“Poll after poll finds American voters believing the country is on the wrong track,” Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, told viewers last Sunday. “And if there’s one other thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common these days, it’s that they don’t trust Washington to fix it.”
Is this a smart electorate or what?
Todd compared today’s public mood to October 2001, just after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Back then, solid majorities of both Democrats and Republicans “had trust in that Republican control of government. Twenty years later, these numbers have collapsed among both parties.… Republicans down to just 9 percent trust in government to do what’s right most or all of the time.
“It’s a Democratic government,” he added. “That’s why the Democratic number’s a little higher here [29%], but this is really troubling.”
And then Mr. Todd even posed the right question: “How did we get here?”
Calling the public “very cynical” — shouldn’t you be, if paying attention? — Todd explained that most Americans don’t believe “that most candidates that run for office … do it to serve the community. Only 21% think people run for office in order to worry about the greater good — 19% of Democrats think this, 24% of Republicans.
“A full 65% think most candidates run for office to serve their personal interests, nothing else,” he added. “And this is across the board — 66% of Democrats believe this, 63% of Republicans.”
Todd suggested “this may be bigger than any polarization problem that we have.”
It is bigger. But it’s an easy problem to solve. Just takes two words to bring back public trust in those who represent us, in them not just representing themselves, their personal career interests.
Term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Meet the Personal Interest”
Not just term limits. They have to promise to go home. No lobbying or sitting in a Washington think tank, figuring out how to use the connections they made while ‘serving’ the public. No ‘family’ seats in DC. No brother or sister or child or spouse ‘inheriting’ the seat left vacant by term limits.
Term limits is entirely inadequate to fix an unaccountable self-serving government. When politicians are term limited out of office it only assures that the permanent ENTIRELY UNACCOUNTABLE UNELECTED bureaucracy remains and grows in its power.
Legislators are at the mercy of the bureaucracy because only the bureaucrats know how to work the machinery of government and by the time politicians learn the ropes to be quasi-effective, their term is up.
The only fix to this mess is to make government as small and powerless as possible. Only then will its harm be limited and its control be lessened on the people it is supposed to serve.
But good luck with that. If you think it’s hard to get elected politicians to voluntarily reduce their control over your life, wait ’til you try to get unaccountable bureaucrats to back off.
Not just two words, “term limits,” but three words, “cumulative term limits.” A political career of serving one office after another does not much to cure the problem of politicians serving themselves at the public expense. Only a limit of total, cumulative number of terms and/or years in power can do that. Politics should not be a career, but only a temporary civic duty, like jury service.