Tom Davis

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/magazine/05Davis-t.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Nice article about House Rep. R-Tom Davis ending his political career. He makes some very good points about how disgusting the partisanship in Washington has gotten. Worth a read.

Then he asked for a list of the three bills to see if he really did want to vote yes: A nonbinding resolution “recognizing that we are facing a global food crisis.” O.K., Davis said puckishly. That’s a yes. A second resolution “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the emergency communications services provided by the American Red Cross are vital resources for military-service members and their families.” O.K., another yes. A third resolution “condemning the use of television programming by Hamas to indoctrinate hatred, violence and anti-Semitism toward Israel in Palestinian children.” A third yes. “They read me pretty well,” Davis said, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.
Three resolutions offering platitudes, none of them carrying the force of law, none of them actually doing anything. Davis asked for a list of all 20 bills on the floor that day — naming post offices, recognizing the anniversary of Bulgaria’s independence, honoring an old American war sloop. Davis wanted me to have the list. “Tell them about the important work we’re doing while Rome burns,” he said.
...Congress has become so infected with a win-at-all-costs mentality that there is no point in staying. “You know, the Cubs fans used to put the bags over their heads,” he told me when we met for eggs at Mickey’s Dining Car in St. Paul the first morning of the Republican National Convention. “That’s what I feel when you say you’re from Congress, because there are just so many things we’re not doing.”
“When you get the majority, the leadership team sits around the table, and the first question the winners ask, sitting in this ornate room, is ‘How do we stay in the majority?’ ” he said. “Now the members, a lot of them, are willing to tackle these issues, but they elect leaders, and the leaders’ report card is: Do they get their members re-elected? You see what I’m saying? And the minority, by the way, sits in a little less ornate room, a little smaller room in the Capitol, and they say, ‘How do we get it back?’ And so for every issue it’s ‘Do we cooperate or do we try to embarrass them?’ Very few times they cooperate.”
Davis is one of 26 Republicans who have chosen to retire from the House this year, many of them moderates like him, compared with 6 Democrats. “There’s no question we’re a dying breed,” said Representative Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, who is also giving up his seat.
This evolution has been fueled by migration patterns, demographic shifts and, many argue, redistricting. Most lawmakers represent safe districts, giving them little incentive to tack to the center and work together. Indeed, many incumbents worry more about “being primaried,” as they put it, drawing a primary challenge from within their own parties for being insufficiently orthodox.
“We moved it through a lot of land mines,” he recalled. “That taught me right away up here — if that had been a partisan deal, it never would have gone.” That is the model he says is missing today. As coarse as politics seemed in the 1990s, Davis remembers it as a productive period when Clinton and Gingrich and their parties actually did business. They overhauled welfare and eliminated the deficit. “If you’re solving a big problem, whether it’s welfare reform or Social Security, you want every perspective at the table — not so they can veto it, but so you can get everyone involved,” he said.
The two sides, he says, are so divided that they are incapable of recognizing what he sees as the looming crisis of our time — the massive debt accumulated during the Bush years. “The fiscal thing is awful,” he told me. “When you’re running $300, $400 billion a year in debt every single year and nobody wants to face the issue, the time is coming pretty soon where it’s going to have a huge effect on things.”...“Nobody keeps an eye on anything unless it hurts the other party,” he said.
“This compounds the whole deficit issue,” he said. “It’s huge. I listen to McCain and Obama and they mean well. But there’s no money to do anything.”
He says that members of both parties shy away from the hard stances, like raising the retirement age for Social Security or ruling out new tax cuts.
Then again, another Senate seat is up in 2012. “I can step back in it if I want — if they’re looking for a problem solver,” he said. “But right now, neither party is looking for that.”