The conventional wisdom is that Tuesday's primary was bad news for incumbents, that they are in deep trouble with voters because they are all a bunch of worthless, corrupt bums who would step over their stroke-addled grandmas if that's what they had to do to hold onto their jobs.
Taxpayers are angry, the experts said, and they were more than willing to vent their spleens at the ballot box, throwing out dedicated public servants and replacing them with people whose public policy experience is limited to watching Glenn Beck and yelling about socialism and fascism and other -isms that they do not understand but which sound very scary.
All of the news outlets had their experts and unemployed political strategists holding forth on the meaning of it all. They all seemed to agree that people hate incumbents with the same fervor that Fred Phelps hates gays, soldiers, human beings and anything else with a pulse.
The cable news talking heads all shook their talking heads and diagnosed incumbents' political prospects as being on life support and voters were ready to yank the feeding tube.
They came to this conclusion based on very slim evidence -- the defeat of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, the near-call for Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln and the victory of something named Rand Paul in the Republican Senate primary in Kentucky.
In reverse order, Paul, son of Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, was declared king of the tea partyers by winning the primary in
Kentucky, something the experts all proclaimed as being a sign of something significant. Paul the Younger, who looks like the genetically challenged love-child of Danny Kaye and Howdy Doody, campaigned on a platform that would lead the charge to return the country to the 19th century.
That kind of thing plays well among Kentuckians, who have a great sense of humor. Remember, they are the same voters who gave us Sen. Jim Bunning, the former baseball player who staged a one-man filibuster against extending unemployment benefits and complained that by doing so, he would miss a University of Kentucky basketball game on TV.
You can only conclude that Republican voters in Kentucky gave Paul the Younger the nomination for its humor value. I mean, please, the guy wants to return the country to the gold standard and believes public education can be fixed by giving parents who homeschool their kids tax breaks.
Moving on to Blanche Lincoln. She still won. She has to face a run-off election, but still, she won.
Which brings us to Arlen Specter.
Arlen didn't lose because of anti-incumbency sentiments. He lost because of anti-Arlen sentiments. Two years ago, he was palling around with John McCain and Sarah Palin. Democratic voters didn't forget that.
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that incumbents did well. Locally, U.S. Rep. Todd Platts beat Mike Smeltzer, a favorite of the tea partyers, like a rented mule. None of our Republican state representatives who faced challenges from the right lost.
Elsewhere in the state, voters in the district of the late John Murtha, voting in a special election to replace the deceased congressman, chose his reanimated corpse, in the guise of one of his longtime aides, over a candidate favored by the tea partyers. That, in a district that was the only one in Pennsylvania to go for John McCain in 2008.
So there you have it. Incumbents are not an endangered species, despite the proclamations of their demise.
Still, people hate Congress and the state General Assembly and anything that's remotely related to any government function. Every poll you see shows great disdain for elected officials, some ranking even below journalists, lawyers and Nigerian scam artists in popularity.
Every election, there is the cry, "Throw the bums out!" Every election, the electorate pledges to excise the malignant tumor of incumbency from the body politic.
It never happens. Year after year -- even this year when voter anger is boiling over -- incumbents easily retain their jobs.
And that's because it's always someone else's incumbent who is the problem. We all love our own incumbents -- Platts, I remind you, won what was believed to be a hard race with 70 percent of the vote -- and we all revile other people's incumbents. If only those jerks in those other congressional districts had the fortitude to throw those jerks out, everything would be fine.
So, I've come up with a plan to address this.
Every year, we would vote for -- or against -- candidates in some other district and allow voters in another district to vote for -- or against -- candidates here.
For instance, one year, we could elect candidates for races in Philadelphia and people in Philadelphia would elect our representatives. The next year, we'd trade with, say, Johnstown, or Erie, or Mars. (Mars is out by Pittsburgh.)
Sure, it would be chaos, and it'd probably be unconstitutional.
And we'd more than likely wind up with representatives we loathe even more than the ones we have now.
But imagine what fun it would be to elect, say, Charlie Robertson as congressman for Philadelphia. That would be worth it.
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Originally Posted by dumbdumb
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