IT’S easy to champion change, if one has no past – as the remarka ble, if perhaps unsustainable, ascendance of Sen. Barack Obama demonstrates.
The very junior US senator from Illinois shot to the head of the Democratic presidential class of 2008 on the strength of this claim: He is not yesterday’s news.
This is true. He is not.
Yes, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and New Hampshire voters yesterday took the bloom off the Obama rose.
But they didn’t take him out of the race.
Obama is engaging, he is personable and he is dynamic. And while some might regard him profoundly lacking in experience and accomplishment, many others find that to be a plus.
It is not.
Obama served seven years on legislative back benches in Illinois, and has been an extraordinarily low-profile member of the US Senate since entering the body in 2005.
This is presidential?
Could be.
America has been down this road before: in 1960, a year before Obama was born, and again in 1976 – with unhappy results both times.
John F. Kennedy spent 14 years in Congress, most of them running for president on his father’s dime. His legislative record was, to be charitable, sparse.
But he was young and he was charming, and that was good enough after eight years of President Dwight David Eisenhower.
Four months after JFK’s inauguration came the Bay of Pigs catastrophe – an event, taken in tandem with a face-to-face meeting at Vienna in June, caused then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to tag the young president as a lightweight.
Grave provocations followed – the Berlin Wall in August, and the Cuban Missile Crisis 16 months later; events that might be taken as warp and woof for the making of a statesman . . . except for what happened in the first week of November 1963.
That was when Kennedy, and his younger brother Bobby, freely acquiesced in a plot that resulted in the assassination of the then-president of the Republic of (South) Vietnam and his brother.
Dallas came shortly thereafter, obscuring the fact that the Saigon coup had rendered South Vietnam a ward of Washington until the bitter end.
Thirteen years (and 55,000 combat deaths) later, a Watergate-weary America was again in search of change for the sake of change – and to provide it, the nation again embraced a man with no real past.
Jimmy Carter, with four years in Georgia’s Legislature and one term as governor of that then-largely-rural state, ran hard as the agent of change, and ended up as, arguably, the most overmatched occupant of the Oval Office in the 20th century.
He delivered change all right – if bone-cracking inflation and economic stagnation count.
And, more to the point, his principal legacy – the Islamic Republic of Iran – bedevils the civilized world to this day.
History gives no president a free ride, of course – and no amount of experience can fully prepare a candidate for the demands of that singular office.
But some meaningful experience is required – if not to be elected, at least to serve.
Expect Sen. Clinton to make this point – again and again – as the campaign proceeds.
mcmanus@nypost.com