Over 90% of Congress gets reelected. Joe Lieberman deserves to be a member of the faltering 10%.

Job security is really not something that our elected officials have to worry about. After making the incredibly daring decision to run for office–often initially driven by wide-eyed ideals and optimism–most victorious candidates scrap their courage in favor of a self-preservation strategy. To make it to Congress is to have made it, period. Why mess with a good thing?

The most common result of Congressional job security is that once they are positioned comfortably on Capitol Hill, representatives become complacent career politicians, content to put in passing effort. Indicative of this trend is the recently released Drum Major Institute Congressional Report Cards, on which only 20% of Congress received an A (only 44% of House Democrats and a startling 20% of Senate Democrats). Drum Major bases its grades on how a Congressperson votes on specific legislation that either protects or attacks middle class families–the target market of the Democratic Party. The absence of A grades suggests that Democrats aren’t standing up for their principles; they’re earning B’s to pass.

A less common result of the reelection rate is that seats in Congress become more akin to hereditary titles than earned positions of representation. One has to look no further than Senator Lieberman to find an example of a man who believes he is owed his seat in the Senate, almost as if for the reason that it’s been in his family for years. He has bristled at the thought of his constituents rebelling against his benevolent rule. Like a medieval prince, representatives like Lieberman believe that they know better than the common serfs. It is the Senator’s duty to decide what is best for his subjects, and his subjects’ duty to maintain the Senator’s fiefdom. It’s all too appropriate for this metaphor that Joe Lieberman is planning to disregard the democratic process if he loses the August 8th election.

When the diagnosis of our democracy is that it is suffering from complacent and/or princely representation a remedy is in order. When teenagers get fat and arrogant, many doctors prescribe not drugs but challenge: send them into the outdoors, to work, or out of the house. That is to say, though they manifest themselves in forms that are fundamentally at odds with representative democracy, the complacent/prince issue is not a disease, it is a lifestyle problem. To change it, our system needs a massive dose of challenge.

Luckily, there is a cure-all for both the complacent and princely cases of this lifestyle problem: Primaries. To again use Lieberman as a case study since he has been both princely (”Who is Ned Lamont?“) and complacent (”Dear Mr. President, I have a compromise on my principles I’d like to offer you in exchange for nothing, please.”), Thursday’s debate between Lamont and Lieberman revealed the extent to which Lieberman’s math is that 6 + 6 + 6 = 24. He pointed to the nice but not stellar move he made by keeping a submarine base in Connecticut, the money he earmarked for his state’s highways, and his tenure. To me, that sounds like a prince rattling of his B-grade offerings to his subjects. Were his record of delivering for his constituents better, Lieberman might be able to skate through the Primary by being rewarded for his excellence.

Instead, he touts a only a decent record. Coupled with his unimpressive and complacent record for his state, however, Lieberman brandishes his stance on Iraq, which is at odds with that of his constituents. He attacks Lieberman for making it his central issue, but Lieberman has been the most guilty of letting Iraq trump all else. He has gone out of his way to define himself recently by his pro-Bush and pro-war positions because he feels that he knows better than the people he represents.

When put on TV side-by-side with his alternative, Lieberman broadcasted why he is such an appropriate case study for this post. Both complacent and princely, he proved that he has spent the last 5 1/2 years counting on reelection. It is this Primary that is forcing him to account for his deeds and words, and win or lose the effect will be a more attentive representative for Connecticut voters.

I wrote in April that:

There are many reasons for this trend in American politics, such as gerrymandering and campaign bribery finance rules, but since this is an election year and I find myself in the employ of a Democrat running for Congress in a contested Primary, I believe now is an appropriate time to discuss the importance of Primary Elections as the battle grounds for the soul of a political party.

I believe strongly in contesting every election. No job should be more precarious then that of a representative of the People. No one’s record should be more open to scrutiny then that of a Member of Congress. The problem is, and this is evidenced by the repeated electoral successes of people like Joe Lieberman and Tom DeLay, that politicians are rarely forced to defend themselves within their own parties. When voting occurs on Election Day voters are presented with a partisan choice–one that they are likely to have made well in advance of learning the actual names on the ballot. Were Democrats forced to defend themselves as Democrats and Republicans forced to defend themselves as Republicans it would be drastically more difficult to hide behind a parenthetical “D” or “R” on a ballot. A reliance on a constituency’s partisanship is a reliance on the negative vote–you’re betting that they’d rather vote for you than the other party instead of the other guy

To be clear, I am not advocating any certain ideological outcome of having more primaries. Would I like to see the Democrats move more to the left as they take back the House? Yes. But that is representative of my vote not my theory of political organization. The whole idea here is to make sure that the candidate that appears on the ballot on Election Day is the best choice of his or her constituency instead of simply being the only choice. Call it a free market approach to elections: consumers voters win when businesses candidates compete. I suppose you could also call it a democratic approach to the nomination process, but that just seems too ironic.

In that post I discussed the Lieberman/Lamont race. It was relatively new then–certainly not nearly as heated as it is now, just one month to the day before the Primary. It is affirming to see how Lamont’s challenge has forced Lieberman to campaign for votes instead of primp for a coronation. It is also deeply satisfying to feel the power of the netroots to effect change in our damaged democracy. This year the blogs are largely responsible for the nationalization of quite a few new voices in the Democratic Party. Some are fighting incumbent Republicans (Tester, for example) and some, like Lamont are challenging incumbent Democrats or vying for open seats.

It’s time to take note of the very short list of qualifications that an American needs to run for office:

No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.
…
No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen.

It’s too late for 2006, but now is the time to seriously consider whether getting elected to your local school board or even just the PTA should be the beginning of your own challenge to your local complacent Democrat or incumbent Republican. Perhaps more realistically, now is the time to pay attention to those smaller elections to seek out future leaders. Start pushing them to run in 2008. As former New York Governor Al Smith used to say, the cure for most of democracy’s ills is more democracy.


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