The Problem With Contested Elections...

Monday, 18th January 2010

More on the special election in Massachusetts in due course. But Dan Drezner makes a good case for the ghastliness of politics:

For those readers who have never had the privilege of living in a battleground state, let me explain what the experience is like. Every other television commercial is about the campaign. Day after day, the race dominates the front page of the newspaper. Your mailbox is stuffed with fliers for or against one of the candidates. Your friends and neighbors talk about the campaign -- and who you support can affect your friendships. You can't escape the race.

All of this would be tolerable if it were not for two things. First, the phone calls. Over this weekend, by my count, we have received ten phone calls asking us to vote for or against someone, and then a few phone calls on top of that polling us about our voting intentions [...] Since these inquiries can't be put on the Do Not Call list, the phone will not stop ringing.

Second, the candidates are God awful. Seriously, they stink. Just to review our choices: Democrat Martha Coakley has a prosecutor's complex that would make Javert seeem like a bleeding-heart liberal. She is a God-awful politician so out of touch with reality that she accused Red Sox hero extraordinaire Curt Schilling of being a Yankee fan (Schilling's blog response is here). Based on the ads I've seen, her campaign has also been, by far, the nastier of the two.

This leaves Republican Scott Brown, who based on this vacuous Boston Globe op-ed, is an empty shirt with no actual policy content whatsoever. He was in favor of health care reform before he was against it. He can't stand the run-up in government debt, and wants to cut taxes across the board to take care of the problem -- cause that makes perfect economic sense. The one thing he is unequivocally for is waterboarding suspected terrorists.

Quite. And Dan, remember, is a professor of political science. On a more substantive point, the American public is so scunnered by politics that you can (almost!) make a case for arguing that it's better to be in the minority than the majority in Congress. True, voters aren't impressed by the GOP opposition but that's a semi-hypothetical or at least secondary dislike: they don't like Nancy Pelosi either and she's the one running the shop.

True too, voters are pesky creatures. They want Congress to achieve something. The problem is that almost anything that is proposed is automatically unpopular - regardless of which party is in the majority. That's one of the many reasons why there's been very little "big" legislation passed these past 15 to 20 years.

In an alternative political landscape that would recommend stripping power from Washington and returning it to the states. Unsurprisingly there aren't many people in Washington, in either party, who like that idea. It would be a counter-revolution and, as such, dangerous, complicated and liable to end in surprising places.

Filed under: Americana (478 more articles) , Congress (73 more articles) , Washington (169 more articles)

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Beefeater

January 18th, 2010 6:23pm Report this comment

Political scientists, almost by definition leftist, do not like Democrats to lose. It is kinder not to take any notice of their blustering and sudden cynicism about a political process now on the verge of electing a Republican (who is dumb and approves of torture). Surely it is kinder to ignore scientists throwing sour grapes tantrums.

And I do not follow the "more substantive point" you tacked on to Dan's quote. By definition the minority party is liked less by voters when elected to Congress, and relatively more by voters when the majority messes up. Then the minority may become the next majority. Who, precisely, is "scunnered" by politics?

And as for your remedying the dislike of Congress by suggesting greater federalism, that is a GOP - now minority - party plank.

Republicans support a halt to the usurpation by federal government of state power. Republicans do not want busy federal government to "achieve" monumental social legislation. That is why they poll better at the moment than Democrats and Democratic Congress.

It might well be that over the long haul small gov Republicans cannot win against big-gov Democrats. With each Democrat administration more Americans become dependent on the state. But were the Republican party to become a permanent minority - or espouse big-gov - Benjamin Franklin's dubiety that America could "keep" her Republic will have been proven well justified.

ndm

January 18th, 2010 6:42pm Report this comment

-- In an alternative political landscape that would recommend stripping power from Washington and returning it to the states.

Would that this were so. The reality is that State politics gets almost no coverage whatsover in the press and really is backroom politics at its worst. The fact that State voters really seem to love term limits shows how little they understand the political process.

Alex Massie

January 18th, 2010 6:54pm Report this comment

Beefeater: Fair enough, except...

1. Dan Drezner is a (moderate) conservative.

And

2. The GOP's small-government rhetoric was hardly matched by their record in government over the past decade. Perhaps that's changed but I think it unlikely and suspect that a President McCain and a Republican Congress would also have passed a large stimulus package and probbly bailed-out Detroit too.

Snowman

January 18th, 2010 7:39pm Report this comment

The professor’s survey of the ghastliness of the campaign gives credence to the view that the pundits will ignore policies or personalities, and go for rebalancing of the political environment in Washington.

Shifting power to the States must be a non-starter what with the big money flowing even more from the Federal coffers under the current leadership.

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