Change

For yesterday’s Saturday / July 4 presidential address, Barack Obama offered up a pretty tough political message based on his reading of history:

These are some of the challenges that our generation has been called to meet. And yet, there are those who would have us try what has already failed; who would defend the status quo. They argue that our health care system is fine the way it is and that a clean energy economy can wait. They say we are trying to do too much, that we are moving too quickly, and that we all ought to just take a deep breath and scale back our goals.

These naysayers have short memories. They forget that we, as a people, did not get here by standing pat in a time of change. We did not get here by doing what was easy. That is not how a cluster of 13 colonies became the United States of America.

That all seems true to me. But to return to my point of obsession, it’s also true that substantive change in the United States has not typically come by simply working within the framework of the powers that be. The Revolution itself, of course, is a case in point—the whole idea was to vindicate the rights of Americans by going outside the established procedural framework of the British Empire.

The country doesn’t lack the intellectual capacity to understand how the health care system might be better, nor do we lack the material resources to transform our energy sector. But will we actually be able to do those things if Susan Collins and Ben Nelson are given absolute veto power over crucial issues of national policy?