Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Worship of Incumbency

Joe Klein's just trolling at this point, so no linky for him, but I've been long fascinated by the elite consensus that there's something distasteful about running primary challengers against incumbents. Certainly primary challenges can be strategically stupid - if Pat Toomey had beaten Arlen Specter in the primary a couple years ago then Joe Hoeffel would currently be the senior senator from Pennsylvania - but they provide one of the very few checks on legislator behavior that the people have.

Incumbents, of course, rarely lose these things because they have a built in massive fundraising advantage, an advantage which often comes because incumbents are pleasing wealthy interests.