Change I can believe in

I wonder if any of you can remember your life in politics before 2000? Before we were loaded with one outrage after another to the point that it became difficult to keep up?

I remember Monica and impeachment (ha-ha) and the “vast right-wing-conspiracy.” But things get more fuzzy when I try to think about what issues were on the table, or which ones were off the table and we were trying to get them on.

The reason I’m going down this memory lane is that I’m doing my best to try to imagine a world without Bushco. And its hard to get there. I feel like I’ve been fighting them with almost everything I’ve got for so long that I can’t imagine a world where that isn’t a centering theme. But its about to happen.

I don’t mean to say that there won’t be political battles to fight. That has never been the case and I doubt very much that it ever will be. But I also don’t want to dismiss the magnitude of the change that is about to happen.

I can hear it all now though. Those of you who want to say that Obama’s policies are not THAT different. That’s not my point – even if I disagree. What I’m thinking about is how I’ve ordered my political life around the outrage I feel at people like Bush, Cheney, et al. And they are about to disappear from the stage of power. We got a bit of that when folks like Rumsfeld and Gonzales resigned. Where are they now and what are they doing? Who knows and who cares? That’s about to happen to Bush and Cheney.

So its a starting over…almost from scratch when it comes to the Executive Branch of our government. Oh, and while we’re at it, lets take a look at one of the Legislative branches, the Senate. Over 1/4 of them are new to the body since 2006.

1. Sen. Barrasso, John (R-WY)

2. Sen. Begich, Mark (D-AK)*

3. Sen. Brown, Sherrod (D-OH)

4. Sen. Cardin, Benjamin (D-MD)

5. Sen. Casey, Robert (D-PA)

6. Sen. Corker, Bob (R-TN)

7. Sen. Hagan, Kay (D-NC)*

8. Sen. Johanns, Mike (R-NE)*

9. Sen. Kaufman, Ed (D-DE)*

10. Sen. Klobuchar, Amy (D-MN)

11. Sen. McCaskill, Claire (D-MO)

12. Sen. Menendez, Robert (D-NJ)

13. Sen. Merkley, Jeff (D-OR)*

14. Sen. Risch, Jim (R-ID)*

15. Sen. Sanders, Bernard (I-VT)

16. Sen. Shaheen, Jeanne (D-NH)*

17. Sen. Tester, Jon (D-MT)

18. Sen. Udall, Mark (D-CO)*

19. Sen. Udall, Tom (D-NM)*

20. Sen. Warner, Mark (D-VA)

21. Sen. Webb, James (D-VA)

22. Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon (D-RI)

23. Sen. Wicker, Roger (R-MS)

24. ILLINOIS*

25. NEW YORK*

26. COLORADO*

27. Sen. Franken, Al (D-MN)???*

(* indicates new in January 2009 – 13 total)

No matter whether you believed Obama would bring change or not, we’re going to have heaps of it rolling out over the next few months. The specter of these kinds of changes to two of the three branches of government (and the Supreme Court is very likely to change too as several retire) is unprecedented in my lifetime.

Of course, you add to all that the fact that we now have Democratic control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since the advent of the netroots as well as the incredible grassroots movement that Obama built during the campaign. So we’ve all changed alot in the last 8 years too. I’d say that all bets are off for predicting how things will play out based on what has happened historically.

Of course, I would be remiss if I were to neglect mentioning that with all this change in personnel, we are also facing some of the greatest challenges we have ever seen as a nation. Those include the crisis in the economy, climate change, two wars, and eight years of everything from incompetence to war crimes to clean up.

I am NOT predicting some progressive sweep of our national politics. What I’m saying is that the deck has been shuffled – big time. That is just as likely to scare people into retreat as it is to invigorate them to move forward. All I know is that there might never have been a more momentous time to be engaged in the process.

44 comments

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    • Robyn on December 28, 2008 at 17:09

    I wonder if any of you can remember your life in politics before 2000?

    If you don’t remember the 80s, good for you.

    You can do a little focus on 1963 later today if you want to. 🙂

    • kj on December 28, 2008 at 17:11

    many treads of thought offered here, thanks, NL.

    been on a slow political withdrawal for awhile now. (the impeachment folly saw me furiously emailing and phone calling and taping the hearings and in general, losing my mind, which just accelerated over the years that came after. Katrina pretty much knocked me out, even here in the Midwest.)

    so.  i got nuthin’  ðŸ˜‰

    but i’m rested, fairly clear, with a decent dose of detachment.  i’m ready for what’s next.  ðŸ™‚

    oh!  and thanks to DD, i gots some hope in the collective again.  woohoo.

    • Edger on December 28, 2008 at 17:17

    Wasn’t life a bowl of cherries and there were less assholes running the US government being held up as saints by pseudo-christians who are convinced that all  of Jesus’ teachings apply to everyone but them? Or something like that?

  1. … transit oriented development, progressive populism.

    Not much different, really. The biggest change was 1981, since then its been a running fight to preserve old gains while new challenges piled up.

  2. up on the front page of dkos right now focusing on what we can learn from our mistakes in 2008. He zeros in on how the Iraqi Parliament took on Bushco over the SOFA in a way that our own legislature didn’t have the courage to do. And he finishes with this great question.

    2008 is also unique in that it is the last year of the Bush administration.  It may therefore be that all of the models we have developed for predicting Washington behavior from 2001-2008 will not be operative in 2009.  It depends, I guess, on how dependent those models were upon the Unitary Executive, and upon how completely the incoming Obama Administration scraps the Unitary Executive.

     

  3. Nezua has his own unique way of adjusting to the changes.

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