mousey musings

Cheney's Dreadful Lack of Ambition - We'd be better off if the vice president were running in 2008. By John Dickerson: This article brings back memories of "ambition theory," championed by some American politics scholars but applicable to other political systems as well. The theory argues that the best representatives, those looking out for the interests of the country as a whole, are precisely those who are often vilified -- ambitious pols who will say or do anything to get leected and retain their seats. These people aren't satisfied with merely fixing a single problem (discrete ambition) or serving a set of constituents (static ambition); they always seek to move up in the world, ever-willing to betray the ones who elected them in order to gain access to more power. In a democracy, this means they focus on broad national interests instead of the narrow sectarian ones that got them their House or Senate seat (or position in the Executive branch). There are real problems with this analysis (it really does assume that most people work their way up through Congress; it has little to say about political control over information; it cannot predict the behavior of term-limited pols like Bush) but the core is a truism: someone who has to care what people think does a better job than someone who gets paid anyway.

posted by Jeffrey # 11/22/2005 01:28:00 AM