(Part 1 because I’ll have a lot more to say about them before they happen.)
For my non-American readers, the “midterm elections” are the Congressional elections in the middle of President Bush’s four-year term. Pundits like to use them to gauge how the president is doing. If Americans vote greatly for the opposition party, this supposedly means they aren’t happy with the president. In reality they’re unhappy with the Congress, because it’s not at all an easy thing to unseat a Congressman.
The Congressman has an unfair advantage. In D.C., he spends his entire two-year term digging up financial support for the next election, networking with a lot of people who will give him lots of money in exchange for his “ear”—a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Antony gets the Romans to listen to him for a few minutes so he can rile them up against Brutus and Cassius. Thus his “ear” is really his Congressional vote, but nobody calls it that. Especially the Congressman, who wants to maintain the illusion—to himself and others—that he’s independent.
But you aren’t independent when you’re begging for money. I once worked as a campaign volunteer for Tim LeFever, a lawyer from Dixon who was running for Congress against Vic Fazio (who may have been majority whip at the time; I don’t recall). I watched LeFever speak and shake hands with serious contributors who expressed great satisfaction that he was going to go to Washington and do something about “those feminists and liberals and homosexuals and minorities.” LeFever was probably personally disgusted at some of the sentiment, but he needed the money. So he shook hands, nodded as if he agreed, and collected the checks.
Fazio beat him easily. He already had enough pull in Congress that many people were paying for his “ear.” And if he hadn’t been listening to them (or at least done a fabulous job of pretending to listen to them), they’d have financially backed LeFever.
Not that money wins elections. More ranting on this later.