Real change takes real experience

NORMAN, Okla. – If you were looking for a coming-out party for Michael Bloomberg’s independent presidential bid, the gathering of frustrated moderates Monday at the University of Oklahoma wasn’t it.

But if you’re among the legions of Americans hungering for change this election season, then this was the place for you. What happened here Monday won’t change our politics overnight, but Washington won’t change without meetings like this.

Surprisingly, Bloomberg was a sideshow. He sat at one end of a podium of 14 former members of Congress or governors, with two presidential experts and a diplomat thrown into the mix. He did little talking, except to explain how we have lost our courage and vision and to suggest we should think about results more than parties.

Not bad. But neither were the New Yorker’s remarks a call to the barricades that some thought would happen here.

The most interesting comments came from the other panelists, most of whom have decades of Washington experience. Former Sens. David Boren, Sam Nunn, Jack Danforth and Gary Hart and their peers looked like movie stars about a decade past their primes. But these Republicans and Democrats knew how to govern in their day. And they are fighting back.

“We’ve seen the system work,” fumed former Maine Sen. Bill Cohen, also President Clinton’s secretary of defense. “And it’s not working.”

Beware: Some proposals the moderates made are process-oriented. And process never seems to get voters to jump out of their seats. Yet Washington is all about process, and unless you change the way things work, the city won’t climb out of its dysfunction, which stems from each of the two major parties trying to steal the show from the other.

Boren ticked off several worthwhile changes, such as getting the next president to form a genuinely bipartisan Cabinet and making sure the 44th president meets regularly with congressional leaders. That would take some of the edge off Washington’s mean ways.

You can trace the talk that went on here yesterday, as well as the “change” chatter we’re hearing on the campaign trail, to our founding as a religious colony. Some of us still see ourselves as that city on a hill that John Winthrop envisioned and Ronald Reagan popularized. We don’t want to get sullied by the mischief in which rulers engage.

So, when someone says, “I’m not like that,” we latch onto them. All that lobbying, posturing and vote trading is for the status-quoers, the insiders, the suits.

In my book, that’s the strain in our political culture that Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are tapping. People are searching for a post-politics politics.

Understood. George W. Bush hasn’t been able to unify Washington, as he promised. The place shows no signs of coming off its partisan bender. But if voters really want to see the people we send to Washington get more done, we need more than platitudes. We’re going to need people like the Borens, Nunns, Danforths and Cohens, who know how to make things move through the city.

A friend of mine made a similar point after Iowa, where change was in the water. If you want change, he asked, doesn’t it take people who know how to get things done?

The group that met here at the University of Oklahoma has experience galore. Their challenge is how to move out of this comfortable university setting and take their message to the masses.

When I interviewed him before the event, Boren said it was up to the American people to broaden this effort. True, we citizens need to speak up. But I hope this group takes its message to the campaign trail. Washington needs changing. No doubt about that.

The rest of us could use some advice about how to change it.