DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

"We came by our miracles easier than we were able to manage them," Fred Friendly and Walter Cronkite once wrote of the 1960s. The same is true of every decade since then and I often think of how the frame of reference of generations changes rapidly.

For instance, no one under forty or so can imagine a day when our courthouses and airports were not armed camps, while many of those over forty have memories of walking their loved ones to airport gates and even to the airplane stair ramps and of walking through courthouses unimpeded.

The omnipresence of plastic seems like it was always with us, but the first decade of baby boomers can remember the sandwiches in their brown bag school lunches wrapped not in plastic wrap or plastic bags but in wax paper, and Dixie cups made of paper and wax instead of plastic or styrofoam.

Watching Barack Obama try to switch parties in recent weeks and John McCain try to settle on a wing of the GOP to join made me think of how recent is this phenomenon of candidates shifting their ideological positions.

We've become accustomed to it. On election night 1994 television commentator Cokie Roberts made a famous demand that Bill Clinton "move to the right, which is the advice that somebody should have given him a long time ago."

In 1988 George Bush the Elder spent all year pandering to the Republican right in order to win his presidential nomination, then started shifting to the left to try to win the election by promising to be the "education president" and the "environmental president."

Hillary Clinton is some kind of champ at this, moving to the left to run for the senate from New York, then to the right during her term of office, the back to the left for reelection and her presidential run.

What today's young voters do not have is any memory of a time when candidates took stands and maintained them. The phrases "moving to the left" and "moving to the right" and "moving to the center" once were not even in common use.

There was, in fact, a time when candidates did not say a word between nominations and election days, instead digging in their heels and maintaining their positions. In 1864 Democratic presidential nominee George McClellan was asked to travel to Pennsylvania to campaign. He responded, "I fully appreciate the importance of carrying that State and I would do everything in my power to aid in securing that result, but I have made up my mind on reflection that it would be better for me not to participate in the canvass." He wasn't seen in public for two months and during an election eve appearance he reviewed a parade without saying one word.

His opponent, Abraham Lincoln, running for reelection as the Union Party nominee, was asked to make a speech or at least send a written statement to a Union meeting (the Union Party was a Republican/Democratic coalition during the civil war). He replied, "I beg you to pardon me for having concluded that it is not best for me now to write a general letter to a political meeting. First, I believe it is not customary for one holding the office, and being a candidate for re-election, to do so." One chronicler of that campaign, John Waugh, wrote, "The people knew exactly where he stood and what he intended to do and not do if elected." Today, no candidate wants the public to know such things.

For a long time, even after candidates started campaign tours -- a change particularly advanced by Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 -- they did not use those tours to shift their positions.

Even some candidates we now think of as slick resisted the kind of slipperiness we see so often now. Imagine Obama saying, as John Kennedy did in 1960, "I do not regard the title of liberal as an honorary degree. I regard it as a license to preach the gospel of liberalism across this country."

The big change came with the invention of the public opinion survey. Surveys made it possible for politicians to do scientifically what they never had reliable enough information to do before -- tell the public what it wanted to hear (marketing surveys served the same purpose for journalism). Candidates resisted it for a long time, but as polls got better and more dependable, they were unable to withstand what seemed to be a sure route to election. Within the space of a generation, candidate backbones all over the nation had decalcified, with a concomitant impact on the public's respect for politics and the voter turnout rate. Today's younger voters never knew another way.