First Person Political
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First Person Political

Legislative Life and the Meaning of Public Service

Grant Reeher

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First Person Political

Legislative Life and the Meaning of Public Service

Grant Reeher

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About This Book

In First Person Political, Grant Reeher combats the public's alienation from and distrust of politicians by putting a personal face on everyday political life. Through moving personal interviews, Reeher allows legislators to tell their own stories about how and why they came to politics, the experience of serving in their state legislature, their decisions to stay or leave, and the many trials they face in the name of public service. Reeher contends that these politicians do have the public good in mind and often suffer great personal losses for their chance to represent the people and fight for what they think is right. His research also shows that those who choose to run for office often come from a background of deep community involvement.

Reeher argues against public cynicism about our elected officials, and his profiles stir not only our praise and respect for these legislators, but also a greater belief in the democratic process itself. The excerpts from his interviews provide a rarely afforded intimate look at these politicians. What emerges from these stories is a humane and believable portrait of public servants acting on behalf of the public good, a portrait that should provide some comfort, perhaps even inspiration, for citizens concerned about the state of American democracy.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2006
ISBN
9780814769256

1
Introduction
The Sickness Unto Politics

The word candidate is very old. Ancient Romans seeking high public office customarily dressed in white togas—hence the Latin candidatus, or clothed in white. The candidates’ loosely fitted robes made it easy for them to reveal the scars they had earned in battle, while their robes’ pure white color, made more intense by rubbing in chalk, demonstrated the purity of their civic purpose in the pursuit of public office.
What today’s candidates might reveal about themselves is not hidden by togas; their shrouds are instead woven from the many layers of distance separating most citizens from their political representatives—layers of mediated political information, the absence of politically safe spaces in which to communicate as well as publicly reflect and ruminate, political alienation, and mutual distrust. It is these virtual robes that I attempt to pull back in this book by supplying an insider’s view of the political and personal lives of legislators based on their experiences in running for, serving in, and deciding whether to exit from the legislature.
Ultimately, what is revealed in this process is an impression running counter to commonly held ideas about politicians’ motivations and the nature of legislative life: that candidates for public office in the United States today actually look a lot like the ancient Roman idealized version. Contrary to what most people think, most candidates pursue office, and once elected serve in office, primarily out of a motivation to advance the public good—and many pay dearly for their efforts.
To uncover these aspects of legislative life, I rely primarily on the extended in-depth interviews that I conducted with 77 legislators serving in the lower houses of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont during the mid-1990s, a time when public respect for and trust in politicians and the political institutions they inhabit reached all-time lows. I also draw on survey responses collected from 233 legislators in the same three states along with data from official records on individual legislators’ characteristics and activities, extended personal observations of their behavior, both inside and outside the legislative chamber, and a set of follow-up interviews conducted in 2004 and 2005 with 23 of the original interviewees.
I designed the interviews to give the legislators a chance to talk at length with an understanding stranger, or in some cases a relatively recent acquaintance, about things that were important to them. Our meetings provided a supportive place where they could describe difficult issues, develop points, explain themselves, and register positions, all without concerns about reelection, political standing, or repercussions within the legislative chamber. I believe the discussions yielded honest assessments of legislative life and service, and the legislators’ own weaknesses and problems.1
Not enough of this has been done. It is strange that for all the attention legislators have attracted in the academic political science literature, so little of it has been focused on them as people. There are few direct inquiries into why they do what they do; what attracts them to run and serve; what prompts them to make the transition from active political observer or participant to candidate; and what drives them away from office.2 Some of the reason for this lack of attention is rooted in certain aspects of academic political science that I will discuss later in this chapter. Political scientists have tended to view these questions as theoretically uninteresting or have inferred the answers based largely on measurements of legislators’ behavior while in office. In either case, the questions have not received much direct study. But any valid theory about representation or legislative behavior must ultimately play itself through a process involving people, and thus understanding the people involved is essential to a full understanding of the explanatory work that the theories purport to do.
What result from my inquiry are real stories of the paths taken to the legislature and the experience of serving in it, warts and all, including the effects of chance, strategic planning, and personal gratification. But what also emerges from these stories is a humane and believable portrait of public servants reaching toward the public good—a portrait that should provide some comfort, even perhaps inspiration, for citizens concerned about the state of representative democracy.
The battle scars these legislators carry with them and the civic virtue that informs their purpose are harder to see now, but they are no less real. Now the scars do not usually result from prior military conflict but rather from the political process itself. The wounds take a variety of forms—private and public, interpersonal and financial. The integrity of the legislators’ purposes is reflected in why they seek public office, what they risk and often lose to seek and hold it, and why many ultimately leave. Although the book’s focus is on the state legislature, there is good reason to think that the arguments made here extend upward to Congress, outward to other state public offices, and downward to public offices at the municipal level.3

