Representative Cawthorn

It appears that there are limits after all. Hm.

 

I wonder if the number of orgies in Washington will decrease?

His entire existence is due to Americans’ laissez faire attitude towards politics. He and Matt Gaetz are two of the most superficial people I’ve noticed in Congress. There are others more dangerous, even more crazy, but these two guys belong in a frat house, not the US House.

 

His ouster gives me less faith in our democracy. Half of the controversies he was embroiled in were caused by things leaked by fellow Republicans who otherwise would have gone to great lengths to protect their own, except that he raised the curtain on their hypocrisy. I'm a little worried about what he will do with his life now.

 

One thing you learn pretty quickly in electoral politics: It's possible to run for office without the support of a major party but it's really, really hard. Political support is a two-way street. You can't publicly abuse other key members of your party (especially with false accusations) and not expect to get paid back with interest. Rep. Cawthorn demonstrated a very poor sense of practical politics and got bit in the end.

Americans in general don't get how things really work. There's no secret cabal. Anyone who wants to do so can be involved to the eyebrows. Most Americans aren't interested. They expect to vote in the general election (they often don't bother with primaries) and to be presented with a choice from "column A or column B". Then people seem shocked, shocked to discover that...well...politics is politics and politics isn't pretty.

Don't confuse politics with government. They are two separate lines of endeavour.

 

Further rumination...I have learned that there are two seperate groups of politically involved people. The larger group likes to get involved in electoral politics for its own sake. These people are astonishing.Energetic, smart, dedicated and usually pretty reliable. If they find a candidate they want to support they will work hard for little reward and on election night either celebrate to the rafters of drop into deepest gloom.

This group makes electoral politics function. They will do whatever they can to help their candidate win. What they WON'T do is run for office themselves. The second, much smaller group of politically involved people comprises candidates and potential candidates. Interestingly, to me, the larger group will recruit the smaller group. Once the candidate wins, the political support people tend to fade away and allow the candidate to do what he was elected to do. They might make a suggestion or place a phone call from time to time but in my experience anyway they tend to lose interest once you've won. Or lost.

The last point I'd like to make is that an elected official is not free to do whatever he wishes in evey way. All elected officials must perform their functions through a professional bureauocracy of some sort. That's what kept Trump from going completely off the rails. Also, every elected official is subject to checks and balances from other elected officials. De Toqueville describes this in his Democracy in America. Americans spread authority out among as many officials as they decently can. In the last resort, no official can do anything illegal without inviting a lawsuit or some form of official discipline. They try at times and recently the traditional restraints seem to be eroding in the face of Trumpism but even there, you saw state level GOP officials follow the law of their jurisdictions during the 2020 election and its aftermath.

 

Rich, agree with you. His political postering was way

I'm reminded of what senior enlisted used to tell officers: "Sir, I can only slow down stupidity, I can't stop it." There are a lot of stupid politicians in government.

 

I'm also interested in nosborne's answer to this, but at least one element is that the holding of many offices is a much different beast than the act of getting elected to said office. Glad-handing and horse-trading are key elements of both getting elected and being a successful President (just ask Jimmy Carter), but in many other offices once you're elected your day to day looks radically unlike the campaign.

For one vivid example, I think of the County Auditor in Pierce County WA (Dale Washam) who campaigned on rooting out corruption and managed to do such a terrible job in his new role that the county actually eliminated their ranked choice voting system that got him the win in the first place. They also paid out $1.5m in lawsuit settlements from employees alleging mistreatment and spent $40,000 administering two separate recall petitions against him for various misdeeds.

 

I'm sorry. I see I didn't answer the question. Basically, one is getting elected with all of the effort and investment needed to persuade the voters. It's exciting, exhilarating, exhausting, and expensive. While you're doing that you rarely consider what will happen if you are unfortunate enough to win.

It's like shooting an elk then realizing the nearest road is five brush filled miles away and mostly uphill. In the rain. (Simile borrowed from hunter friend.)

Once you've won and executed your oath you turn into a bureaucrat. You can push some things you believe in of course but most of your day is doing the grunt work. Day after day after day. Most of your day's work could be done by an intelligent cocker spaniel (though probably NOT by your erstwhile opponent) but YOU have to do it because YOU are the elected official.

