That old line about lawyers — they’re all rotten except mine — seems to apply also to incumbent politicians.
No doubt, Americans are angry with elected officials. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed 63 percent of voters believing most members of Congress do not deserve to be re-elected. But whether that anger trickles out from Washington, D.C., into local ballot boxes remains to be seen.
By the time last Tuesday’s primaries had rolled around in 12 states, the anti-incumbency wave had turned into a tsunami. Or so we were told. The next day, Rachel Maddow strolled out onto the beach to count the casualties. The MSNBC commentator — who has this habit of using facts and statistics to analyze hearsay and political puffery — found political oceanfronts undisturbed in nine of those dozen states. Relieved incumbents were shimmying down from their stilts.
“In New Jersey … 13 incumbents on the ballot … all of them won,” Maddow said Wednesday night. “In California, a whopping 52 incumbents … each and every one of them winners.” She also found 11 incumbents in Virginia, four in Iowa, three in Arkansas, two each in South Dakota and Maine and one each in Montana and North Dakota … and not one had been swept away in the anti-incumbency tsunami.
Still, the test buoys are out there, measuring the slightest rise in the anti-incumbency waves. And both Republicans and Democrats are nervous about it. In the GOP, the concern is whether the new wave of anti-government candidates — many of them Tea Party activists — can win in November. A recent Wall Street Journal article quoted Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2008, taking it a step further: “The challenge for these candidates is transitioning from an insurgent profile to a candidate who can be trusted not only to win but to govern.”
Do more than just yell
Maddow speaks of a basic reality that, in my opinion, will ultimately determine the relevance of the Tea Party movement (it’s not really a party): Simply put, you’ve got to run good candidates and win elections. Success requires more than just tying tea bags to hat brims and turning town hall meetings into Jerry Springer shows. Without electable candidates and meaningful solutions, no political movement can succeed. The tsunami siren becomes a dry whistle.
For all its warts, our political system is still based on two parties, and history shows that insurgent movements typically wind up aiding the political party they hate most. I could be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure most of this year’s election-winners will be either Republicans or Democrats. How the Tea Party affects those two parties will depend largely on news events between now and November.
If the anti-incumbency movement is struggling to gain traction in some states, it could be that most voters see the “throw ’em all out of office” for precisely what it is: the lazy man’s protest, feeble squawking from folks who are unwilling to do their homework, analyze candidates and issues and make informed decisions.
Imagine the teacher who has a tough week in the classroom and decides to just flunk ’em all. Imagine the employer of a large business who decides to just fire ’em all. For that matter, imagine a Seattle Mariners owner who decides to just trade ’em all. OK, maybe that last example wasn’t such a good one. But you get my point.
Cleaning house does not require a match and an accelerant. It requires careful sorting. Here in Clark County, wise voters will watch, listen, learn and vote. Lazy voters already have made up their minds. As for the candidates, they’re looking nervously at the Tea Party crowd and thinking, “How much of that do I really want to embrace?”
Unmentioned until now is the possible impact of the national economy on this year’s election. An Associated Press story last week began, “For the first time since the beginning of the recession, economic growth — modest and fragile, but growth nonetheless — has spread to every corner of the country.” For many voters, a nice, new jingle in the pocket could be louder than any tsunami siren.
