Check Your Assumptions About Professional Politicians

We are all cognitive misers – that means our brains are lazy.  We like things to follow a pattern, and we don’t like to spend time reviewing the data looking for the exception.  So when we develop a ‘truth’, we tend to stick with it even when the data doesn’t support our lazy view of the world.

In reading the comments on the latest Seattle Times “Truth Needle” article, plenty of people made the observation that the Times has now poked at both Patty Murray and Dino Rossi for making false statements, and have submitted this as evidence that all politicians lie and that they only care about re-election.

Am I here to defend the politicians?  No.  I’m here to defend against the public policy equivalent of applying leeches to a sick patient.  Go ahead and feel the way you want to feel about politicians, lobbyists, and the system in general.  But let me point out a couple of ways that your beliefs can be used against you – HAVE been used against you – by those seeking to corner the market on power and hide their influence.

First, let’s consider the difference between a “professional politician” and a “citizen legislator”.  Washington boasts the latter.  Is this better for us (meaning citizens in general, not a special interest) than the alternative?  Despite conventional wisdom, I would submit that it is not.

Yes, politicians wish to be re-elected.  In general, this is a good thing because it makes them responsive to voters.  We all protect our jobs.  But what happens when you have two jobs, and the decisions you make at one job can substantially affect the other?  If I’m a teacher and a legislator, am I going to have an unbiased view of education funding, or will I choose to protect my “real job” as a default position?  What if I’m a Boeing engineer?  Yes, we want people in office with “real world” experience, but the price we pay for that is that they come with “real world” allegiances.

Similarly, campaign contribution limits were instituted by the citizens to minimize the influence of special interests (and yes, this means business, labor, environmental activists, social service advocates – we’re all “special interests” in some respect).  But what we really did was to force political spending through channels that are much harder to trace, and to give politicians “plausible deniability” for the mud-slinging that we all despise.  After all, it’s not the candidate who is attacking his or her opponent; it was an “Independent Expenditure.”