Well, you console yourself with the perfectly true thought that it's called "public service" and that you promised the people you would do the job to the best of your ability. You also realize why it's so hard to get those politically involved people to run for office themselves. They know better.

You'd be surprised how many officials quit before the end of their terms.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just a burnt offering on the altar of the Public Good. It's an honor, really it is, but some days...

 

If you are really unlucky and reasonably competent, ideally even honest, no one will run against you and you will be REelected for another term.

 

He lost by less than 2% of the votes, even after (2) quasi gay sex tapes, (2) attempts to carry a handgun into an airport, bringing weapons to a school, multiple driving without a license citations, caught in multiple financial shenanigans, the cocaine and orgies controversy, lying about his address, a bewildering Russian Casino/CrossFit honey trap ordeal, abandoning his constituents and closing regional offices, being endorsed as a non-racist by a KKK leader, staff ethics/harassment complaints, and multiple ethics issues… This is where we are as a country. This is the individual that the Republican party celebrated as the new face of their party. He lost by less than 2 percentage points… that’s all…

 

In a primary election, 2% is plenty. Only a fraction of eligible voters even participate and those that do have strong opinions. 2% in a primary does not mean that 48% of the electorate favored Cawthorn. It might mean little more than that his family and church turned out for him.

 

That 2% was 1300 ballots so 65,000 votes were cast. Cawthorn got about 31,000 votes. The average House district has a population a bit north of 750,000.

 

Frankly, the fact that Cawthorn, an elected incumbent, was successfully unseated by a primary challenger indicates just how little support he has in his community.

 

Out of a large stable of Republican challengers, Cawthorn earned close to a third of the votes and only was beaten by Edwards who had just a tad over a third of the votes. The rest going to a mix of other challengers. Personally, I don’t see that as him earning little more than family and fellow church goers. Yes, two-thirds effectively voted against him as an incumbent, which is a staggering rejection. Especially since Edwards was a generally well respected and established businessman and long time Republican politician. But… the fact that Edwards beat him by so little though, at least to me, is astounding. Granted, incumbents have tremendous advantages.

 

Which is a problem. The House of Representatives is too small. The population of the United States has tripled since the the number was set at 435. This encourages gerrymandering. It also makes the representatives less responsive to their constituents. It gives representatives too many things to do to help lead a government. And it favors a few smaller (rural) districts who are over-represented.

Everyone focuses on the Senate. In my opinion, it is the least democratic legislature you will find in a modern democracy. But the House really needs work, too. (Expanding the Supremes would help, too. Not for politics, but for coverage.)

We've grown a lot in the past 100 years, but our representation has not.

 

Not just your opinion. The House is the only majority based part of the federal government. It was designed that way of course. The reason the structure no longer meets our needs as a nation is that the U.S. government evolved, perhaps inevitably, from its intended functions as a union of sovereign states into being the primary governmental presence in the lives of the citizenry.

Well, not really. The state remains the most "impactful" level of government. It just doesn't look that way.

As to Rep. Cawthorn, his defeat should be seen as a rejection by people who had voted for him last time. Please understand, defeating an incumbent in a primary election is very hard because he has a built-in base of support. That base of support is what Cawthorn managed to squander.

Primary voters tend to stick to the candidate that won "for them" last time. To vote otherwise is to admit they were wrong.

 

Incidently, that whole "base of support" business is why there are so few elected Presidents who fail reelection. In my lifetime, Trump (of course), Carter, and G.H.W. Bush. Johnson maybe but he was a special case. Okay, maybe not so special; he became deeply unpopular due to his failue to extracate us from Vietnam. Anyway, he DID serve about a term and a quarter. Presidents in my lifetime who were reelected were Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama. Ford doesn't count because he wasn't elected to anything ever except his seat in the House. I presume Biden will be reelected if he runs.

 

Funny thing, really. I have a sense was to why Carter lost to Reagan. In fact, I saw it coming. Trump losing surprised me and rightfully so since he received the highest popular vote total of any Presidental candidate in the history of the country save Joe Biden. I have never understood why GHW Bush lost. I don't remember him doing anything particularly badly. Even his War for Oil went astonishingly well. He did raise taxes after promising (famously) not to do so but then so did Ronald Reagan.