I don’t think we tend to elect Governors to the Presidency so much because we think that executive experience is important. We do it because Senators and Representatives have a lot of votes that they can be taken to task on, and because Governors can more effectively run against Washington, DC. Bush did it in 2000. Clinton did it before him in 1992. Reagan did it in 1980. Carter did it in 1976. But every Governor that becomes President hires many of the same old bureaucrats from the prior administration of his/her party anyway—-because those guys make the trains run on time.

It is time that America grew up and realized that when politicians use words like “Washington insider” or claim that an opponent "represents the past" we are being condescended to by pandering politicians who are simply manipulating cultural symbols and stereotypes at the expense of substance. It so happens that I am supporting a Governor for President this time. Having admitted that, I always cringe when he questions whether someone who has spent 35 years in Washington can “change” Washington. It’s utter nonsense. It’s a meaningless political slogan. And what’s more to the point—-he obviously knows that. But he also knows what slogans people will buy, so he repeats them anyway. Why do we keep buying it? Are our memories so short? The mantra of “change” every election cycle is the primary thing that doesn’t change.

The last true “change” election we had was in 1938. That election fundamentally changed the assumptions upon which our government was based and the basic rules about the role of the Federal government in American life. It took a national disaster known as the Great Depression to serve as a catalyst for that “change”. I’d like to have another “change” election to undo a lot of what was done then. But I’m not holding my breath. Until that happens, however, I suspect that our politicians will continue to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic by spending money we don’t have and doing things that government shouldn’t be doing to fulfill promises they made to give away other people’s money. Hillary’s Christmas TV ad made me sick. If you didn’t see it, it shows her placing Christmas presents like “national health care” under the tree—as though she is bestowing these “gifts” on the American people out of her own generosity-—instead of taking their money by force to pay for them. And I think that this is precisely how she thinks about it. She wants to be America's Eva Peron, bestowing largesse on the people and pretending that all of the wealth came from her generosity and compassion.

In any event, I expect that our politicians will continue to tinker with the tax code year after year and move a little closer all the time to making the federal government morally responsible to feed us and make sure we have all of the medical care we want. Please remember this folks, the Soviet Constitution guaranteed the people jobs, food, shelter, health care, etc. Our own Constitution did not. Yet we have those things in far greater abundance than the Soviet people did under their constitution—precisely because we don’t guarantee them. We realize that the necessities of life are produced by work and innovation and not by paper guarantees. All of the paper guarantees in the world amount to nothing if the wealth is not created. You can’t redistribute wealth that doesn’t exist.

I thought that when President Bush came into office and we had a Republican President and a Republican Congress for the first time in half a century that we would really see meaningful “change” to fundamentally reduce the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy. After all, we took control of Congress because Hillary’s proposal for socialized medicine scared everyone. But, once the Republicans got into office, they wasted their time, moderated their policy positions to get re-elected, spent money like a drunken sailor and, in fact, gave us the biggest new entitlement program since Lyndon Johnson. I hate to say it, but we deserved to lose the Congress in 2006. We begged for it. I want to see people in office who will be careful with our money instead of using it to get themselves elected. I want to see politicians who understand and respect the Constitution’s limits on the authority of the Federal fix-it-man. In any event, I am not impressed by the “change” slogans I’m hearing this year. I suspect that things will pretty much stay as they are, whoever is elected.

JEFF