Careful what you wish for

A new poll suggests that nearly half of American voters would rather be represented in Congress by someone with absolutely no political experience than by someone who’s been in office for more than 10 years. This finding from a survey of 1,000 registered voters by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows how far the “throw the bums out” spirit of the “tea party” movement has rippled through the electorate. It’s an understandable sentiment, given how little progress Washington has made in lowering unemployment or spurring economic growth.

But what’s happened in California over the past decade should serve as a cautionary tale to voters who consider inexperience a prerequisite for the difficult tasks facing lawmakers. It turns out that amateurs can be at least as inept at fixing structural failures in government as the veterans they replaced. That doesn’t mean we should reflexively vote for incumbents; instead, it’s a reason to question whether incumbency is the real problem.

The most prominent political figure in Sacramento for much of this decade has been a governor with no experience in office before his election in 2003. Thanks to term limits, the Legislature’s top Democrats and Republicans have frequently been new to their leadership roles as well, forced to learn on the job how to negotiate a $100-billion budget with multibillion-dollar shortfalls. With the state’s finances deteriorating rapidly, they adopted a series of gimmick-laden budgets that kept the state running but didn’t produce any kind of stability. And this is a model for governing?

In fairness, the fiscal disaster that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders faced would have been daunting for anyone. The budget problems facing the federal government are different but no less difficult, including fast-rising healthcare costs, burgeoning entitlements and a long-term spending gap that could push the debt to dangerous levels in a decade. And they’re complicated by rules that give individual senators extraordinary power to obstruct.

The voters surveyed by NBC and the Journal seemed torn about the value of experience even as they yearned to replace “career politicians” with fresh-faced novices. When asked about their own congressional representatives, 52% considered them to be “part of the solutions” to the country’s problems, compared with 35% who said they were “part of the problems.” That’s an unusually low level of support for incumbents, raising the likelihood that many won’t be returned next year. Here’s hoping that the newcomers will be up to the job.