Throw the Bums Out!
By NANCY GIBBS
You remember Jack Kevorkian, the pathological pathologist who, when he wasn't transfusing blood from corpses, refining his "mercitron" machine or arguing for an auction market for human organs, used to help people commit suicide in a rusty van in a public park. So maybe it's no surprise that in the Year of the Outsider, he's finally out of jail (eight years for second-degree murder) and running for Congress as an independent in the Fifth District in Michigan.
There's something touching about a man who spent his life defying laws now wanting to write them. Dr. Death has little to commend him to voters except not being a career politician, but in this season that might count for something. The 260 laws passed by the 110th Congress represent a 30-year low, and they include the naming of 74 post offices, not to mention the nonbinding resolutions designating July National Watermelon Month and recognizing dirt as an essential natural resource. Approval of Congress has sunk to a record low: 9% of people in a Rasmussen poll think lawmakers are doing a good or excellent job. The happiest news in this for the Democrats running the place is that about 40% of voters think the Republicans are still in charge.
This all suggests that if voters are serious about change, craving a new kind of politics, then they can't stop with the White House: Capitol Hill will also need a makeover. Members of Congress were never meant to have tenure; the more anti-Federalist of the founders wouldn't have wanted a government that required full-time, much less lifelong, service. Lawmakers usually pitched in for a few years upholstering the work of the framers, then went back to their plantations or law practices. This model of the citizen-legislator held for about 100 years, until government began to expand after the Civil War and the realignments of the 1890s made for safer seats where lawmakers could tuck in for a long ride.
It is now so expensive to run for Congress that incumbents, who have no other day job and better access to cash, enjoy a re-election rate of better than 90%. The only hope for turnover is for members to hate the job so much that they leave on their own, or for voters to be so hungry for change they'll risk backing the long shot. As it happens, both now seem to be occurring. With some 30 of their members bailing out, Republicans are running a crop of entrepreneurs and CEOS (it helps for amateurs to pay their own way), including a concrete magnate in Illinois, a Lockheed Martin vice president in New Jersey and an 85-year-old Montana lawyer with eyebrows like hamsters who still counts as a rookie since he's yet to win office after 15 tries. Among the Democratic youngsters, there's a former Republican Iraq-war vet in Minnesota, a former ranch hand and Yale Ph.D. in Nebraska and Dennis Shulman, a blind rabbi who easily won the Democratic nomination for the Fifth District in New Jersey. "We keep sending career politicians to Washington, and what do we have to show for it? A big mess," Shulman says. "It may very well take a blind man to show Congress the light."
There is, of course, an argument for experience, especially when the issues are complex and the special interests cunning. House Speaker Tip O'Neill used to grumble about the "bed wetters," the fresh-faced Democrats who hadn't been around long enough to know how to resist pressure from the Reagan White House. There's a reason roughly half the people who write the laws have law degrees. But surely there's value in having some teachers as legislators when No Child Left Behind is on the table, or some doctors and nurses on the committees dissecting health-care proposals. Would actors perform better in floor debates? Would Al Franken lighten up the Congressional Record?
Running against Washington is the oldest play in the book; even Presidents up for re-election have been known to try to run as outsiders, and rookie candidates should be optimistic about where voters fall now on the change-vs.-experience spectrum. It's worth remembering what usually happens to amateurs who are ambitious enough to think they can vault to the top of the political pile: they end up acting just like the professionals who are already there. But maybe this year really will be different after all.