There are few things in politics more absurd, or more reliably recurring, than the candidate for Congress who proclaims earnestly that once elected, he or she will "change the way they do things in Washington." Just you wait, you logrolling legislators, you leeching lobbyists, you blundering bureaucrats -- once freshman Rep. Smith gets to town, the old order is going to come crashing down!
Within a few months, the representative stops talking about "change" and assures his constituents he knows how to work the system to their advantage. Before you know it, he's being challenged by a new politician, who proclaims her hatred of politicians and promises to deliver the "change" for which everyone has been yearning.
This week, the members of the 112th Congress say their oath of office. Nearly one in four House representatives is new, and almost all of those promised that their arrival would sweep the winds of change through the Capitol. But if that's what you're expecting, you shouldn't hold your breath.
Unless, that is, your definition of change is exceedingly modest. For instance, if you think change means somebody reading the Constitution on the House floor once a year, then you're in luck. Republicans are planning to do just that, in the apparent belief that Democrats disagree with them on various issues because the latter are unfamiliar with the founding document.
The Tea Partiers whose hearts go all aflutter at this sort of thing won't be disappointed, so long as their hopes remain firmly in the realm of the symbolic. The Republican leadership will be happy to feed them a regular diet of empty gestures, so long as it doesn't get in the way of the party's primary agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and assistance for corporate interests. But anyone who thinks that a victory of one party over the other in a midterm election will bring a sweeping transformation of Washington's processes and power relations will be sorely disappointed.
Of course, this isn't just a Republican problem. Barack Obama swept into office on a promise of "Change We Can Believe In," and one could charge progressives with naïveté for believing that his arrival in the Oval Office would transform the practice of politics. Obama's relentless efforts to "reach out" to Republicans didn't dampen the GOP's vicious partisanship any more than his ban on lobbyists serving in the executive branch meaningfully reduced the power of corporate interests.
The truth, however, is that Obama's good-government, post-partisan campaign rhetoric wasn't what had progressives so excited back in 2008. For them, "change" meant a reversal of the policies of the Bush years more than anything else. And they got that change, in significant part at least. But for all his skills and charisma, Obama will not leave Washington a fundamentally different place than he found it.
Perhaps he can be forgiven for raising our hopes that everything would be different once he took office, and we can be forgiven for believing it. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein reminds us, conservative complaints about the Obama "personality cult" notwithstanding, this is a regular feature of presidential politics. Rank-and-file party members usually believe their candidate will be a transformative figure, even candidates who in retrospect look far less than heroic. George W. Bush certainly promised that he would be. "We will write not footnotes but chapters in the American story," he said in his 2000 convention speech. "I come from a different place, and it has made me a different leader. ... I don't have enemies to fight. I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect." We saw how that worked out.
The force of one politician's personality has never and will never be enough to bring immediate, transformative change to a government as complex as ours, even if it's far less insane to believe that a president might change everything than to believe the same about a congressman ranking 435th in seniority in the lower house. But in practice, disgruntlement about "the system" is usually little more than dissatisfaction with its policy outcomes. Whether you think the government is operating in a responsible, effective, and accountable manner is going to be largely a function of whether you're getting the policies you want.
That isn't to say that even Democrats who got much of what they wanted in the past two years weren't disgusted with what it took to get it and the gauntlet of obstruction and interest-group opposition that had to be run. Nor is it to say that we shouldn't try to root out corruption and make the system as democratic and transparent as possible. There are real things that can be done to alter some of the system's worst pathologies. For instance, amid the recitals of the Constitution, Democrats in the Senate will be attempting to change the way filibusters are used, to avoid the kind of systematic abuse Republicans undertook in the last Congress.
That could actually change the way things are done, at least in the Senate. But it's a matter of some arcane rules with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Tell them you'll do something with absolutely no substantive meaning, like forcing every member of Congress to read every word of every bill they vote on, and you can pretend to the folks back home that you're shaking up the system.
Since it's the time of year for predictions, allow me one: 2011 will not see transformative change in the way Washington does business. That's not as much of a tragedy as it could be, because it's the policies that matter most. Bad processes often produce bad policies, but not always. For some reason, we see this more clearly when it comes to what the other side does. Democrats who are less than elated about Obama saw George W. Bush's presidency as an evolving national nightmare, and Republicans today are convinced Obama has brought America to the brink of socialist tyranny. If John McCain had won the presidency and continued George W. Bush's policies, there would be no Tea Party movement demanding change (all their protestations that they were mad about big government during the Bush years notwithstanding). Change to entrenched systems is difficult and slow and more likely to come in an accumulation of incremental moves than a dramatic gesture caught by the cameras. Elections don't transform government; they are, at most -- for better or worse -- a start.