The Public, Its Politics, and Its Politicians

Two features about contemporary state politics illustrate the disregard the public has for its politicians. The first is term limits for state legislators. These have exploded onto the political landscape over the past 15 years—they were first enacted in 1990 in California, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Seventeen other states followed suit by 1995. With term limits, voters essentially tie themselves to the mast so that they cannot be tempted by the siren calls of incumbent legislators. The limits were put into effect largely out of a general public frustration with the legislative process, and a more specific belief that the process had become too disconnected from the people and that it was remotely located in the hands of a permanent professional class of politicians. The laws spoke to a desire to return the legislative process to citizen-legislators.
But there is now an active reconsideration of the wisdom of this change, informed by both academic work and journalistic accounts. In particular, the concern is that term limits only eliminate the most senior legislators, who provide needed continuity and knowledge to the legislative process—they function as the institutional memory within the legislature—and that their absence can lead to even greater influence by lobbyists and interest groups. Limiting terms may actually cause some legislators to become even more career conscious and confine their vision of legislative service to a stepping-stone to something else, rather than an end in itself. Indeed, the political process seems to have cooled somewhat on term limits; only Nebraska has introduced them since 1995, and six states have repealed them.4 Two-thirds of the public, however, still support term limits for members of Congress—the same proportion that would like to see the electoral college replaced by a direct election of the president.5 Despite the partial revisionism in thinking about their benefits, limited terms are probably here to stay for a good long while.
The second feature is the growing use in recent years of initiatives and referendums, procedures through which the public directly votes on legislation. Initiatives were originally a Progressive Era innovation designed to combat a supposedly corrupt legislative process by vesting more legislative authority directly in the people. Provisions for initiatives and referendums are found mostly in western states, which came of age during this time period. But during the past 15 years, they have grown in use and significance. All but two of the term limit laws, for example, were the products of initiatives and referendums. And a recent survey found that by over a three-to-two margin, respondents agreed that “the public should decide issues directly by voting on them” versus “making laws is a job best left to elected representatives.”6 As with term limits, the political value of initiatives and referendums is being reconsidered, particularly in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by narrow well-heeled interests.7 There is also concern that the policy produced through the initiative process is too blunt and simplistic, and in combination over the years, can even become entirely contradictory.
But more important for my purposes here than their shortcomings as political processes is what term limits, initiatives, and referendums say about the way the public regards legislators. What is strikingly absent in these features is the opportunity for extended deliberation in the policy-making process, which for any large-scale political system, requires the mediation of some representative body with the time and wherewithal to ponder and decide complicated policy questions, whether that body be a smaller representative group of ordinary citizens designated for the task—as has been proposed by some democratic theorists—or a traditional legislature.8 The public seems reluctant to trust the extension of that deliberative authority to elected political representatives.
This impression is substantiated by more direct evidence.9 A recent survey found that 56 percent of the public agreed with the following statement: “I don’t think public officials care much what people like me think.” Back in 1964, only 36 percent agreed with this statement. During the same time interval, the proportion believing that government is run by a “few big interests looking out for themselves” rather than “for the benefit for all people” doubled, while the level of belief in the honesty of politicians dropped by half. A similar survey about the relative power to affect policy decisions by government officials found that 64 percent of the public responded that interest groups and lobbyists were most influential on these decisions. Twenty-five percent responded that the officials’ own sense of the national interest was most influential, while only 7 percent maintained that public opinion was most influential.
Surveys on specific governments and legislative bodies yield similar findings. In 1997, a majority of Florida citizens responded that their state government represented them either poorly or very poorly. Less than a fifth of the U.S. public rate members of Congress or state officeholders as high or very high on honesty and ethics. And in New Jersey, fully a third of the public think that between “half and all” of their state legislators take bribes.
