On Why Legislator's Voting Records Don't Matter

I just read a post linked from DailyKos about how Tom Perrillo ran as a liberal in a conservative district and did better than you'd expect, though he lost anyway. One of the conclusions is that legislators' voting records don't matter that much. I'd submit that this is true, and that there are several good reasons why it should be true. One of my examples comes from the left, the other comes from the right.

The example from the Right is the rather obvious one, I think, and it applies specifically in the FOX-suffocated atmosphere. What Democrat wasn't attacked as being a radical, anti-American liberal by the Republicans and FOX? Do you think that Bobby Bright, that most odious of Blue Dogs, got to run as a centrist in his race? Do you think Republicans didn't hammer him for having supported an agenda he didn't support? I doubt it. There is, actually, one Democrat who got to run against Obama and have it work, and that's Joe Manchin. But he was the incumbent Governor, and running for Senate. I would contend that just about no one in the House can do the same: Congressional candidates just aren't well enough known. Not anymore, not with as thick a blanket of national media. The "all politics is local" world of Tip O'Neill, I contend, is only slightly relevant in today's world, and in particular with today's media.

And now the example from the Left: Lincoln Chafee. Chafee might've been the last Republican in Congress who was to the left of any Democrats in Congress. He voted against Iraq, he's pro-gay marriage (per se!), he's pro-choice, he's good on the environment, he voted against repealing the Estate Tax, he opposes the death penalty (per se!), etc. etc. And yet, in 2006, Democrats in Rhode Island voted him out of office. He was a very liberal Republican (very liberal, for a Republican) in a liberal state, the last of the truly liberal Republicans, and that wasn't enough to save him. Because people didn't know he was so liberal? No, we knew. Everyone knew; it's who Lincoln Chafee is. But we didn't vote for him, and why? Because he would have voted for Republican control of the chamber; Republican committee chairs; Mitch McConnell for Majority Leader; Ted Stevens for Speaker Pro Tempore. And that was enough to make him worth defeating. If we hadn't beaten him, by a fairly narrow margin of 8 points, we would not have nominally reclaimed the Senate in 2006. So yes, the "R" next to his name is enough to make it worth voting against him. And a "D" next to the name of Tom Perrillo, Glenn Nye, Bobby Bright, or whoever is enough that anyone who has good reason to support the Republicans ought to vote against them. And the way you vote doesn't matter for that: if I'm a Democrat, I should support Democrats. In federal elections, it's even true that I should support Democrats over more liberal Republicans, as long as those Republicans will vote for Republican leadership. (This does not apply in state elections, which is why I proudly voted for, yes, Linc Chafee for Governor!)

And I think people get this now, in a way that we used not to in this country. The way I see the history of partisan politics in this country from FDR's day onward is that the regional divisions that ran across partisan divisions, where a Southern Democrat had more in common with a Southern Republican, or a Southern Whig back in the day, than a Northern Democrat, and vice-versa, gradually annihilated themselves. Now, the parties are truly ideological coalitions, which is after all what political parties are supposed to be: organizations for the promotion of a certain political ideology. So no, we don't have bipartisanship anymore: why should we? We never really did in the first place: what we now call the Republican Party used to be called the "conservative coalition", a group of Midwestern Republicans and Southern Democrats who would unite, across nominal party lines, to block New Deal-style programs. But was this really "bipartisan"? Only if you ignore the fact that a Southern Democrat just plain was not the same as a Northern Democrat. These differences have been smoothed over, first by the 1994 election in which Southern Democrats became Republicans at the Congressional level and then in the 2006-2008 elections when the last vestiges of Rockefeller Republicans were replaced by Democrats. Now we have ideologically consistent parties, and so it makes sense to vote party line without caring how the individual legislator voted. It's almost like the House of Representatives is now functioning more like a usual parliamentary-style chamber: you are not voting for a representative, you are voting for a party. Would George Washington like that? Probably not. But Congressmen might be well advised to recognize it, and learn that they can only gain so much by opposing their party anyway.