Justin Gardner thinks so:

• This Is A Change Election (Donklephant)

Congress’s approval rating is in the shitter after a spectacular mid-term election comeback in 2006. The Dems promised change, and didn’t deliver. We’re still trying to pretend that Iraq is a single nation, and forcing Iraqis to so pretend at gunpoint. We’re still hassling air travellers more than ever before, and pretending that the magnitude of the hassle proves that we’re “safer”. We’re still repeating the folly of Prohibition with the War On (Some) Drugs, funding organized crime and raping the Bill of Rights in an apparent attempt to prove that half the population is perfectly willing to break the law to get high. Banks, emboldened by a blank cheque from the Federal Reserve, raised extraordinarily risky capital through extraordinarily risky mortgages and spread it around so thickly that the inevitable collapse of the housing bubble has just about everyone in a panic. And while I’m at it: waterboarding is torture even if Pelosi thinks it’s a pretty neat idea; the farm bill sucks (and this “holiday season” its artificially-inflated ethanol-targeted corn production has kicked food banks square in the nuts), tax-break-fuelled local HMO micromonopolies combine the worst features of private and public health care, the FCC is fucking evil, and the Tenth Amendment makes pretty much all of the foregoing thoroughly unconstitutional.

Most of the politicians in this country don’t want to talk about any of that. They’d rather talk about the church they attend, mostly to convince you that they’re stable and predictable God-fearing Christians (even if the God in whom they believe didn’t much like black people until 1978). They’d rather hammer on the same safe, predictable issues that haven’t been resolved in the last 30 years — abortion and illegal immigration for the Republicans; health care and gun control for the Democrats; taxes and Social Security on both sides. The fact that none of these issues is even glancingly connected to the United States’s real problems (see above) doesn’t bother them in the slightest: it’s all part of the electoral ritual, where candidates play on the fears of the party faithful and get elected based on the quality of their public relations team. It’s sort of like the Super Bowl, only with less chance of seeing Janet Jackson’s nipple, and instead of terrible commentary from John Madden you get terrible commentary from Wolf Blitzer.

Don’t let the rhetoric of the 2006 election fool you: these people aren’t even remotely interested in change. From the perspective of the aforementioned (first-paragraph) issues, Rudy Giuliani is basically the same as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards is equivalent to Mitt Romney, and they’re all about as bad as Bush 43. None of these people is going to rein in the DHS. None of these people is going to restore habeas corpus. None of these people is going to unfuck the cheap-debt economy. Those just aren’t traditional campaign issues. Policy doesn’t matter to these people. They don’t give a fuck about the country, they don’t give a fuck about the people they claim to (want to) represent… they only give a fuck about getting elected. If they do, it’ll be the same shit in a different bucket.

Mr. Gardner wrote mostly about Barack Obama. I’m not convinced that Obama is any more interested in change than any other front-running presidential candidate — I’m having a hard time distinguishing his platform from Clinton’s — and his “new ideas” image comes mostly from his lack of experience, rather than any evidence that he actually has new ideas. (Wasn’t I just saying something about style vs. substance in the past few paragraphs?) But when he says stuff like this, I warm up to him:

“I’m a Democrat. I’m considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or a Conservative or a libertarian or a free-marketer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody and in that sense I’m agnostic.”

(Hat tip: Donklephant)

For one thing: this is the first time I can remember in recent political history that anyone has broken with the “pro sports team” model of national politics: we’re good because we’re us; they’re bad because they’re them; it’s all about identifying with the right group, waving the right pennant, wearing the right jersey. Go Canucks Packers Democrats!

For another: I’m damn pleased that Obama gives equal time to libertarianism, and that he distinguishes between Republicans and conservatives. Republicans lately have been anything but conservative in their changes to the balance of federal power and their assault upon individual liberty. (Remember, “conservative” is supposed to mean “doesn’t like change”.) And while I imagine that Obama’s talking up libertarianism to try to feed off of some of Ron Paul’s support (like, say, the guy who used to run ObamaLA) it’s nice to see that he’s taking liberty seriously.

I’m not just pleased to see Obama give a tip of his metaphorical hat to libertarians because I kinda like the idea of living in a free country; I’m also pleased because he’s the first of the front-runners to admit that people younger than the Boomers matter. Libertarianism is strongest on the internet, and most of its adherents (as far as I can tell) are — typical of netizens — younger than the Boomers. I can’t speak for the rest of my post-Boomer cohort, but Obama is the only front-runner who doesn’t alienate me entirely by focusing upon Boomer issues (the aforementioned 30-year-old party planks).

Hell, I’m convinced that the sudden interest in nationalized health care is due to the Boomer generation suddenly realizing that they’re getting old and worrying about their health. (I’ve also noticed that the War On Drugs began in earnest in 1969, when the Boomers started to graduate from college, cut their hair, and get “real” jobs. That’s probably just a coincidence.)

Now that Obama has acknowledged that Boomers actually had kids, and that those kids are human, maybe he’ll pay attention (or at least lip service) to other “younger” issues: shoring up privacy rights, scaling back the drug war, net neutrality, and so on.

I’m not precisely thrilled with Obama as a candidate, but he beats the hell out of the other people with “strong main-stream support”. He’s far worse than Paul — he’s a statist; that pretty much goes without saying — but he’s far better than the rest of his kind.

And at least he isn’t entirely more of the same.