national security, voted to authorize the war.

The crux of Obama’s argument is that we must the existing political system with one that rewards honesty, pragmatism, and responsiveness if the country is to solve its problems. His background as a legislator, his tone in public speeches, and his campaign’s refusal to engage in mudslinging or to accept money from lobbyists all demonstrate his deep commitment and ability to bring about such sweeping change in American politics.

Once again, the Iowa caucuses provide evidence for the power of this message: Of the majority of caucus-goers who said that “change” was the single most important issue for them, more than half voted for Obama, compared to 19 for Clinton and 20 for Edwards. Moreover, Obama won decisively among the unprecedented 57 percent of caucus-goers who had never attended a caucus before. The record turnout in Iowa, especially among the formerly politically apathetic, shows that his campaign is already starting to achieve its aims.

Both by virtue of who he is—an African-American, a relatively young candidate, a fresh face with an unconventional background—and because of his efforts to win voters outside the traditional Democratic primary base, Obama’s candidacy has drawn into the political process many people who have never supported a candidate before. He is able to give them, for the first time, an investment in their government and a sense that the political system is responsive to them.

Despite the palpable enthusiasm nationwide for Obama’s candidacy, there remains the lingering suspicion that it might all be a pipe dream. After all, it’s easy to talk about changing the political system on the campaign trail; it’s much more difficult to put it into practice in the harsh Washington world of backroom deals and partisan squabbles.

Hillary Clinton, particularly, has integrated this skepticism into her recent campaign appearances, regularly saying, “Some believe you can get change by hoping for it. I believe you get change by working hard.” After her defeat in Iowa, she intensified the attack, accusing Obama of instilling “false hopes” in Americans. Only a candidate who has weathered the storms of Republican attacks, Clinton argues, can manipulate the political system to implement changes in policy.

But this argument relies on a shallow and misguided interpretation of Obama’s hope. As he said in his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, “Hope is not blind optimism…Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.” This is the transformative power of Obama’s candidacy: He offers a vision of change more ambitious than any candidate has in a generation, without losing sight of the integral role that hard work plays in achieving that change.

Every Democrat on the New Hampshire ballots offers policies that comprise a sea change from eight years of the Bush administration, but only Barack Obama can move beyond the level of policy to reshape the political system in a way that puts the common good, rather than power struggles, at the forefront of policymaking.

Eva Z. Lam ’10 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. She is associate director of Harvard Students for Obama.