A Case of the Mondays

Imagine that you were going to apply for a job somewhere, but in order to apply for that job,… Imagine that you were going to apply for a job somewhere, but in order to apply for that job, you had to take anywhere from six months to more than a year off of your current job in order to complete the application process and compete against the other applicants. You would not be able to do your original job, but you would still get paid for doing it, and if at the end of the application process you aren’t hired you’re allowed to go right back to your old job without penalty. Sounds kind of ridiculous, right?

Now, read that again but replace the words “apply” with “campaign,” and that’s pretty much the problem I have with the electoral system. Many of the people running for president right now are elected representatives in the U.S. or House of Representatives, but they aren’t doing any actual, you know, representing.

Instead they’re fundraising, stumping and kissing babies in an effort to be elected president that will be ultimately futile for all but one of them.

Now, before anyone jumps down my throat, I know that Congress is not actually in session at the moment. Congress is in session about as often as John Edwards has a bad hair day. But do you honestly think that once the Senate and House reconvene, all the currently elected representatives, which include three of the most popular candidates in the race – Clinton, Obama and McCain – are going to run back to their actual jobs in Washington?

Yeah, sure. And then Hillary and Obama will become best friends forever, and all the pigs will be free because they would have grown wings and flown away.

In short, I feel cheated by electoral politics. I mean, here all these candidates are campaigning for change and responsible government action and all these really good things, and they can’t even be bothered to actually go and vote on the laws and bills that would make these changes happen. It would be like making a New Year’s resolution to lose weight while actively eating an entire box of Twinkies. “I can’t change things now! I’m campaigning for change!”

And more annoyingly, these people are still getting paid for doing the jobs that they aren’t doing. According to the Senate and House of Representatives respective websites, both senators and state representatives earn $169,300 per year, paid for by – who else? – the taxpayers.

But it gets better. If you multiply that number by the 435 House representatives and 100 senators, you learn that $90,575,500 goes toward paying our elected representatives. Of course, that number isn’t entirely accurate because some of them, like the Speaker of the House and party leaders, earn significantly more, and the president and Supreme Court justices aren’t even included.

But the general point I’m trying to make is clear: Every year more than $100 million is spent just on paying the people we elect to represent our interests, and then they can’t even do that because they want us to elect them to a better position instead, and thus spend hundreds of millions of dollars more in order to get us to pay attention to them.

I can’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, the elected president of Russia. Both times he was elected, his general campaign strategy, contrary to anything any American has ever done, was to not campaign. Instead, he basically told the press that he was too busy being the president to campaign to be the president again. He went about his actual job, made himself look capable and responsible and thus won the election. I wish American candidates could take a hint.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has missed almost 25 percent of votes in the 110th Congress, Barack Obama has missed almost 38 percent and John McCain missed nearly 56 percent, according to the Washington Post. Think about it: If you were hired somewhere to do a specific job, and then only did it a little less than half of the time, how long do you think you’d stay employed?

And yet McCain has been on the Senate since 1987, as long as I’ve been alive. The only person to have missed more Senate votes than McCain is South Dakota’s Tim Johnson, who suffered a brain hemorrhage in late 2006 and hasn’t been back since.

Basically, I don’t think that trying to get a better job should be any excuse for people to not do their current one. In any other field but politics it wouldn’t be tolerated at all, and I think that we voters should start demanding a little more out of the people we choose to run the country for us.

In other words, get back to work.

If you do less than 50 percent of your job and get away with it, e-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu and tell him all about it.