Self-loathing insiders

Surveys show that Americans are sick of Washington and the politics-as-usual of insiders.

So Washington insiders decry politics-as-usual, practicing the very thing. They endeavor to redefine themselves in line with the fleeting public mood so that they might remain the insiders they lament.

Give me a politician-as-usual and Washington insider who says so. But I’ll get to Harry Reid later.

President Obama went on the road last week and despaired of hopelessly off-track Washington insiders who worry more about how something will play than the good it might or might not do.

The president regretted that people in Washington are always worrying about who will win the news cycle, or the week, politically.

He was hoping by saying that to win the news cycle, maybe even the week, politically.

In Arkansas we have a nationally showcased U.S. Senate race.

Our embattled, poll-lagging Democratic incumbent, Blanche Lincoln, runs a TV ad showing herself standing amid misbehaving children who are throwing money, a dollar bill of which comes to rest on the senator’s weary head.

This child’s play represents Washington, the senator sighs in visual metaphor. She makes our nation’s capital out to be a place that she is removed from, even looms higher than, the infantile nonsense in which everyone else is engaging.

Her TV commercial gets paid for from $6 million she reaped because contributors perceived that she is a political insider.

This woman has been working practically all her adult life in Washington, first as a congressional staff member and then as a young congresswoman before getting elected to the Senate a dozen years ago.

Ask for her accomplishments and she’ll inevitably talk about how she got the Bush income tax cuts amended to provide direct payments to people so poor they didn’t pay any income tax that could be cut.

Even last week as her television spot saturated the airwaves, Lincoln held a conference call with her state’s reporters to boast of money for the state’s agriculture community that she single-handedly got plugged into the jobs bill.

Somehow, you understand, she managed to get that done as a Washington outsider, even as, apparently, she stood by disapprovingly while her colleagues threw around other money, but not, it seems, the money for farmers and poor people in her low-income agriculture state.

She’s the new chairman of the Agriculture Committee. The farmers of the state are surely hoping she’ll engage in savvy insider politics-as-usual and protect the subsides of rice and soybean growers.

A true Washington outsider would invite voters to re-elect him or her because of a clear and noble record of woeful ineffectiveness.

Conversely, a proud Washington insider would seek re-election by saying voters would be crazy to get rid of him considering all that he gets done.

That brings us back to Reid, the Senate majority leader standing at an unfortunate time for re-election at home in Nevada — unfortunate in that he can’t very well tap into the currently raging sentiment of this outsiders’ revolt when, by his very position, he epitomizes the hated contemporary Washington insider.

So Reid’s early re-election advertising has been honest, at least. It has emphasized the things he has done for his constituents and the things he can be expected to continue to get done if re-elected.

It might be that one man’s hated insider and practitioner of politics-as-usual is another man’s best line of defense against having radioactive nuclear waste dumped in his neighborhood at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

We don’t need political outsiders as much as we need political insiders who shoot straight with us about who they are and what they do.

And that would be some politics-as-unusual.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.