I Like It...

...when people I don't like adopt positions that I don't like. Less cognitive dissonance!

So I was very glad to see Holy Joe Lieberman, on his way out the door, endorse term limits (via Political Wire).

Holy Joe says that if we only had term limits, we would have more new blood...but there's of course plenty of new blood in both Chambers of Congress (I haven't double checked this one, but someone said on twitter last week that once we hit January half of the Senate will be in their first terms). But that's not all! He also claims that  term limits will reduce partisan polarization. How? He didn't exactly explain that part. But he doesn't like polarization, and he's decided that he likes term limits, so why not?

In fact, there's no reason at all to believe that term limits would have any effect at all on polarization. But it certainly would be bad for Congress, and bad for democracy, as I noted in my column over at TAP last week.

Okay, I'll give Holy Joe credit for another thing: he gave me an excuse to push my term limits column. That, plus reducing my cognitive dissonance? And, as regular readers know, I think that hypocrisy is overrated, so I can't be upset with him for just coming to support term limits now that he's retiring after 24 years in the Senate; it's no worse, in my book, than if he had supported it from day one and retired on cue after 12 years or whatever. So for today at least, I'm quite happy with Holy Joe Lieberman. Nice job!

Elsewhere: Politics and Tragedy, and Others

I'm not posting much today, but I did write something about tragedies and politics over at PP.

I also have a new column up over at TAP arguing against Bobby Jindal's call last week for term limits.

And yesterday I posted my first reactions to the Susan Rice news over at Greg's place, and talked filibuster potential deals at PP.

I do plan, more or less, to be back later for a baseball post, but I think that's it for now.

Goo Goo Train Wreck

Via Seth Masket, Ruth Marcus had an interesting column last week speculating that Arizona's good government reforms, in particular public financing, may be responsible for my native state's campaign to be #1 -- the looniest state of all.  Marcus describes how purist conservative activists were able to contest and win primaries against Main Street GOP candidates who were deprived of business funding, by Arizona's public financing scheme.  Marcus also mentions Arizona's good government districting plan, which gives line-drawing to an independent commission.  She neglects to mention Arizona's term limits -- it's not exactly shocking, at least in my view, that amateur pols are more likely to spend their time on birther legislation than, say, trying to come up with a responsible budget. 

I should say that the causal connections on all of these things aren't exactly nailed down.  After all, if I remember correctly (and it's been some time), when I was I think in high school my state senator used to report, before voting on various measures in the AZ legislature, the voting instructions Jesus had revealed to him in his nightly vision.  (The state senator's vision, not Jesus's.  I assume.  As I said, it's been a while).  So it's possible that Arizona politics is goofy all by itself, regardless of what goo goo rules they set.  

Still, I'll use it as an excuse to trot out my views on this, and my preferred campaign finance regime.  My view is that people make two related and overlapping mistakes: they believe that if only special interests are purged then The People will win out, and that if only self-interest is removed, then the public interest will prevail.  What's wrong with that is that good government types always assume that whatever it is that they want must be for the good of the people, and in the public interest.  But in a democracy, only the people, in groups and as individuals, get to decide that, and it's often not at all what good government advocates think is right for The People.   That is, in a real democracy, a lot of folks believe that they're losing because of nefarious interests, when in fact they're losing because other folks really don't agree with them.  Which is frustrating, but not undemocratic.

At any rate: my position on campaign finance reform is floors, not ceilings.  I like the idea in the AZ law that candidates can get in and run real campaigns pretty easily, but I very much do not like the idea that interest groups cannot get involved: business groups should have influence in the Republican Party (assuming they want to).  The idea that pols should be lone wolves, accountable to no one but voters-as-voters (and not as organized groups) is a bad one.  Especially if its combined with term limits, which means they don't have to be responsive to the voters, either.  Give all candidates enough that they can run a legit, if bare-bones, campaign, and then let them raise (and disclose) whatever they can on top of that.  And by the way, it's worth knowing that campaign spending is subject to pretty severe diminishing returns, at least at the Congressional level, and presumably at the state legislative level as well.  Helps a lot to get name recognition, and maybe a fact or two about the candidate; after that, not so much.

Floors, not ceilings!

Elections Are Good

On the flap about Virginia, Governor McConnell, and the Confederacy (Yglesias is excellent, TNC even better), Jonathan Chait makes an excellent point:

Of course this is an inherent problem with Virginia's cockamamie system that limits governors to one term. Not only do you lose the ability to retain a competent governor -- and Virginia has had two straight -- but you give every incentive for a candidate to feint to the center and then govern from the extreme once in office. Lots of people supported McDonnell because he insisted he was not a social issues warrior. Once he's in office, it's obvious that he lied, but the voters can't do anything about it.

I'm okay, with a lot of hesitation, with the two-term limit on the presidency.  The dangers of the things that a president-for-life could do seem to me just barely sufficient to override the dangers of a president no longer accountable to the voters, although I'm willing to listen to arguments the other way.  But for pretty much every other office, and certainly for governors, Members of Congress, and state legislators, term limits are a lousy idea.  

Good government types tend to believe that if only pols were freed from re-election constraints, they would do the right thing and serve the public interest.  The obvious problem with that* is that sometimes what a pol really believes has nothing to do with the public interest; it's just what he happens to believe.  Elections -- the incentives involved in re-election -- are the mechanism that democracies use to ensure that pols serve the public interest, because...and this seems beyond the goo goo mentality to understand -- voters are the public.  Yes, yes, sometimes voters can mistake short term gimmicks for long term effects, and sometimes voters actually want things that other observers think are foolish, but in general, a politician who keeps voters happy is doing so because she is representing them well.  Which is, you know, good democracy in action.


*Outside of all the other perverse incentives term limited pols face such as the likelihood that they'll be especially responsible to those who might employ them in the near future, the lack of experience that term limited pols bring to their jobs, and the selection effects of disqualifying those who can't or won't serve for a short time.