#7 "NO POLITICIAN SHOUD BE ALLOWED UNLIMITED REELECTIONS..."

http://www.tenurecorrupts.com

The subtitle of the TenureCorrupts website is the quotation:

“No politician should be allowed unlimited reelections...
...even if he has the votes !”

You might ask: If I believe in democracy and a representative republic, how do I square the first half of the sentence with the last half ?

There are two principles which form the basis of that declaration.

First, my commonsense (and yours) and my experience tells me that, for most people, the longer anyone stays in one job, the more jaded and less effective he becomes in that job, especially in a legislative job where he has no particular ‘boss’, as one would have in any other organization, especially in commerce or industry.

This happens for a number of reasons. For example, the specific problems he wanted to address may have been solved during his tenure, or found to be insoluble due to factors beyond his reach; or he may find the day-to-day grind of legislative politics too arduous, and opts to just ‘go with the flow’; or as is most likely, he simply does not have the imagination or drive to propose unique or exciting ideas for better government.

Secondly, a great many successful reelections are not the result of any particular merit of the winning politician or his platform, but rather simply due to the lazy acquiescence of a significant fraction of the voting public who are voting for names they recognize on the ballot, because they ‘have nothing against the incumbent’ (e.g. the “they are all the same, and at least I know this guy” syndrome).

I had specific evidence of that last factor when I was building the ‘SignUp’ page of the website and found I had to modify the data entry format for people who did not know their Congressional District number, or even name of their Congressperson.

The effect of this large indifferent fraction of the voting public is especially felt when we have close elections, as in ‘00 and ‘04. It serves to extend the status quo of incumbent politicians whether
they were good public servants or not, as long as they were unobjectionable.

Is this any way to run a democracy ?

http://www.tenurecorrupts.com