Anyone Can Share The Obama Moment

There is no doubt this historic moment in American politics belongs to one American politician in particular. But you don't have to be Barack Obama to take advantage of his moment.

That's a lesson a lot of people in public life are learning or ought to be learning — right now. For anyone active in our national arena who is interested in change, this is the time.

Among those who are paying attention are two old vets of the reform wars of the past: Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold. Yes, that would be the Arizona Republican who finished second in the presidential election and the Wisconsin Democrat who, having flirted with a long-shot bid for his party's nomination, opted out early.

Back in the 1990s, these two cooked up the most successful bipartisan effort at curtailing money's role in national politics since the Watergate era. And they got it through Congress. President Bush, goaded by the Enron scandal, signed it into law in 2002. This achievement, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act or BICRA, has been through a wringer in the courts, but what remains is still meaningful.

Now McCain and Feingold want to get the band back together and take it on the road, targeting an element of our political system nearly as ingrained as "pay for play" giving to campaigns. Their latest bete noire is earmarking, which allows individual members of Congress to steer funding to pet projects in their home states and districts. It has long been the lubricant for spending measures great and small, held especially dear by members of the Appropriations Committee in each chamber.

Is the elimination of earmarks a major item on the Obama agenda? Probably not. He tended to downplay the role of earmarks in the budget during his debates with McCain this fall. But McCain and Feingold don't absolutely need a boost from the president-elect to achieve their mission. They have succeeded before without White House help, and in certain respects they may be better off without it.

But this is the time for McCain and Feingold and a raft of other reformers to press their case, not as Obama acolytes or emissaries but as people who share his sense of timing.

What's important about the Obama moment is that it does not entirely depend on Obama himself. He is Time magazine's "Person of the Year" not because he personally made this historic moment happen but because he saw it coming. His name is on the era not as inventor or creator but as claimant and principal beneficiary.

So in this brief interlude of fluidity, many things are possible. A specific change in law, in policy or in attitude may or may not be part of the Obama agenda, the Democratic agenda or the liberal agenda. It can be as bipartisan as earmarking, or as nonpartisan as eliminating the power of governors — all governors — to appoint new senators.

That last idea is in bloom thanks to the rank corruption detailed in transcripts made in the office of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. His fate remains unclear, but suddenly the spotlight is on governors who solicit bids like auctioneers from a chorus of aspiring senators. All at once, the whole country knows what pay to play is. And that's a godsend to every reformer looking at every aspect of political commercialism.

How much of this spreading reformist zeal can Mr. Obama take credit for? His own credentials as a good guy are far from pristine. His ties to Blagojevich and other Chicagoans, as well as his time among the fallen angels of Springfield and Washington, mark him as a man of artful compromise.

But the degree of purity in the president-elect is beside the point, because he is less a cause than an emblem, a model and a point man. The forces that brought him to the pinnacle of our power system in this moment are broad and deep in the electorate as a whole, and they have implications beyond him.

In issuing his pivotal endorsement of Obama in October, former Secretary of State Colin Powell called him "a transformational figure." He saw this young man from Illinois as being in tune with times of transition in the nation and the world. He spoke of his capacity. All of this rang true.

But if Obama matters because he is in tune with the times, then it is ultimately the times that matter most. Yes, this slender young fellow from so many different backgrounds and worlds has seized the moment and made it his own. But others can do so as well.