Dw. Dunphy On… Defining Change in the Here and Now
Thursday, September 18th, 2008 by Dw. DunphyI’m not a politics junkie, really. I know that might be hard to believe based on some of my columns over the last year. You’d find support in your disbelief from my family members as they recount the agony I go through while running through the Sunday morning roundtable tortures.
This Sunday, much like last Sunday and the one before it, the buzz was about how John McCain has co-opted Barack Obama’s tentpole strategy of change. Some argue that he is only flipping his deck of cards around, that he utters change while he shuffles out constancy. Others are saying that he actually has presented change, but only one, yet that single one has all but assured him a close run to the White House - Sarah Palin. The other big topic for the talking heads was the collapse and eventual sale of Lehman Bros. Investments and the rapidly plummeting stock prices for Washington Mutual (WaMu) and other notable lenders.
It all started me to thinking about the notion of change beyond the rhetorical slings and arrows. What changes are we actually looking for in this country? Who among us are secure? Who are hanging in, and who have given up? Despite optimistic numbers all summer long, unemployment is at a five year record high, so pervasive that those once rose-tinted figures had to be retro-actively adjusted to gel with the facts. I posed the question to some of my fellow Popdose writers: how are you doing? We’re presenting the responses here as an invitation to you, the readers. Feel free to share your situation with us in the comments section.
A point worth mentioning: this article has been several months in the making and while individual circumstances may have changed from person to person, the viewpoints are still valid, the message still has merit and is presented in that respect.



The current breathless “Sarah Palin Watch” going on in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream media is one of those political phenomena where the accuracy of her claims doesn’t really matter to those outside the chattering class. That’s because it’s not so much what she says as the image she projects. But that image has to project a certain something with keywords directed to the political base and swing voters (at this point in the game, swing voters are about 21% of the electorate and they have a high opinion of both McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden).


Jon: What were your impressions of Ted & the Kennedys? He looked pretty good, considering.

There are, of course, massive floods up and down the Mississippi River – a “500-year flood” that has taken out levees up and down the Iowa-Illinois border, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The enormous damage to homes and lives has often taken a backseat to worries about the damage to the Midwest corn crop. (Less ethanol next winter! More food riots in Africa!)
The media has treated these three developments separately, but to me they’re all part of the same story. Simply put, our nation’s disastrous energy policy is breaking us financially – and when it’s not busy doing that it’s getting us killed around the world, or avoiding the middleman and ravaging us at home via the type of extreme weather that just might portend a climate-change apocalypse. Out-of-control oil prices, Middle East instability and global warming are related problems that require a unified solution. It inevitably will be the task of the next president, even if it’s John McCain, to begin the long-delayed process of weaning this nation (and eventually the world) off of oil and other fossil fuels. 


With gracious assists from the national media and Obama himself, Hillary has raised two key questions about Obama that voters weren’t asking themselves as they fawned over his January speeches: Who is this guy? and Can we trust him? Implicit in these questions is the assumption that voters already know everything they need to know about Hillary, and have already decided whether they trust her or not. (In this she is, however unintentionally, parroting George Bush’s 2004 line, “You may not always agree with me, but at least you know where I stand.”) She has effectively re-positioned Obama as The Unknown Quantity – or, as the survivors of Oceanic 815 would put it, as The Other.
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