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One problem with polls is that they give us numbers, but they don't explain the statistics, a task society leaves to consultants, critics and the noble members of the Colorado Red-Bearded Pundits' Association.
Recent surveys show that at least 60 percent of the American public believes that both houses of the U.S. Congress are inhabited by swine whose major concern is hustling bags of money from savings-and-loan swindlers, gouge-artist defense contractors and lobbyists for foreign interests -- a decadent and corrupt aristocracy far worse than those chronicled by Tolstoy and Thackeray.
But about 60 percent of the American people also believe that their own representative is a glorious exception to the dismal rule -- a friendly, decent person, concerned about the public welfare, informed of local issues, sensitive yet courageous, independent but responsive, etc.
This is a logical contradiction. If they're all hogs at the trough, then my representative must be one, too. But if my representative is an honorable public servant, and your representative is too, and the same is true in all 435 congressional districts, then we don't have hogs at the trough, but 435 dedicated public servants.
How can both be true? The only answer I can find is personal. All I know of Congress in general is what I read in the papers, hear on the radio or see on TV, and that's mostly conflict and scandal. Government routine is boring, news must be interesting, and you can figure out the rest.
But of my congressman in particular, Joel Hefley, I know other things. I know that when the Forest Service and the Federal Communications Commission had stalled a license for a public-radio repeater hereabouts (each agency wanted the other to issue a permit before it would proceed), Hefley got them moving. I know he helped smooth the way for the federal Bureau of Land Management to cooperate with the state to create and administer the Arkansas Headwaters State Park. I know that when I couldn't get some information from the Postal Service last month, Hefley's office quickly found the right buttons to push.
And so, whenever I and other Salidans of like inclination discuss the complications of having a right-wing congressman from a right-wing city whose interests are seldom our interests, we also recall that Hefley has an excellent staff which has done a damn good job of grappling with various federal bureaucracies on our behalf.
Most representatives, I suspect, are as dedicated to constituent service as Hefley is. And so most Americans who care about such things see Congress in general as unspeakably wicked, but their own representative as a good guy, fighting the evils of alien Washington.
This, however, leads to a dismaying conclusion. No
matter how much a congressman rails against the federal
bureaucracy,
it is actually in the representative's
interest to enlarge that bureaucracy and make it function
worse. The more arbitrary and unresponsive the bureaucracy,
the more that mere citizens will need to contact their
representative for assistance, and thus, the more people
who feel personally grateful to their representative for
his help. That translates into re-election.
In short, we have a political system which rewards government for getting worse. That explains a lot of things, perhaps even the contradictions of opinion polls.
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