I was present in Chicago on Nov. 5, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. I was pulling double duty, working as a roving reporter for PJTV and writing for the PJ Media website.
The crowds were enormous. The celebration was taking place in Grant Park, where an estimated quarter of a million people had gathered to await Obama's historic victory.
As I entered the park, I noticed the two identical bronze representations of a man on a rearing horse. I flashed back to 1968 and the famous photo of a young man sitting astride one of the horses waving the black flag of the Viet Cong. It struck me then that the Obama campaign, wedded to "hope and change," had put to rest the argument over the Vietnam War.
By my estimation, at least 70% of the crowd was under 30 years old. None of them were alive during the war, and few of them had experienced the generational cleaving that the war represented.
Obama was set to become the first post-Vietnam president, and his voters were hopeful that he would bring about the kind of "transformation" that candidate Obama spoke so eloquently about.
It was a fool's hope. But it's a hope that persisted up to the 2024 election. In many ways, Kamala Harris was the anti-Obama. Where the former president was smooth, even slippery, Harris was herky-jerky, laughing in the wrong places, spouting word-salad answers to questions that the media had a hard time turning into coherent speech.
For good or ill, Democrats were defending the Obama legacy of "hope and change" into 2024. Now, where are they?
Can't cut this, don't cut that, omigod, you're destroying the country! The party of "Hope and Change," the party of "transformation," and the party of "revolution" have overnight become the "Defenders of the Status Quo."
Liberals love the way things are and don't want them to change. They love a national debt of $37 trillion. They don't want to cut a penny (except military spending, of course) from a national budget that's $2 trillion in the hole. They don't mind a bloated, intrusive, overstaffed, overbearing national government that seeks to control every aspect of our lives from birth to death.
An ideology that boasted of its revolutionary ideas is now desperately bending every effort to stop a revolution in its tracks. And what are they working so hard to thwart? A leaner, more efficient, more focused government with a workforce more responsive to elected authority. A government that removes obstacles to success for all Americans while allowing merit to dictate who ultimately succeeds.
"Hope and Change" was an empty promise. Real change—the kind that makes a difference in ordinary people's everyday lives—is extremely difficult. It's like trying to pull a locomotive down a track. You must overcome the engine's inertia before you can begin to move it. It takes a herculean effort to get it started.
That's where we are. More than 75 years of inertia has to be overcome in order to begin the real process of change. It won't happen in four years, or probably even 10 years. It won't happen without a sustained effort.
The bad news is that the arc of history has been trending toward statism for almost 250 years. The good news is that we've begun to reverse that trend.
Whether or not it's permanent is the question.
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