College Republican Federation of Virginia

On November 4, the country voted for change; that much is undeniable.  The country doubled down, hit on 20, went all in, threw long, whatever. It chose a political neophyte with an ambiguous message and opaque ambitions.  What change will we get? We’re beginning to see.

President-elect Barack H. Obama is beginning to show us what change means.  It means bringing back to Washington a lot of people the country has already rejected.  They had a chance to vote for Clinton III in 2000, and (narrowly) rejected it.  They had a chance again in early 2008 to bring another President Clinton to Washington, and again said no.

But that’s ok, because Barack H. Obama is going to do it anyway.  Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Hillary(?), John Podesta, Paul Voelker, Robert Rubin.  All of these people have been here before, and the policies they put in place and the ideas they put forward have all been rejected, in 2000, 2004, and in 2008.

Now Obama is bringing back another liberal Washington veteran who the voters didn’t want, Tom Daschle.  Remember him? He’s the former Senate Majority Leader who got voted out of office by the citizens of South Dakota.  He’s going to be our new Health and human Services Secretary.

But what about the fact that Obama won? Doesn’t that mean that the public did in fact vote for those he appoints, that they have re-endorsed these folks? Had Obama named the people he was considering for these positions before the election and still won, then yes. But he didn’t, he kept them secret, he hid them from the public, nobody knew who he was considering so they couldn’t have approved of them.

Obama promised change without defining it, now we know why.  The change he was talking about wasn’t to change politics as we know it, but to bring back the politics we don’t want, the politics we’ve already rejected.  This is the change of Barack H. Obama, the message of The One: democracy doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if people vote someone out of office, because Obama likes them and that’s all that matters. 

He promised to bring new blood, to throw out the old crowd and change Washington.  What he’s doing is the same thing Washington has done for years, make democratic losers into appointed winners, bring in the people you want, regardless of what we want.  This is the change we see, not the change we voted for.