I'm in the very midst of a phase of reading both political biography and stuff by people I might not agree with. As such, I've just finished former Rep. Tom Coburn's account of his time in Congress. Coburn blames the failures of Washington on careerism -- the habit of professional politicians of making a habit of being professional politicians. I'm somewhat conditioned to see the positives of professional politicians: institutional knowledge, consistency, and the time and opportunity to make truly paradigm-changing changes -- like, say, McCain-Feingold -- that can, in the current system, take years of persistent work. I say “conditioned” because, I’m beginning to fear, my academic background in anthropology may have saddled me with the tendency to find meaning only in situ -- which, while really the point of anthropology, puts one at a disadvantage in seeing the patterns and broader context that make politics and government as they are. So, though I reject term limits as too undemocratic, I'm coming around to the possibility that a cultural norm -- enforced both by the elected and the electorate -- of serving a couple terms and bowing out for a bit might not be such a bad thing. It would of course fully alter the practice of national politics, but I'm just not so sure what we would lose by it. Or, at the least, I'm not so sure that we’d lose more than we'd gain.
9:39 PM
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