Americans have been cursing their incumbents — and periodically rising up to eject them from office — since angry Bostonians took a bucket of tar and some feathers to their customs commissioner in 1774. Such uprisings have become an almost cyclical occurrence in Washington, and after this week’s primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, this year seems destined to be one of those years.
Word has reached Washington that an anti-incumbent tsunami is roaring their way, and frightened politicians are already trying, sometimes comically, to put some distance between themselves and the tide.
“My gosh, these people in Washington are running the country right into the ground,” Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, lamented this week, despite having lived and worked there for the last 34 years.
But to suggest that this week’s primaries are just part of the latest revolt against incumbency, brought on by pervasive economic angst, is to miss some deeper trends in the electorate that are more consequential —trends that have brought us to an unprecedented disconnect between, on one side, the traditional shapers of our politics in Washington and, on the other, the voters who actually make the choices.
The old laws of politics have been losing their relevance as attitudes and technology evolve, creating a kind of endemic instability that probably is not going away just because housing prices rebound. Nor is that instability any longer driven only by ideological mini-movements like MoveOn.org or the tea parties, as some commentators suggest. Voter insurrection has gone as mainstream as Miley Cyrus, and to the extent that the parties in Washington take comfort in the false notion that all this chaos is fleeting, they will fail to internalize the more enduring lessons of Tuesday’s elections.
The first is that this age-old idea of “clearing the field” for a preferred candidate, so as to avoid divisive primaries, is now, much like the old party clubhouse, a historical relic. This should have been clear to everyone after 2008, when now US President Barack Obama, shunned by most of his party’s major contributors and its Washington establishment, simply shrugged off endorsements and raised more than half a billion dollars from his own constituencies.
Now the Obama effect has trickled down to the likes of Rand Paul, who beat his party’s preferred Senate candidate in Kentucky, and Joe Sestak, who toppled the new-and-improved Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. (It makes you wonder whether Obama and his aides really thought they could “clear the field” for Specter, as they suggested, or whether they knew from their own experience how wishful that was and were just bent on to luring him across the aisle.)
A new generation of politicians has been raised with more consumer choice and less loyalty to institutions, and they are no more likely to take their orders from, say, party leaders like Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican, than they are to drive a Malibu just because some car magazine tells them to. Nor, thanks to the Web, are they reliant any longer on the party structure to raise the necessary cash.
A second, related lesson is that less affinity for parties makes incumbent politicians less safe, generally. That’s because when fewer people bother to engage in party politics, it takes a smaller group of ultra-motivated activists to overturn the traditional order of things.
Senator Joseph Lieberman found this out in 2006, when an unknown but jaunty cable executive named Ned Lamont — and a capable army of bloggers and antiwar crusaders — drummed him out of the Democratic Party in Connecticut. (Lieberman won re-election that November as an independent.)
Lamont, who is now running for governor, was the prototype for Paul and Sestak and scores of other primary candidates this year.
A final truism to emerge from Tuesday’s primaries is that the politics of issues, the stuff of which parties have most often crafted their core identities, has now been largely displaced by a politics of personal conviction. In other words, Tuesday’s results were less about the ideological purging of either party than they were about a rejection of the culture of both, a sense that Washington acts from expedience and little else.
So while Specter may have thought he was being transparent by announcing to the world that he was switching parties in hopes of continuing to pursue his life’s work, what a lot of voters probably heard is that his beliefs were fungible in the service of his own ambition — a vulnerability that Sestak exploited with one of the most eviscerating advertisements in recent history. (“My change in party will enable me to be re-elected,” Specter said in a clip shown several times in the ad.)
Similarly, the sober-minded Senator Blanche Lincoln, running for re-election to the Senate in Arkansas, may not have helped herself much in the closing weeks of her primary, when, under assault from unions over her centrist record, she took an uncharacteristically populist stand against Wall Street in the debate over regulating the financial industry. The move appeared calculated for political gain, which, after all, is the very impression of Washington that may be fueling much of the resentment to begin with.
What all this probably means is that we are living in the era of the upstart.
Thirty years ago, when you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office, taking it to the establishment was quixotic venture undertaken on the national level, where a Jesse Jackson or a Pat Buchanan could at least make a powerful statement along the road to obliteration. (Recall former US president-then-candidate Jimmy Carter’s indictment of former California governor Jerry Brown in 1976: “Don’t send them a message, send them a president.”)
Those days are gone. The intraparty rebellions now will be increasingly local, sufficiently financed and built around credible candidates — the kind of campaigns that made Obama president and that may yet give us senator. Paul or senator. Sestak. My gosh, these people in Washington are in for it now.
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