As Michael Bennet and potentially Caroline Kennedy head to the U.S. Senate from Colorado and New York, respectively, let me roll out this Congressional Quarterly story for partisans who don't care at all about the democratic - or, really undemocratic - implications of their senate appointments. The article makes the I-don't-give-a-shit-about-anything-other-than-winning case for Democratic governors avoiding aristocrats/insiders and instead appointing people who have at least some shred of experience representing constituents:
"The mix of inexperience as a winning candidate and an appointment to the Senate has seldom proved to be the right recipe. [George] Mitchell is the only Senate appointee to win election after having holding no prior public elective office since at least 1958, according to data compiled by Sen. Robert C. Byrd , D-W.Va., and a review of the appointments made since Byrd's statistical history of the Senate was published in 1993."
So, if you don't care about legislative policy or democracy and only care about holding Senate seats for people with a D behind their name, it's still gonna take a lot of rhetorical acrobatics to argue that governors appointing people like Bennet or Kennedy is a good move.
Then again, perhaps that's not a lesson about partisan politics - maybe it's also a lesson about small-d democracy, too. Maybe, just maybe, voters like to be represented by people who they've had a democratic representational relationship with in the past. In other words, maybe good democratic policy makes good politics.
Call me crazy, but it seems voters repeated electoral rejection of appointed royalty over the last half century suggests that the old-fashioned American zeal for democracy still impacts our politics.
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