Periodically, the American public gets frisky and mistakes the appearance of novelty with novelty. 1992 (Perot) and Gary Hart's abortive run come to mind. The voters are unhappy and want something different so they convince themselves that one of the candidates actually is different and fresh. Obama and the Old Media are trying to fan those flames today.
But there is not one fresh, novel or new idea coming out of Obama's camp and his platform is pretty much the same as every dem since 1972--retreat and surrender abroad and a race to socialism at home, with a big, fat-filled topping of whipped victim group politics and save the trees. He's working to seem fresh and to avoid the specifics which would expose him as an empty socialist suit. But you can put lipstick on a pig . . .
Pretty much the same out of the R's. Don't socialize as quickly as the dems would like to, stay strong abroad and try to slow down the victim group stuff without seeming mean. Someone may manage to make it sound fresh but the battle lines were drawn in 1935 and 1967 and they won't be moving soon. The reason is they are real lines with real consequences. You can have all the fresh ideas you want. But eventually you are going to have to choose between more, less, or the same amount of socialized medicine we have today.
The delusion that there are fresh new approaches to be picked off a tree has recently popped up in California. Schwartzanegger has tried to sound like this and the voters even believed it for a while. But reality forces him to take positions on all the old fashioned issues and he turned out to be just another middling democrat hack with big pecs.
The only really revolutionary thinker to be president in my lifetime was Ronald Reagan. Sometimes he went so far out of the box it took your breath away. He actually moved the lines--SDI and taxes are just two examples. The rest of our presidents have just been fiddlers around the margin. The only one running today that has a chance of being outside the box is Thompson. Principled federalism is an idea that has been pretty much abandoned by both parties. So it is a revolutionary idea (in context) that could be paradigm shifting.
Did their internal polls in '06 suggest that Bill would win (via Hillary)? Thus, not worth wasting the effort?
Interesting post. We seem to be just muddling along in the same direction, dems and pubs. Maybe that is the way things are going to go until another Reagan comes along.