How Much Change Is Change?

You hear a lot of moaning about how terrible things are in the United States now, but consider the situation 75 years ago this week when Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president and delivered his stirring "only thing we have to fear is fear itself" Inaugural Address. Unemployment in Toledo, Ohio, was 80 percent. Today, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trying to feel Toledo's pain, unemployment there is 6.4 percent. The winter of 1933 marked the bottom of the Great Depression. Today, despite the news from Wall Street, we're not even sure if we're in a recession. Millions of people in those days wanted a dictator. When our new president takes the oath next year, we'll be satisfied with someone who just gets a few things done.

Or will we? The 2008 presidential campaign has featured rising expectations of real change, especially if Obama makes it all the way. It's not too early to begin to think about what, exactly, this change would mean. How would we define it? How would Obama execute it? Two years from now, will we know if we've achieved it?

Crisis makes change easier. With the U.S. financial system in meltdown, FDR's bipartisan bank-rescue plan passed the House on a voice vote with its provisions scrawled on a napkin. But it's a myth that the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress rubber-stamped Roosevelt's 15 major legislative initiatives during his First Hundred Days. Most of those New Deal bills were substantially amended. When he launched Social Security in 1935, many New Dealers thought it was badly watered-down.

Obama tries to prepare his audiences for disappointment. "Change won't be easy," he says repeatedly, explaining exactly how special interests have spent many millions buying Congress. Without a big victory in November that pulls in five or six new Democratic senators (FDR picked up 12 in 1932), it's hard to see how he would get much of his agenda through. Even a landslide guarantees nothing. The Republican minority leaders, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, don't seem likely to catch Obama fever any time soon.

Then there's the budget. Obama admits that with baby boomers set to retire, "we should have been storing our nuts for winter" and "we can't build our future based on a credit card issued by the Bank of China." But he hasn't yet conceded that rolling back President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and slowly reducing the $12 billion a month we're spending in Iraq just won't generate enough revenue to pay for all of his ambitious domestic agenda. Obama may find that the biggest changes he brings are less legislative than attitudinal, by, say, repairing America's image in the world and convincing the African-American community that it must do more to solve its own problems.

Even so, Obama's got a few assets in the Washington change game that have gone underappreciated. The first is that he's a senator. Comfortable with dominating their state legislatures, governors-turned-presidents often neglect congressional relations. (FDR and Ronald Reagan were rare exceptions.) Obama was smart enough to hire former majority leader Tom Daschle's well-regarded staffers, who would likely follow him into the White House. He's not in John McCain's league in working across the aisle, but he has cultivated some important relationships.