Voters demand change (just not too much)

In an era of virulently contrary characters, in an election of eerie contradictions, one contradiction involving contrary characters not only stands out but also defines our time and our November choice. This is it:

The 2016 campaign is a struggle for the hearts of voters who are at once desperate for change -- and satisfied with their well-being. It is an electorate that is impatient with America’s leadership -- even as it is highly supportive of America’s leader.

If all that prompted you to read those two sentences twice -- if in fact those two sentences make no sense whatsoever -- then you completely understand the nature of American politics today and the course of the general election campaign.

The numbers bear out these contrary statements. A YouGov/ Huffington Post poll showed that a solid majority of Americans want to “take the country in a different direction.” A comprehensive poll by Gallup and the health care giant Healthways shows that people believe their lives have improved since Barack Obama took office. Obama, meanwhile, wins healthy approval ratings.

In short, things are pretty good and we have a profound need to change things.

The two presidential nominees are listening, at least a little and at least to some of this. Across this important swing state and across the country, they have seized on the change element of the voters’ message, with Donald J. Trump vowing to make America great again (even as he says this is a great country) and Hillary Clinton stretching to assure the public she is no Bill Clinton (supporter of NAFTA, a tough crime bill and welfare “reform”) and really isn’t all that much an Obama (freetrader and faint defender of America abroad).

Even so, how to portray Obama and his record is a vital question for campaign strategists of both parties.

Every presidential election is a decision point for Americans, a moment to declare whether the path the country is taking is worthwhile or whether to swerve from the path. Great changes in the nation’s direction came in 1920, when Woodrow Wilson’s engagement-oriented Democrats were repudiated by Sen. Warren G. Harding and the Republicans, who turned away from Europe and looked inward, and again a dozen years later, when Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated President Herbert Hoover and promoted a more interventionist role for Washington in the economy.

Other major changes came in 1952 with the election of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, eight years later with the ascension of Sen. John F. Kennedy, and again in 1980, when the country turned from President Jimmy Carter to give former Gov. Ronald Reagan and his vision of supply-side economics a try.

In the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science this month, the political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Michael Tesler of the University of California, Irvine, argue there is a partisan divide on the question of the economy. “Even before the Republican primary got underway,” the two professors wrote, “there was already significant economic discontent among Republicans.”

The truth is that there is discontent everywhere, co-existing with a general sense of contentment. Has there ever been such a moment of cultural confusion?

Perhaps we should look to the 1920s, a decade that didn’t roar for everyone, unless you concede that some of the roar was discontent, especially among working people.

Next month, S.L. Price releases “Playing Through the Whistle,” an important study of the steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and its storied high school football team. In the course of telling this remarkable story, Price argues that the “distilled image of the 1920s -- amoral flappers swanning about a sea of bathtub gin -- is but a dim caricature of a nation unnerved.” The same could be said of our own confused time.