REAL 'CHANGE' COMES FROM WITHIN US

Call me cynical, but I've had just about enough of the empty
platitudes this presidential election season - particularly the
candidates' emotional appeals for "hope" and "change."

Change? From inside the Beltway? You can't be serious, can you?

Washington is a multi-billion dollar, monolithic entity - composed of
hundreds of career lawmakers, as well as thousands of agencies,
corporate lobbyists, and lifelong bureaucrats. Aside from the 535
members of Congress, many of whom are faceless even among their own
constituents, this Leviathan operates in a manner that is entirely
unaccountable to the voting public.

In short, Washington is a bureaucracy - arguably the biggest, most
bloated bureaucracy on this planet - and bureaucracies, by their very
nature, are designed to stifle, not stimulate, change.

That said, even if Washington was an environment capable of
responding to such idealistic expectations, neither the Democrat or
Republican ticket is offering anything other than business as usual.

For all of Sen. Obama's talk of change, there's been little
accompanying action. As a senator, what reform-minded legislation did
Obama shepherd through Congress? Seems to me that the first-term
senator has spent the bulk of his limited time in office campaigning
for the White House rather than representing the needs of his
constituents or championing for "change" from within.

Obama's VP pick, the senior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, is an
anathema to change. Biden, who won his senate seat in 1972 at age 30,
has spent more than half of his total time on Earth as a Washington
insider. Of course, having lorded over American taxpayers so long,
Biden can - unlike his running mate - take responsibility for
numerous pieces of legislation.

For example, during the mid-1980s, Biden was the chief senate
architect of the federal anti-drug laws that re-established mandatory
minimum sanctions for various drug possession crimes, and established
the racially based 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crimes involving
the possession of crack versus powder cocaine. Many academics have
credited Biden's law as one of the primary reasons why America now
possesses the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world,
and why approximately one out of every nine young African-American
males are now in prison. (Ironically, had Biden's running mate and
former admitted cocaine user Obama been convicted under federal law,
his future political aspirations would have been limited to Barry the
janitor, not President of the United States.)

Like all good politicians, Biden recently issued a verbal mea culpa
for his role in disproportionately expanding the U.S. prison
population (does saying "I'm sorry" count as "change"?), stating:
"Our intentions were good, but much of our information was bad."
Seems to me I heard the same thing from the GOP as it pertained to
invading Iraq.

Of course, Republican presidential nominee John McCain is no better.
The senior senator from Arizona has held his seat since 1982 - back
when gas cost $1.28 a gallon, a new car cost under eight grand, and
you could buy a new home for about $80,000. By my count, McCain has
had 26 years in Washington to deliver the sort of "changes" he's
promising now. Has he?

On the flip-side, Alaska I've-yet-to-serve-one-full-term Gov. Sarah
Palin is the antithesis of a Washington crony. That said, the
greatest "change" she brings to Capitol Hill is being nominated for
the second most powerful seat in the nation while possessing
virtually no credentials, aside from arguably her gender, to have earned it.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my jaded tone, I'm a strong believer in
"change." But I look for it within my community, and more often than
not, within myself. True "hope" and true "change" come from within
one's soul; they don't emerge out of shallow platitudes uttered by
career politicians residing 3,000 miles away in Washington.