Not who — what. Voting for change, you say? What if the United States became a theocracy or a giant agrarian commune? That would be a change. Not that kind of change? Then what did you have in mind? And how do you propose that this be accomplished?

Considering how frequently — basically, in every election for everything, everywhere — candidates bleat the theme of change, it is remarkable how little of the fundamental variety the candidates clamor for actually occurs.

Yet there they go again, as a certain well-known campaigner in US history once said. The current field of contenders for what has been called (inaccurately, think some) the World’s Most Powerful Office is yammering about change like they just thought of it for the first time.

We know better. Mainstream US presidential candidates don’t think of anything for the first time on the campaign trail. For the most part, campaign strategists and polling tell them what to tell the voters they think. The strategists all know that change is the Old Reliable of campaign themes, and that’s what the candidates promise the voters.

But that’s not what the voters get. A humorist once said something to the effect that if he were elected president he would end hunger, stop war and cure disease. When asked how he would do those things, he said he was the big-picture guy, and the methods were details.

This is funny as fiction but it’s taken as a serious position by the candidates. The media could quiz them a little more closely on the details, but for the most part they are too busy handicapping the horse race with meaningless reporting more useful to a Las Vegas oddsmaker than a concerned citizen. The republic’s most serious exercise is on the edge of becoming a game show. Absurdist theatre is passed off as a debate: “How would you solve the nation’s economic problems? You have 60 seconds to answer…”

Anyone who has attempted to effect change in a large organization knows that doing it successfully requires thoughtful analysis of the problem and a well-conceived plan to solve it. Where are the candidates’ detailed analyses of the numerous and serious problems that cast shadows over the republic and their carefully crafted plans to solve them? Are these plans in writing so they can be read, reflected upon, referred to, compared and questioned?

Is any of it even possible? Under what conditions will the president serve? Will there be a veto-proof majority of his or her own party in congress? Will world affairs be turbulent or calm? Unplanned events outside the control of a government also have a way of intruding on its best laid plans. UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was once asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman. Macmillan replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.”

Although the US presidential elections are the subject of these comments, the problem is probably almost universal. It wouldn’t be a surprise to discover an organization called “Campaign Strategists Without Borders.”

If you’re really looking for a fundamental change in the way things are done that might have a beneficial effect one day, here’s an idea: vote for the plan, not the (wo)man. If you can find one.

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