The low esteem in which the public holds elected politicians is disturbing enough in its own right, but even more disturbing is the fact that these opinions seem to be just part of a more general decline in the democratic health of our political system. There is a general turning away from political life by U.S. citizens that manifests itself in both subjective factors—like the declines in levels of trust in politicians and government, sense of personal efficacy in governmental affairs, confidence in the campaign and electoral process, level of trust for other citizens, and optimism about the future—and behavioral factors—like the declines in voting turnout, daily readership of newspapers, and participation in various kinds of politically related activities.10 Many social and political observers have weighed in on this topic, with a host of diagnoses and prescriptions. One of the most notable accounts in recent years is offered by the political scientist Robert Putnam, who argues in Bowling Alone that these statistics of decline are all indicators of a more general decline in something called “social capital,” which concerns the stock of interconnectedness and trust among us as citizens. These qualities in turn correlate with our level of civic engagement.
But perhaps more telling than many of the statistics that directly report this political alienation are the anecdotes and quips that illustrate it. Here are three good examples from recent years.11 Thomas Volgy, whom I will mention again below, reports the following excerpt from a 1993 broadcast of Larry King Live: “Politics comes from two words: one is the Greek word poli, which means many, and the other word is ticks, which means blood sucking insects.”12 John McDonough, whom I will also mention again below, reports the exact same definition of politics, this time coming to him from a constituent. He goes on to quote from Jay Leno: “Politics is show business for ugly people.”13 And a few years ago, I myself came across a campaign button that simply read, “Don’t Vote: It Only Encourages Them.”
Most disturbing of all is that the problem of political alienation and cynicism seems most concentrated among the nation’s youth. It is ironic that in a time when young adults’ levels of volunteering and engaging in public service continue to grow beyond those of previous generations, their political alienation also grows, while their political participation declines. Their level of interest in politics, for example, is only about half that of older adults.14 The level of voting turnout among young adults is also substantially lower than that of older adults, and over the past 30 years it has been dropping at a much faster rate.15 They have a negative view of politics. When citizens between the ages of 15 and 25 were asked to engage in a word association exercise concerning the word politics, “lying” was chosen approximately eight times as often as “responsive,” three times as often as “interesting,” and twice as often as “public service.”16 Once again, however, it is other qualitative kinds of measures that may be the most telling.
A devastating piece of anecdotal evidence comes from my own city of Syracuse. The Central New York Branch of the National League of American Pen Women holds an annual poetry and art contest for children and adults in the local area. In 2003, first place for poetry in the high school group went to Camille Castro, age 17, for the following piece, titled “Carnival.”
Politics is a carnival
A fanfare of lights and sounds
Vibrant flashing colors
Tricks that deceive the eye
Vendors selling useless goods
Five dollars for a ring toss you won’t win
Promises of a prize in the end
Overpriced cheap stuffed animals
Sit and watch the show
Acrobats perform unimaginable tricks
Human cannons seem unexplainable
The eye looks where it is guided
Is it all fun and games?
Beware of pick-pocketers
If you look too long the bright lights will blind you
The roaring crowd will deafen you
When the last magician has performed his final trick
Tents will be brought down
Colors fade
All that is left behind is a pile of trash
The last line is a democratic heartbreaker. Suffice it to say that to our youth, politics seems corrupt.17
As our overall voting turnout for presidential elections hovers around only 50 percent, it is feared—perhaps it is also hoped—that in terms of our political engagement, as a nation we have finally hit rock bottom. Even in the November election immediately following September 11, 2001, when active displays of patriotism were washing in waves across the nation, turnout matched all-time lows for that type of off-year election.18 The following 2002 midterm congressional election, which did change the party control of the U.S. Senate, nonetheless failed to achieve a significant improvement in terms of turnout. Granted, the presidential election of 2004 returned turnout to a level not seen since 1968, but it remains unclear whether or not this new high-water mark will be repeated and will trickle down to other elections, and whether it reflects an instance of positive political engagement, rather than a moment of extreme divisiveness.

Sources of the Problem

What caused this increase in our political alienation? At first, one might be tempted to respond that it’s simply the American way. From our beginnings as a nation, we have always been suspicious of government and government officials relative to our European peers.19 In policy terms, the evidence for this fact is everywhere: With the exceptions of education, the military, and law enforcement, Americans have waited longer to institute large-scale social programs, and when we have done so, those programs have tended to be l...

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